 Hi, I'm Miles Long from Cult of the Dead Cow, and with me are my esteemed colleagues, Mr. Radman and Mr. Flack, and we're here to talk about self-publishing. But first, our pal, Adam, Java Man, has a few announcements he'd like to make. Two brief announcements. Just to remind everyone, tonight at 10 p.m. there is the CDC party sponsored by, again, the Coal of the Dead Cow, which will be at Crave. This is over by, it's a nightclub that's over by the Planet Hollywood. I don't know if you guys all know where that is. It's across the Strip from the Harley Cafe. Great place, everyone had a great time last year. It's free entrance with your badge. Two dollar drinks, 10 to midnight. And we have, I think, three excellent DJs. It's going to be a goth industrial night. It's, again, always a great time. And also, tomorrow night we will be having the TCPIP drinking game starting at 9 o'clock. We're going to do it in a slightly different format this year, but as always, it relies heavily on audience participation. So, if you want people to come and to ask as many complex TCPIP questions as possible, and if you stump the panelists, they have to get blitzed. So, please come to our party night and come by the drinking game tomorrow night. Thanks. Alrighty, so now we're going to talk about self-publishing. First, going to give a little background. Talk about content, investment that it will take, actually doing the publishing, marketing, return on your investment, how you can accept payments, how you can get reviews, and then we're going to tell you what it all means and answer questions. So that's me. As I mentioned, I am a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow. I'm the webmaster for the CDC website, the administrator for the CDC forum, so if you're waiting on your account to be activated, I'm the one you should book. Edit the zine, I've written for the zine, and then I edited the book that we put out last year. Where's the book? Oh, the book. This is the book that we put out last year, which is of course for sale. Come see me. Reasonably priced. Cool. I like the Osama bin Radman photo up there. Yeah, so I'm Radman. I started a group called Acid in 1990. You might be aware of it. If you're in the BBS scene in the 90s, it was an NCR group. I was also featured in Jason Scott's BBS documentary. Right now, what I'm doing is I'm organizing a demo party. We're going to be in our second year in 2008 called Block Party, which is going to be taking place in Ohio. I've been involved in a lot of scene publishing and importing for European demo scene publishers. That's how I fit in all this. My name is Rob O'Hara. I'm the author of Commodore, which is another self-published book. I'm a member of the Ninja Strike Force. I have to look at the list. I don't know what all I do. I write for Video Game Collector Magazine. I write for a lot of different websites. I write for Digital Press. I've written articles in 2600. I write for the logbook. I contributed to Retro Gaming Hacks, which is a book that came out through O'Reilly Press. Chris Kohler's book is a writer for Wired. That's me. Next. Here's some fine publications that were actually all originally self-published. That includes, of course, 2600, the CDC book, Rob's book, Commodore, and then some Freaks, I guess, and then some more mainstream type books like the Celestine Prophecy. It was a huge hit, I guess, in the late 80s, I believe. Also, The Joy of Cooking. These are pulled directly from the Wikipedia list of self-published books, so you've got to represent the WIC. That's what all these books have in common, even though none of us are best sellers. Oh, well. Okay. Self-publishing versus vanity publishing. Got to love the Wikipedia definitions again. Self-publishing basically is good, and vanity publishing is bad. Vanity publishing is where the printer is basically exploding the author. That's the definition that we're using here today. You might call it interchangeable. Self-publishing is somewhat analogous to shareware or freeware where the author maintains control of the content and receives most or all of the proceeds, and they're often niche-oriented. Lots of self-publishing is relevant to the computer underground. There's easy, such as Frac and Soljo and, of course, CDC. eBooks, websites, and blogs. I know you guys are all familiar with blogs and websites, so we don't really need to talk about those too much. Streaming or shared MP3s, Fluid, which is an acid production, I guess? Yeah, sublabel. Then CDC releases tunes, and we run a streaming radio station. Then there's Hacker Voice Radio. Offline, there's magazines like 2600 and Blacklisted 411, and then the CCC zine that I can't pronounce the title of. Lots of books have also been self-published. Of course, the three that we're talking about here today, as well as the end of days, and then some more, I guess, more technical type books like Practical Packet Analysis and Security Data Visualization. Then, of course, there's Hacker Radio, like, off the hook, off the wall, and then the Dark Domain DVD. Yeah. Got to represent for BenRab too. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Of course, these aren't exhaustive, and if we left your stuff out, then, sorry, too bad. So content. The main question most people would have is, is my work good enough to be published? And then the short answer to that is yes. If you have some content, if you've written anything, chances are there's somebody that would want to read it and might even be willing to pay for it. Yeah, I think even if your story, if you think that you're just like an everyday person that's ever seen that you're in at whatever time, somebody would want to read that. You don't have to be the leader of some ANSI group or demo group or Weres group or Hacker group. Just your day-to-day involvement and what your experiences were for that period of time. I think I would find that very interesting to read if somebody published something like that. And even if you're not a creator yourself, maybe you have a friend who writes or draws or does something and you could borrow or exploit or whatever their work and make a book. But just remember that getting sued is bad. Got to put that in there. Intellectual property rights are actually very important as many people can attest to. Yeah, don't get sued. Write original content, if possible, which Rob can discuss. Just write about your experiences. My book was basically about old BBSs and it's just kind of like my personal experiences. It starts with the first BBSs that I called. It starts out old 8-bit days like Apple and Commodore and it goes through that. Like I was telling these guys, it kind of ends like when this worldwide web came along and it killed our little hobby. The biggest comment I get from people about my book is they tell me, I feel like you told my story because it's not really a technical book. It's more like a coming of age or growing up at the same time, but growing up online like a lot of us did. And like we had talked before, when I first started writing it, I didn't really know that I was writing a book. I was kind of like writing my memoirs and all these stories down just because I didn't see anybody else doing that at the time and I got about two thirds of the way through and then Jason Scott's BBS documentary came out and I started seeing interest in that and I thought maybe there is an interest for that so that's kind of why I finished off and we've talked about how those are different. Mine's more like just one guy's story. It's not like the whole history of BBSs. I didn't interview a lot of people. They're just like my story as it goes through but a lot of people think well if you're going to self publish a book you have to do all this research and do all these things and you do have to do a certain amount of fact checking because believe me, I have got emails from people in Argentina who argue points about specific facts so you do have to do research but it's pretty easy if you're just writing about what you know about. And at the same time, you have the only book published of its kind out right now so that's the only thing on record that people can now use as a reference. I've had people, like I said, it's about my BBS experiences so I've had people email me and like chew me out because I didn't mention their cracking group and I guess I didn't run into your cracking group but then I tell them, you know, that's your story and they can do the exact same thing I did and I think there's a lot of those interesting stories that get lost somewhere on the web or they never get written down and these stories are just going to get lost so that's really the one thing I would say is that all of us have been through stuff that other people want to read. When I was writing this, when I first started, I thought, well, who's going to want to read my dumb old BBS stories? But the number one comment I get from people is, you know, like I said, I feel like you were telling my story. I was there, I remember those people. I remember calling those boards or whatever. Of course, you could also publish anything that's been previously published or if you can get the rights. There's a lot of underground related content that people most likely would let you use if you just asked or maybe you're affiliated with EZ and it's been around since 1984 and you decide you want to publish a book like we did. Okay, maybe there aren't that many of those but it's possible. Also, of course, then there's licenses that you can use to your advantage the Creative Commons and the free documentation license. Which I guess also with publishing, it doesn't have to be a book. In Radman's case, they did the Dark Domain DVD. So I ran an FTP site on ftpcdrom.com back when it was the largest FTP server in the entire world at one point. And we ran an ANSI archive and we had people that uploaded ANSI art packs and ASCII art packs and different artworks and we collected this for numerous years even after CDrom.com got sold out and transferred to three different companies and eventually it was becoming difficult to afford the bandwidth. So we put it out on a DVD for people to buy and basically we put it out there so that people could just have it. It's easily accessible on their DVD drive and they don't have to worry about are we going to be able to fund the FTP server tomorrow? They have it at their fingertips at any time. So we put that out. There's a lot of other. There's another DVD out called Mindcandy where a group called Hornet went out in FuseCon and they obtained permission from different demo scene groups and they put a bunch of PC scene and Amiga scene demos on DVD video to watch. So that's another example of scene publishing as well. You can also, as I said, you can obtain the distribution rights if you know somebody that has published something elsewhere. You just need to be careful to follow copyright law. Maybe you can talk about Freaks a little bit which is published in Europe originally, is that right? Yeah, it's actually written by a Hungarian printed in Germany so there's some really interesting... The book is in English but it has some very interesting English in it. So I import that book and sell it on Amazon as well as a site called freaksbook.com. And so when I started putting this out I had this out on Amazon for a while. Their pricing scheme is kind of not very competitive with other ways that you can sell products and we'll go over that in a bit. But I started receiving emails from people in Europe that were trying to sell stuff from the demo scene and they're basically asking for my help to sell it in the United States. So now I'm importing a whole bunch of stuff like some books, DVDs, some of it's in the vending booth. Today I brought some stuff. But yeah, there's a lot of stuff from Europe. Okay, aside from content, you need an audience which is actually much less important than the content because if you have the content you'll find the audience. So you shouldn't write to the audience, you should just write whatever you're going to write and the audience will find you. Of course you also need time. It does take time to put something together. And people will notice in nitpick if you don't take the necessary time and don't work on all your formatting correctly and things like that. It takes money. Online obviously cheaper than offline. I mean if you're just running a blog or something it's either free or very cheap. If you're going to buy a book or publish a book rather, most likely need to buy an ISBN which I say costs about $25 but they actually have to be purchased in blocks of 10 or more. So it's at least $250. Some publishers will give you the ISBNs if you publish with them. Or you can, if you're in the United States the person responsible for assigning ISBNs is Bowker. But it differs from country to country. There's also people that resell ISBNs. You kind of have to be wary of that if you're buying an ISBN online because there's no guarantee that they didn't just sell that ISBN to somebody else last week. So you need to make sure if you're buying an ISBN from an ISBN reseller you need to make sure that they're reputable. Your best bet though really is just buy the block of 10 from Bowker because then you're secure. You don't have to worry about that when somebody brings something up on a price scanner that it's going to show up your product and not somebody else's. You don't necessarily have to have an ISBN number or UPC code. It just depends on how you plan on selling your product. You don't have to do that. I know that on Lulu which is the cow's book and my book we both published through Lulu they have a package for it's $99. You get a UPC and an ISBN number and that worked out well for me because I'm not publishing a lot of books. It was just like a one-time deal so it cost a little bit more but it was from the same place I was publishing so it was a lot easier. You also mentioned UPC. Apparently $89 is actually on the low end. That's probably through a less than equitable reseller. So you might want to be careful of that I guess. Publishers as well can potentially offer you UPC code if you plan on selling it through Amazon. A video is going to require UPC if you're planning on selling a book on Amazon. You're going to need an ISBN period bar coded. Same thing, you have to buyer beware if you're buying UPC. It's almost cost prohibitive to try and get a UPC on your own if you just want it for one product. You kind of have to go through a publisher or find somebody that's going to resell that. You can also, if you're doing a serial get the ISSN which is free. I believe it's ISSN.org It's just a standard international standard serial number. Just kind of an identifier. And it is helpful if you want to have your magazine or your zine sold into store. I don't think it's necessary, but it is helpful. And then also you could get ISBN for a specific issue, but then it would have to be one for each issue. Whereas the ISSN is for the serial itself. Various types of self-publishing if you're doing a book. Print on demand or a short press run. Different costs involved there. Print on demand is like lulu.com. There's some other sites as well. Very little cost. You basically upload your manuscript and they print it whenever someone orders it. You have no inventory to manage. They do all the inventory, all the shipping. It could be free feasibly if you don't buy an ISBN and you don't buy a copy for yourself. So you could feasibly make money out of that. But of course you're going to buy a copy for yourself because you want to show your mom or your dad or whatever. Here's the book I wrote. Short press run. That's probably a little more professional. The printing is going to be a little higher quality. The binding, a little higher quality. But you have to buy between 500 and 1,000 copies initially. I agree. Okay. Here's some sites that you can use if you want to self publish. Both Commodore and The Book of Cow were published through Lulu. But we're not shilling for Lulu. It's just the one that we've used. They have pros and cons. Just like all the other sites. Several other sites here. Author House. I haven't used but it looks pretty promising. Though their site was a little difficult to find if there is an upfront cost or not. So that was a little disheartening there I guess. Though they will give help with professional design and layout, copy editing and promotion. And you only have to buy one copy. Book Surge is owned by Amazon. Are you familiar with that? They will do either print on demand or a short press run. It costs 100 bucks I believe They offer publishing packages and I couldn't figure out exactly what that meant. And total design freedom. Also not quite sure what that means. But the royalty depends on the distribution channel. If you buy a bunch of copies the royalty is pretty low. The royalty paid to them is pretty low. If you just want to sold through Amazon then it's going to be pretty high. Using their standard pricing. You can buy as little as one and recommend more than that because they want your money. Cafe Press print on demand. No upfront cost. No other services offered and not very good quality. But you can set the royalty so you can make however much or however little you want in addition to the cost of the book. iUniverse is supported self publishing. Costs at least 200 bucks up to about 1200 but they will help you with design layout and editing and marketing as well. You get 20% of your printed copies 50% if you sell online or like an ebook. Lulu which Rob and I are both more familiar with. Print on demand. Zero upfront cost. They'll help with editing. They'll help with graphics, translation, marketing, publicity and you set your mark up yourself and you can buy as little as one copy at a time. Then just to kind of change it up I included SnapFish on this list. They only published photo books between 5 and 20 bucks to set it up