Time to Publish

One of the advantages of being a self-publisher, or having your own very small publishing company, whichever way you want to look at it, is to be able to control many aspects of the publishing process. So, today I'm considering my book about the Leica D-Lux 4 digital camera to be "published." I'm making that judgment because the book is now in its final form. My wife is doing one last read-through of the latest draft, and she's still finding some small typos and other things that need to be fixed. But the page count will not change, and the basic text and illustrations are now set. Given that information, today I went online with bowkerlink and uploaded the information about the book to Books in Print, including the title, number of pages, number of illustrations, dimensions and weight of the book, etc.

I also adjusted my new web site, whiteknightpress.com, to add a PayPal button to let people order copies of the book direct from my company.

The other step I took today was to open up a Google AdWords account. That is an experimental step, because I don't know that much about AdWords and how useful it is likely to be for sales of this book. I set the maximum amount to spend at $20.00 per day to avoid getting swamped with costly clicks. I'll monitor this process for a week or two and see what adjustments may be needed.

I also sent a message to the advertising people at dpreview.com to see if they have any low-budget options that would let me get some sort of publicity for the book at that site. I'm fairly doubtful about that approach, though, because that site gets millions of viewers, and I probably can't afford their advertising fees.

Now I'll sit back for a while and see when, and if, any book orders come in.