As I wrote in an earlier post, my writers group is going the self-publishing route to put an anthology of our works on the market. We’ve been working at it since last year. We have meetings regularly to discuss our feelings and fears about the project. Somehow I don’t feel any better after I come out of one of these meetings. We haven’t lost any more people (we have six participants), but of those remaining the burden of expenditures seems uncertain. We will have to have a legal entity for our group to protect us all from the possibility of lawsuits. If we want to print our own books, we will need hundreds of dollars in up-front costs. Our group is determined to keep the rights to our work, but we haven’t tightened up our contributions or the filler since we started.
It worries me that we aren’t taking this project in the right order or with the right expectations. I went out and got a copy of Self-Publishing for Dummiesand one of two major books on the subject of self-publishing by Daniel Poynter (The Self-Publishing Manual, Volume II, since Volume I is not on the shelves at Borders right now), but the more I read these self-help guides, the more I feel we really aren’t ready.
Anybody who expects to at least break even–if not make a profit–on their writing must have a solid base on which to build the product, and right now I don’t think we have it.
So what do I do? Do I voice my concerns and seem like the “bad guy” (or actually, girl) of the group? Everybody else seems ready to go along and put some money down on the project, but in this economy I don’t feel I should spend a cent without some certainty behind my investment. It’s the difference between putting money in stocks or Cd’s. A CD is a guarantee of interest, while stock can deplete your principle. At this point I feel that we are buying into some bad stocks. I don’t mind if publishing takes time, but I don’t want to have a bad experience the first time at the OK publishing corral.
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