Self Publishing

november 11, 2005

Being one who writes in his blog almost daily (except for those days when I feel damn lazy), I guess I am one who has embraced the idea of self publishing. A while ago, it was heralded as the new paradigm of getting written material out to the public. I mean, what better than people writing for the people? A direct line from the author to the audience, that is a great idea. Too bad blogging has really boiled down to people babbling on and on about everyday shit which no one else cares about -- and don't get me wrong, I am guilty of the same thing. This afternoon, while randomly chatting with JR, we hit the topic of Lulu.com, the new company of Bob Young, who was one of the founding fatheres of Red Hat. Lulu.com is a self-publishing house. You write your book, you put together some cover art, and you send it to them. They publish and distribute your book for you on-the-fly as books are ordered. I would write more details about how it works, but it looks like their website is currently down. The idea of being able to publish my own book without having an agent or publisher or whatnot is pretty cool. Then again, the idea disturbs me when I think about what happened with self-publishing and blogging. How many trees will die for Jim-Bob to self-published his trashy romance novels? I don't know. Will this actually work? Beats me. But, it is a very scary, disturbing and altogether exciting idea though. I can't wait to see what comes out of self-published books. Maybe I'll write the next America novel, or maybe not.


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