To Blog or not to Blog?

Pretty much everything that precedes this post is an experiment or planning for the future. The point of this thing is to ultimately sell my novel, A Girl and her Neodog .* In a way, this may be the first 'real' post to this blog.

So a little 'about', until I update the appropriate areas:

A Girl and her Neodog is the story of Kim and Rosie, a sort of near-future Nancy Drew with her talking service dog; a service dog genetically engineered for intelligence and equipped with a chest speaker and a pair of mechanical arms. Think Dr. Octopus's cuter, friendlier dog.

The characters are inspired by my wife and the extremely cool dog she had when we were dating, so Rosie is a Portuguese Water Dog, a breed that recently got a lot of publicity thanks to First Dog Bo Obama. The breed is hypoallergenic, which is important to my fictional use of them as super service dogs, and a reason the Obama's got Bo over a shelter dog.

I've recently completed the novel, although it needs editing from others. I call it 'complete' despite the lack of input from others because I massaged it to death for a very long time and I feel it is pretty solid at this time. I sent copies to a number of people, and started looking at selling and marketing.

The other point of this blog is to document the business journey of getting somewhere with this book. I'm looking at parallel pursuits of independent self publishing, print on demand publishing and traditional publishing. In the near term, I imagine posts will be much more about what I'm learning about publishing than about the book itself. Hopefully, that will get somewhere soon, and it will change to being about the second book in the series!

So, while I'm waiting for input from people (and trying to finagle real editing for future favors), I'm trying to evaluate three paths for hard copies. An ebook version is very simple to put up.I plan on a detailed post on that at some point; probably when I put it up. For hard copy, I've got three resources I like:

http://www.aventinepress.com/
Aventine seems to be the place to go to self publish with PoD and get into book stores. The plus in that, their pricing is right to get you into bookstores. The minus is, the margins are small, because they are setup for bookstores and online booksellers; they do not have their own order process. So it's sell only through Amazon, etc. and bookstores, or build/find your own online orders.
- Note: they must have some kind of back end. I need to dig deeper.

http://publishing.booklocker.com/
Booklocker has thier own order website, and, if the order comes through there, very high margins. There are a lot of other interesting resources on a no-frills looking website. Somehow, they give me a very nice feeling.

http://www.stoneinthesurf.com/
Rich Neumann is very inspiring. He is the friend of a friend, and I owe the man an introductory email. My bloody book took much longer to reach the 'fit to show others' point than I expected. Rich outlines the real do-it-yourself, going to the printer himself, bypassing the whole PoD system, and not breaking the bank. He is his own publisher, gets short print runs done such that the total upfront money is comparable to a PoD, but the cost per copy is much lower. If I were more confident of my abilities, I think this would be the way to go. He is very soup-to-nuts the independent publisher guy.

Curriously, only booklocker seems to have a real ebook strategy, although ebooks are simple enough to post to your own site.

Now, many I should clean up some the gadgets around this?


* Speaking of learning, there is no 'underline' button in the blogger post editor. I better find my old html references (I guessed right on the tag) and or find a good offline blog post editor.