A message from the president of South Mountain Publishing

Sorry for the delay in updates lately. My graphic artist/designer  and I have been busy, busy getting the book ready for print. A few weeks ago, I decided to forgo the self publishing route through Lulu (the company I used for my first book), and instead to go with Lightning Source, which is a subsidiary of distributor giant Ingram. So why go with Lightning Source? For one, it’s a way to cut out the middle man. LS works directly with Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc,which means I make a better profit on per-book-sold. Not that I’m looking to get rich off of this endeavor (or even make money), but in theory I can recoup my production expenses faster. The differences between Lulu and Lightning Source probably wouldn’t be much interest to anyone outside of the self-publishing biz, but here’s a link that explains it better than I could:

http://bookmakingblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/lightning-source-vs-createspace-vs-lulu.html

Essentially, Lulu and Createspace (and countless other self-pubs) work directly with authors, whereas LS works with publishers. There are many bigtime publishers who take advantage LM’s print-on-demand services, especially if they are not dealing in high-volume titles. But I would suspect that the majority of LM’s “publishers” are actually just the authors, like me.

So begins my journey from author to (micro) publisher. I am in the process of setting up South Mountain Publishing as a sole proprietership. I even have a logo, courtesy of Jeff Compton:

Jeff insists that this is only a temporary logo, but I think it looks pretty cool! I like how he made the “M” look like a mountain range.  For the final version down the road, Melissa thinks we should turn the “S” into a Snallygaster. Now that would be pretty awesome.

The cover (see below) and formatted manuscript have been sent off to the printer. Baring any technical issues, we should be getting a proof back by the end of next week. Nothing beats holding the actual book-all put together- in hand. Very exciting. I’ve got some local press stuff that I’ll be posting in the next few weeks.

I was about to post the final cover, but decided to hold off for now. I’m often lamenting about how, in the age of  information overload and hyper-viral marketing, readers/viewers see all the good stuff before the product launch. It’s as if we fully experience the media before actually experiencing it. There’s something to be said about the element of surprise. See, here I go again on another “get off my lawn” rant. Okay, back to the Weather Channel.