and no additional services offered. As far as I know you can't mark up the price. You're giving all your money to SnapFish but they are pretty professional looking basically photo albums, photo books. Again this isn't comprehensive this is just a few sites that we looked at and don't blame us if you pick one of these and they screw you over or something like that. Hey do you want to talk about the process like I'm dealing with Lulu? Sure. Basically what these sites do is they take your user created content and they turn it into a book. So when I dealt with Lulu they will let you upload a Microsoft dot if you want or if you want more control over the layout you can upload like a PDF they have several different formats that they accept but basically the way these websites work is you just go to a website and you've already created your content and you upload the content they have a certain amount of checking where they make sure that it's compatible with their books but like I did my cover in Photoshop and uploaded that I uploaded the book they have templates available all these sites that we've checked out have templates available online so when I wrote my book I just wrote it in Word and then when I was ready I downloaded their template cut pasted into that and when you're done they either you can upload through their web in our face or you can FTP it up but that's basically it's really really easy it's deceptively easy people come up to me and they're like man how did you get a book I just uploaded it it was kind of magic really so it's really easy to do and that's one of the things that we really want to convey is that if you've got that story and a lot of us you have something that you wanted to get out there this is a really good way to do it like Miles said earlier if you write what you know about we're not talking about writing things here they're going to be on the best sellers list they ought to be but they're not so if you have a smaller market this is a really good way to do it marketing you're selling yourself as much as you're selling your product so basically you're going to try to sell your friends your family your co-workers everybody you know because you want to get it out there you want to get people talking about your book maybe or whatever it is use every contact you have and then try to make sure that they use every contact they have then eventually you get a review published on Slash.ly like Rob did and you sell hundreds of copies of your book thank you Jason Scott so yeah talk to your friends tell them to talk to their friends and so on online marketing it could be its own domain it could be part of your other domain it could be even it could be on like GeoCities or whatever you just need a site for your book that you can direct people to I mean obviously if it's its own domain or if it's on your own domain it's better it's going to look better than if it's like a GeoCities thing and has Yahoo ads popping up everywhere but even if you have that I mean that's better than nothing because it's somewhere you can direct people to press releases Lulu and some of these other sites will actually give you templates for the press releases give you ideas how to set those up you can also go to like PR web and just read both press releases and kind of copy their formatting use some of the terminology that they use forums put links to your book in your forum signature that actually can get you quite a few sales same thing with blog if you have a blog or if your friend has a blog or whatever put it in you know put it in the comments comment about it in other people's blogs put it in the comments in your blog put it in like in your sidebar or whatever same thing with websites e-zines advertise everywhere you can if it's free or if it's cheap you want to get your story out there you want to get your book out there you want people to see it so that's the only way to do it did you want to talk about podcasts Rob? maybe not podcasts specifically but really like the way I advertised my book was if you have a big product you can afford to do this shotgun advertising you know you just blow it out there and then you hope people find it when you've written a book about hey I like to copy games on the Commodore 20 years ago you have to find your market that market is not at Walmart so what I did was I mean I you know I'm on lots of retro computing forums I'm on I found retro podcasts I found people that would be interested in my book and then I contacted those people so I did a more specific marketing I was at convex the Commodore Vegas Expo last weekend last fall I was at the Chicago Land Commodore convention so I mean I've sold quite a few books I guess I've sold more than the average or whatever but it's because I found those people you know if you're you know and like I said depending on you know like what you've done you know and even Miles it's all about finding those people because there are people out there we all know like with blogs and news sites they're dying for information so you just have to find the right people that are and you know be willing to give a little bit of your time and they'll really help you out yeah the number one way that I that I distribute this or you know kind of get the word out about the dark domain DVD that Acid put out which has all this ANSI artwork and seen magazines and everything you know archived worth of you know 20 years worth of releases is that I is basically cons and meetings and conferences, demos parties and everything like that we sponsor events if there's like a online competition where they're having you know who can program the best you know K demo or something or the best text mode animation or something like that we'll offer up you know DVDs and books as prizes and that I think that's one of the best ways you can advertise and get your product out there because it's like it's free advertising in a way I mean you're giving away your product you know but at the same