Довольно обширная статья на очень интересную для меня тему - "печать по требованию". Очень интересно было бы обсудить ее с кем-то, имеющим отношение к издательскому делу.

Have you read my book?

The publishing world has been turned on its head and suddenly we can all be authors. Sorrel Downer reports

“I'd exhausted all traditional publishing channels and been told no, I was about to go and stick the manuscript in the drawer," says Lisa Genova of her novel, Still Alice, which charts a woman's decline into Alzheimer's, "But I'm very lucky to live in a time when I can self-publish."

Self-publish was exactly what Genova did in July, 2007, She got some good reviews and then Simon & Schuster stepped in with a half-million-dollar deal. Reissued by the major publisher just over a year ago, the book has now sold more than half a million copies in the US and has been translated into 17 languages.

Digital publishing has made it possible and affordable for almost anyone to design and print their own book (if not necessarily to sell it), and self-made authors are increasingly side-stepping traditional publishing houses and going direct to market.

The technology of digital publishing, so-called 'publishing on demand' (POD) allows for books to be printed and distributed, post-sale, in print runs as small as a single book. For authors, that means low risk, low investment, editorial control, speed to market and a larger slice of the royalties. The process is straightforward, involving the upload of content to the websites of self-publishing companies which then offer a sliding scale of hand-holding. This ranges from the DIY, royalties-free printing and shipping option at Blurb to the team of designers, editors and publicists that can be bolted on to a publishing package at somewhere like AuthorHouse UK — for commensurate costs and slices of the royalties pie.

In terms of awareness and uptake, Europe and the UK are a couple of years behind the curve compared with the US. According to Bowker, which issues US ISBN numbers, printing on demand overtook the production of traditional titles for the first time ever in 2008 in the States, a fact they ascribe to the huge rise in self-publishing. The number of self-published titles being produced is phenomenal. Two million titles have come through the global self-publishers Blurb since 2004, and Author Solutions (ASI), one of the largest of thousands of US companies, brought 23,000 titles to market last year alone.

Along with XLibris, AuthorHouse UK is one of two ASI imprints in this country. According to Daniel Cooke, business development director, it's signing up around 180 authors a month and put out 1,200 new titles on the UK market last year. "It's a whole new model," he says. "The publishing industry is in crisis, whereas we've seen growth." Cooke says the business sector is growing particularly fast: "Businessmen and women understand the publishing business, how to sell the book, make money, and for them the book's a tool, a business card. They push a lot of units out at seminars and conferences. On average an author needs to sell 50-60 direct, maybe 200 through a retailer, to break even. For fiction authors getting over being rejected by HarperCollins, we have to undertake a large management of expectations."

Instead of a few authors selling a million copies, economics is based on a million authors selling a few. Even Blurb, which offers the production software to authors for free and will print your novel for a fiver, can be financially viable because low cost plus scale and flexibility bring a lot of people with a lot of different objectives to its portals.

"It took a lot of development to figure out how to create one copy of a book and make that economical," says Teresa Pereira, senior director, EU market development. "But now we're seeing growth and evolution."

Blurb works increasingly with corporations to meet the demand for limited edition, branded, commemorative books, partnering recently with the Saatch. gallery, the Guardian, YouTube and Disney. And its speed to market attracts entertainment companies producing works on the back of events — for example, books tailored to each night of a recent tour by The Grateful Dead were on sale 72 hours after each concert. And Blurb also picks up the niche titles, such as China Shipping ("dimensions of international container transport, the seamen, the privacy and hurry on a container vessel"). "We want to democratise publishing, give everyone a voice," says Pereira.

The idea is to complement, rather than replace, traditional publishing. Kevin Weiss, CEO of ASI,

agrees. "What it's really all about is choice," he says, adding that change is inevitable. "We're a change agent. We're at the forefront of helping consumers, publishers and authors adapt. We don't want the traditional industry to fall apart. Hopefully they'll look in the rear view mirror and figure out how to transform the business."

