How many of you would be prepared to pay for a hard-copy of the novellas?
I’ve been considering self-publishing for a while, although a viable means has just been pointed out to me by another author’s own investigations. I’d be wary of publishing a novel I’m submitting to agents though, so I was thinking the novellas would be a better place to start. They’d be redrafted and polished beforehand, obviously; revised and expanded throughout as they say, and I could probably pop in one of the odd stand-alone stories too.
Not a definite go yet, but just something I was thinking about. Please provide comment, if you don’t mind. Need to know whether it would be worthwhile.
Whitehall Press Corps. 
I would buy one if the price range were $10 to $20. Have you checked out Lulu.com?
It was actually Lulu I was looking at 🙂
And yeah, the books would be pretty cheap I think. Wouldn’t feel right to charge too much for a novella anyway 🙂
I would be wary of self-publishing. While self publishing in the music industry is actually seen as quite rebellious and awesome, it’s more than a little frowned-on in literary circles. Someone that’s read your work will buy it and judge it on the quality of the book, but someone that hasn’t heard of you will tend to look down on you (unjustly, I might add) because you’re cutting out a lot of the vital process that goes into making books.
Every book you’ve ever read has been edited (except Anne Rice books) and come out better for it. There are copy dudes who skim text for errors and confusing shit, there are big editors who tell you that this whole section confuses the tone and that bit could be longer and the chapter divisions are all wrong etc, and there are typesetters who carefully plan each page. These are full-time jobs that skills professionals perform every day, all over the country.
I’m not sure how lulu works, but if it’s pretty cheap to produce, I’d imagine a lot of that process isn’t happening. You’re probably very good at grammar and spell-checking, and you could even do a great job with the self-editing, but the assumption will be that you A) are very precious about your work and won’t let anyone touch it unless they ruin it, and that B) you don’t rate very highly the process of publication and want to skip ahead to the good bit.
It’s also probably the only way you could get published in the near future – JK Rowling was rejected a ton of times and traipsed around for a year before getting picked up by one lucky bastard.
With lulu, you won’t end up with 400 copies of a book that nobody wants, acting as a coffee table in your living room, but you could take a copy along to a local bookstore and talk to them there, maybe get a few orders and order them yourself online. If you’re going to write all those words and put all that effort into laying out a book, it makes sense to get paid for it.
You can also send the book to publishers and see what they think 😀 I’ve heard a few success stories about self-publishers landing a book deal based on presenting a copy with the rest of the pitch. They’d totally re-do it, of course, but it’s a lot of effort of imagination taken away from them.
Man, I LOVE talking about publishing.
I won’t go into the pro/con of the self-publishing things as I don’t have a clue about them to be honest!
I will say this, I would happily put down £10 or whatever for a collection of your novellas and short stories 🙂
Yeah, I would personally put down a tenner or so for a collection of your novellas and associated works. I had actually been thinking about producing a paperback of it.
Self-publishing is a personal choice. Clearly your other commenter’s would pay a bit for your work. I guarantee you that you can get interest from a publisher if you can sell 7-10K copies yourself. I would suggest you work with an editor to polish your work (you can hire someone via guru.com, probably at a reasonable price or trade editing/analysis with a peer) and then consider developing a query for agents/publishers and pitching the self-published work. It’s true that self-publishing often has a negative connotation…but if the work is high caliber and interesting it will find a house. 🙂 H