time it's an offer of goodwill and it gets the name out there and even Cult of the Dead Cow they offered up some signed copies you know I don't know how many Cult of the Dead Cow members but that was an awesome I mean people were like so honored to receive that you know it was awesome because we're cool yeah he made a good point though giving don't be afraid to give away free copies that's going to help you get reviews which is going to help you sell more copies so you give a few away for free and you sell a lot more it hurts at the beginning I mean you know because it's not like you know you're here in a band and you've got you know a thousand promo copies they hand out every time I give out a copy you know it's coming out of my pocket it's copies that I've personally bought through Lulu or whatever but you know I mean one of the copies I sent out got reviewed in Video Game Magazine and one of them you know it was in Tips and Tricks last month so I mean it does pay off and those do lead to sales but you know at the very beginning when you're paying the money down and mailing them out it's hard I guess basically the same works offline as online press releases try to get mentioned in print magazines as well as online and then come to cons like this and talk about your product or set up at the vendor area or whatever Common Trap would be writing for marketing which I think we already mentioned don't write for the market the market will find you if you have something to say if you have something if you're at all creative in any way then the market will find you and I believe this was this was Flax Line which was thinking about marketing first is like writing pop music so you're just doing it to sell and that's not the right reason to do this type of thing selling is good but you know that's not why you're doing it you're doing it because you actually have something to say or something that you want people to see okay how many copies can you expect to sell if you publish a book that really depends on whether you're writing to make money or just to get your ideas out there if you're writing to make money most likely by self publishing that's not the way to make money you can make some but it's not going to be you're not going to be able to make a living on it most likely there are exceptions of course but it's pretty unlikely you can sell at cost so if you're not you don't really care about the money you just sell for whatever costs the site to do the printing and the binding of course you can mark it up for profit printing is cheap pretty cheap these days on some of these sites so we actually make about 32% on the book of cow and we sell it for $13.37 so make what like $4 per book goes back into buying more copies of it which is how I have some here today so actually we haven't really made any money it's just all gone back into the project the way Lulu or like I said again I should say we're not really shilling Lulu it's just the ones that we both happen to use but after you upload your book they have a set printing fee and then it's so much per page I think for black and white it's two cents a page or three and so then you get this total and like I think the total on my book is like $6 somewhere around there on Lulu and then after that you just name your price and then they have a split it's a 2080 split they get 20% of anything over that set amount and you get 80% so there is a lot of room for markups and are you do you have a slide later where you're talking about selling through Amazon yeah yeah but the highest profit margin is buying the books yourself and selling them to people you know just like everything else the more people that touch it everybody starts getting a chunk of that money and so we're going to talk about that later on also sales depend on your audience as I said audience isn't that important but I mean it is important if you're selling something that is very similar to something else that's already for sale a book that someone else put out the last year or six months ago or whatever you're less likely to have sales if maybe you held that for another year or so but differently I guess than traditional publishing it's print on demand works can be available forever essentially with no inventory because it's just sitting in a database on Lulu's site or whatever publishing sites server and just there's no physical inventory so it can be available ten years from now whereas a traditional publishing it would be out of print by that time which that allows the audience to find the work so maybe your book isn't selling right now but it could sell five years from now if it's still available whereas if it is out of print in five years no one's going to find it even if there is a market at that time okay the average self-published book sells approximately five copies in it's lifetime according to that site there Commodore in a little less than a year has sold about five hundred copies so apparently BBS memoirs are big sellers so as Flack was saying there's a lot of other people that have their BBS story so maybe somebody in the audience here or one of our viewers at home could write their story and mention those cracking groups that he didn't mention if it's something that affected them more I guess free, go ahead I was just going to say again though that's not like people just found my site and just bought copies that's been a lot of traveling around traveling to Vegas and Chicago and different kinds of shows you touched on it whenever you talked about being your own marketing person you're really your own everything from coming up with the content to the design, the editing and it doesn't end after it's out you're your own marketing you're your own promoter it's constantly working so it's a lot of work to sell that many copies just a footnote for Freaks that only represents how many were sold in the United States there's also distributors that can navigate a Hungarian website or a German website still that's 100 