A quick reply to some of the comments to the lulu/neverendingbooks post.
Are they also responsible for the graphical design in your books ? No! In fact it was one of the more pleasant experiences of the last couple of weeks to develop our own format, LaTeX-style and covers. The usual gang had their say in all of this but it is only fair to say that Jan did most of the work. We developed the cover-concept (that is, macro shots of games in duotones and placing of titles etc) by trial and error. Jan is responsible for the photo-shoot, I did choose the shots to be used and did the initial coloring and placing of titles and left the final tweaking to Jan, who did some lay-out work before. We, at least, are happy with the result… As mentioned before, the LaTeX-style sheets were made using the memoir package.
Who is responsible for trying to sell the book, you or them? I dont think we are doing great efforts to try to sell the books, yet. Up to now, you can only get to the book-sites via this blog or via my homepage. Lulu claims that they will only make money if we do… and as this is clearly sales-talk (they make money on every book they print) it involves no (or a very small) financial risk on our part. Anyone who wants to have a copy of one of our books, orders them at Lulu, they print it and ship it to you. But beware! They have several shipping options and for most of them it costs you more to get them shipped than to buy the books… In fact, that was the main reason why we didnt put the URL online before we had two volumes out. The reason being that if you buy for over 25dollars you can have them shipped via their “SuperSaver” option, that is, shipping is free (but probably slow). But, based on my own experience it works well (I ordered a few copies of book 1 via SuperSaver and another one via their InternationalShipment and got the free SuperSaver package a day before the costly other shipment…). Our real investment is that we have bought ISBN-numbers for the books (at a price of 35dollars/book) and hope to earn this back from a small royalty we get from each book (the Lulu-rule is that they get 25% of any royalties you set). Even though we are not entirely happy with the distribution process we opted for this series for an unusual book-format making it handy and fun to use (the square 7.5 x 7.5 inch format is very pleasing to read and the coil-binding makes it extremely handy to lay flat on the table). So we view this series as a student-edition of the books and we keep them as cheap as possible. At a later stage it may happen that we will also have a library-edition of the books which will have global distribution (meaning that you can order them via Amazon or your local bookshop). For this to work, you have not so much freedom in your book-format and can only have regular binding. Besides, buying such a global-ISBN is more costly and will make this edition (a lot) more expensive. But, as you can see from the picture, the books get printed and shipped and look VERY nice. In fact, of the few copies I ordered, I had to hand out already two because some people just liked the feel and touch of it. I think, people will only gradually be willing to buy their own copy when (1) they have glanced through a copy at some meeting or seminar and (2) if more volumes come out and they have a greater choice in bying 2 volumes to get free shipping. On this last issue : already three people have expressed interest in writing a book in our series. My own hunch is that the next book out will have to do with Poisson noncommutative geometry and will have a macro shot of a war-game on its cover (authors can give suggestions for which games they want on their cover), curious how this will work out…
How many have you sold so far? Well, not enough so far to get our ISBN-investment back… But, once again, I think it will take some time for people to trust the series enough to buy a volume or two. In the first week we made the URL available we sold 16 books, so if you want to increase our sales-index please do by going to this page for the first volume and to this page for the second volume. But perhaps it is easier to bookmark the lulu/neverendingbooks if you want the latest news on the series. I”ll keep you posted on our sales via this page. If you buy a book and like the result, please tell others about it (or even better, let them see and feel the copy. Hopefully you will get it back…)
games, geometry, latex, lulu, mac, noncommutative
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Posted in general
Written on Wed, 27 July 2005 at 8:54 am
Tags: games, geometry, latex, lulu, mac, noncommutative
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