A few days ago I made a small ebook on the topic of publishing magic, with a little practical advice on how to do illustrations, layout, typography etc. A few answers to questions I get now and then. It was done just as a two-day project to prevent me from getting bored, so the information has a few gaps - but might still contain a few interesting hints on several related topics.

It's shareware, and can be downloaded from:
http://www.lybrary.com/forauthors.php

-Tom Stone

I've just had a quick read through the booklet, and it's amazing. Full of information and tips for anyone interested in producing booklets (the section on manipulating digital images will save many people many hours...)

Thanks Tom, five bucks is too cheap.

Take care, Ian

Houdini's also publishes paperback and limited hardcover, and stiched books. If anyone is interested I would be happy to quote.

Self-publishing is an interesting topic. Frankly, I know too little about it.

Having come from the more commercial side of intellectual properties, I guess I was systematically trained to avoid it and those in it. When I was a professor, it was not very good for one's professional portfolio.

However, now that I am "maturing", many of my friends are self-publishing in areas where mass market sales are very unlikely but where being published also feeds their other endeavors.

A case in point is a friend who has enjoyed a good career as a trick horse trainer. She is a remarkable story herself but her self-published books bring her more animals to train. I'm not sure she could survive as well as a writer. It is simply a case of a very small target market. But it is good advertising.

She even suggested that I try it. Under the right circumstances, I would consider it.

What should be considered?

Bob Sanders
Magic By Sander

FedEx/Kinko's, Office MAX, Office Depot, and similar firms can print and bind your projects, should you wish to self-publish.

When my Magic World retail shop began branching out into publishing in the 1980s, I was lucky enough to find a local offset printer with reasonable rates. My wife and I handled the collating ourselves and did the binding with an Ibico comb binding machine we purchased by mail.

With the huge advances in laser print technologies, you can buy an HP duplexing laser printer for well under $500. This, along with a binding machine, would allow you to print on demand as orders came in. No inventory to keep, no shopworn copies! Wow!

www.cafepress.com

Proper, bound, paperback books on demand - and they will ship worldwide

Utterly astondingly cheap prices and a 'proper' book at the end, not a wirebound bit of tat.

Worth looking at I would have thought.

Damian

It is nice to see how creative people can now self publish books compleatly by themselves. A "normal" computer with pretty basic software will do and even the laser printers are so inexpensive that one could truly be self-sufficient.

What would you guys think is the limit for printing books at home. 30 pages per book, no more than 500 books? Has anyone calculated this?

Pekka:

HP LaserJet printers (and I assume other brands) have official monthly duty cycles, which should give you a base line to begin estimating how many books you can produce in a given time frame. You can also google "print on demand" and find a bewildering variety of choices, including some, I believe, who will take credit card orders for you over the web and ship the books straight to your customers, so all you really have to do is advertise.

I'll be looking into these in much greater detail in the next couple of weeks, as I will be publishing the scripting magic book myself soon. If this thread is still going I'll report back what I find out.

Yes, www.cafepress.com as I mentioned above do all that for you. You have a cost price and then you decide what profit you want to make and they do the rest sending you the cash you make.

CafePress is not a bad deal if you don't want to have an inventory or if you don't want to wholesale your merchandise. It is also good for short run books. But if you are planning to print more than, say 500 copies of something, you will be paying a lot more than you would for a similar book from a regular book company, such as Sheridan.

It all depends on how much you want to invest in your product.

The cost on their saddle stitched books is not really competitive at all.

I thought about doing all the work on my book "The King Has Left the Building...With Amnesia" but found a company that would print, not copy 115 Limited Edition sets, offset print the cover on extra heavy stock in one color and spiral bind, all for around $6.00 each. I could not do it at home cheaper and with less stress.

Jeff
Jeffpiercemagic.com

From time to time Kinko's, Office Depot and Office Max will have a price war in the area. I went in to Office Depot have 150 copies of one of my books done. When I went to pick it up, the fellow in charge said, "I printed 250 copies by mistake. I can't sell them, and I can't eat them. You can have the other 100 copies for the cost of the paper."

I figured he meant the retail cost, so I said: "How much would that be?"

"Well, our cost on those books would be 25 cents each."

So I got the other books for $25.00.

Bill,

A few weeks ago I got a deal like that in Virginia at an Office Max. There is some stuff I carry with me on a Jump Drive to make it easy to get stuff printed on the road.

I gave the people at the counter my Jump Drive, described the files to be printed and selected a paper. I requested black printing on the paper (specifically to save money). The printer would not feed their paper properly.

Therefore, the man at the printing desk gave me a deal. The actual item on the Jump Drive is in color. He offered to print it in color on very nice white paper (that would feed in his printer) for the same price! I took it!

What a deal! Bargins do happen. Deal with it.

Bob Sanders
The Amazed Wiz