According to Weiss, 80 per cent of authors don't make money. But there are authors whose self-published books have been taken up by major publishers and gone on to sell millions, such as Kenneth Blanchard's The One Minute Manager, Richard N Bolles' What Color Is Your Parachute? and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts — although only after he'd sold 485,000 copies himself.

With the internet as a platform, there's a higher chance of a random buzz catapulting an author to bestseller status or at least a publishing deal. When Michelle Obama found The Secret Ingredient by Sally Bee of Stratford-upon-Avon and ordered 12 copies, a book deal with Collins and a top slot on Amazon followed, UK business publishers Kogan Page have picked up and reissued books that were initially self-published, and Steve Radcliffe's well-received Leadership: Plain and Simple has just come out on FT Prentice Hall after an earlier book self-published through Matador Business sold well.

The final step of getting a self-published book into a bricks and mortar store is the toughest for authors opting to flog their own wares. Cooke cites the example of two authors (not his own clients) who, when the now defunct Borders refused to stock their books, camped outside and harassed the managers to the point of following them home at night. But it seems that the stigma of self-publishing has almost gone. "Resistance is reducing all the time," he says. "If a book's going to sell, the shop will stock it."

Even Waterstone's says that "self-published authors are welcome to write to our stores to see if they would be interested in their titles" (it advises including the jacket image and "any impressive sales statistics") and has a dedicated consultant to help shepherd them through the process. "Being self-published is certainly not necessarily a detriment to successful sales," it says, giving examples that include a cookbook (4 Ingredients), a humour title (To Be or Not to Be, Innif) and a novel (The Dealer) that sold well last year.

Blackwell makes it easier, enabling authors to print out their opus in store via the ATM of books, the Espresso Book Machine, currently on trial at the London Charing Cross branch. It prints, binds and trims a paperback book from a catalogue of millions of available titles on demand, The makers, On Demand Books, are understandably proud.

"This is a revolutionary product," they say. "Instead of centrally producing, shipping and selling, we sell first, then produce. What Gutenberg's press did for Europe in the 15th century, digitisation and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow."

Phill Jamieson, Blackwell's head of marketing, says 70 per cent of the output is self-publishing, It would be handy if the authors could then pop their books on the shelf to sell, but of course distribution isn't quite that straightforward. "We're a volume business, arid it's easier to deal with publishers not individuals," he says. For now, the simplest place to sell a virtual book is a virtual bookstore. Each self-publishing house has its own, but Amazon has 76 per cent of the UK market, It also has its own self-publishing venture, CreateSpace, and the Encore Program through which it identifies promising self-published books and republishes and promotes them, distributing them every which way via Amazon websites worldwide and physical bookstores, as Kindle downloads and audio downloads.

Amazon even offers self-help guides for authors, such as Aiming at Amazon: The NEW Business of Self Publishing, or A Successful Self Publisher's System for Profiting from Nonfiction Books with Print on Demand and Book Marketing on Amazon.com by Aaron Shepard, which really ties it all up nicely.

The changes in publishing have parallels in film, TV and music, where affordable technology has allowed for a proliferation of choice. Interestingly, the techno shake-up seems to have positioned self-publishers in the spot the traditional publishers once occupied before economics narrowed their remit: that is, offering diverse, interesting, high-quality books on paper. "Moving from the digital world to print as everything else moves in the other direction may seem contrarian," said Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb, in a recent interview, "but people want physicality, especially as more and more of our lives  are lived virtually."

Self-published Classics:

The One Minute Manager by Kenneth Blanchard

What Color is Your Parachute? By Richard N Bolles

Life 101 series by Peter McWilliams and John-Roger

Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin

Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun by Wess Roberts

Winning Through Intimidation by Robert J Singer

In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters

Pro-sumer Power, Overcoming Time Poverty and many more by Bill Quain

Zapp: The Lightning of Empowerment by William Byham

Ask the Headhunter by Nick Corcodilos

50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save the Earth by John Javna and Julie Bennett

The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield