sombrefan

So I was reading an article in today's Guardian about how people were making money off the web and this section caught my eye.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1013313,00.html

When McCloud's Bitpass trials were exceeding his expectations, CafePress.com announced the launch of its book service.

CafePress has long held a happy place in the heart of the internet creative, offering a print-on-demand service for T-shirts and mugs and similar merchandise. You upload JPegs of your designs, and the site will create an online store to sell them, taking care of the payment, production and delivery, and then giving you a split of the profits.

It is a very popular service, and the announcement that CafePress will allow you to upload text files and sell them as books has caused no little excitement in the writerly weblogging community. One writer, the UK-based Andrew Losowsky, is about to publish a print version of his online writings from Barcelona.

"BarçaBlog, my weblog, was proving very popular," he says, "and I turned round and realised that I had written 30,000 words. So I thought it would both make a nice memento of my time in Spain, and also a way of putting my work out there as an up-and-coming writer." His collection of writings and photography will be for sale soon at his site, Prandial.com, distributed via CafePress.

CafePress's book publishing service launched last week is remarkably simple to use. Writers lay out their books on their ordinary word processor, choosing their own typefaces and spacing, and then save this as an Adobe Acrobat PDF file. They then upload this file on to the CafePress system from its web page, choose the size, type of binding and price, and CafePress builds an online store for them to sell it from. When a customer orders a copy, the book is printed specially and dispatched from the CafePress warehouse. The difference between the base cost of the printing and distribution, and the price set by the author is then given to the writer.

It isn't exactly cheap: a 200-page paperback comes at a base price of $13. "One advantage of this system," Losowsky says, "is that you keep your own copyright. If you were to go through a small publisher, you give up all hope of selling it on to a major house, but printing online protects you from this."

But unlike old school writers, or internet-only purists, Losowsky is not treating the internet as print's poor relation, or superior, in any way, but rather sees the two as integrated parts of his business of writing.

"To be able to send out a book to a future publisher is so much more impressive than a web link, but to be able to send a book and an online audience of thousands to a publisher is even better."

So I thought I post the info on my LJ cause I know a far few excellent fan fic writers and who knows maybe something will come of it. As I'd love to buy decent fan fic in printed form (though not too sure about the legalities when it come to Buffy fan fic etc).

Here's the relevant link at CafePress.