copies in the US essentially in about 2 years at $37 each that's a pretty good a pretty good deal there Book of Cow we've sold about 150 copies in a little less than a year all of its content has been available for free for more than 10 years but we've still sold 150 copies so that just shows that there is a market for previously published content even if it's previously published content that is available for free and has always been available for free Dark Domain has sold about 800 copies in 3 years that's also again previously published content that was available for several years before it was put out on DVD still is available for free too so it's just if you want it all packaged nice again same thing with the Book of Cow they're available on the Internet or freely available on the CDC site they're available on TextFiles.com they're available all over the place or you can get them nicely bound like this it's up to you and I heard a statistic from Jason he sold over 2,500 copies 2,800 copies of the BBS Documentary which is Creative Commons licensed so it's effectively free as well accepting payments if you're managing your own inventory basically if you're not using a site like Lulu right so everything that I deal with I manage inventory of physical inventory nothing's being printed or pressed on demand all the books that I have basically in my own inventory and there's a lot of different options you have to accept payments to sell these products that you have be it books, DVDs or something else the number one way that people use is actually if you want to get something on Amazon.com and it's not there already then you have to set up an Amazon Advantage account if you have distribution rights for that product I can't really see the slide that well but there's a lot of fees basically involved there's a $30 annual fee they take 55% of your sale which is a huge percentage and then if you know once they're ready to cut you a check you're offered over $100 they charge you a $15 check fee on top of that so this is like the least competitive program available but at the same time it gets your product on Amazon.com and that's the funny thing we're selling this book Freak's book for like $30 and on Amazon it's marked up to almost $60 and we're still practically losing money on it I mean it's just totally ridiculous but people are willing to pay that because they trust Amazon and there's the name Amazon behind it so one of the reasons that they do to be fair to Amazon I don't want to slam them too hard is they're managing that inventory so they'll order for example when you start the account they'll order like five or six books or DVDs or what have you from you and then some sort of an algorithm or something that tracks the success of your product because then later on give me 30 of these and then if nothing if there's no activity they'll go just give me three and so they'll keep reordering and re-upping like that and if it's really successful they'll order in the dozens if they're just trying to keep it available then they'll just order one or two so I have a lot of different products on Amazon.com you can actually compete with Amazon.com with your own product by joining what's called the Amazon Marketplace it's a lot, it's a little bit more competitive they only take 15% cut of the sale instead of 55 still have a couple other little transactional fees which add up to around a little over two bucks but you're still making you're still keeping a lot more of that money yourself the difference is that you're not shipping to an Amazon warehouse and then that goes out immediately from Amazon you're actually shipping directly to the seller like you would with just like eBay or something like that so yeah, just one point though the product has to be on the Amazon website before you can add it as a marketplace item my experience with Amazon since we're all talking about how much we love Amazon like I was saying if I purchase my book with no markup it'll cost me about $6 so if I sell it for $15 I make about $9 now if I sell it for the same price through Lulu they take 20% of that profit Amazon well Lulu so now you've got this certain amount now when I purchased the UPC and the ISBN they automatically submitted my book to 13 online retailers so now my book's available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble Borders.com all the online websites Amazon if you buy through Lulu at that point $5 maybe $5 something at that point Amazon has a $4.50 handling fee per book it's slightly less but I know that I get these checks for like $0.78 through Amazon so it is this thing if you buy it for me on the street I make a lot more money but the odds of that aren't very good versus when people say $9 you've got books in your backpack versus they'll go to Amazon they feel a lot more safe using their credit card at Amazon if you search for my book at Google for a long time my website shows up now Amazon starts to show up it is people feel safer dealing there but they kind of stick it to the little guy yeah of course there's always PayPal they're probably they're probably the most competitive in the marketplace if you want to sell your own products and you stock your own inventory they're really only taking around 3% unless you're in a really high sales volume they're basically going to charge you 3% it's not available in all countries but from my own experience with other credit card processors that's because a lot of these other orders from foreign countries tend to be fraudulent but they support 190 different countries and the base is growing all the time another really good credit card processing payment processing company that I use is called Kagi they charge a slightly higher percentage and then they also charge a credit card fee on top of that if the payment is coming in through credit card but they accept by far the widest variety of credit cards they even accept like JCB which is unheard of a whole bunch of other different off the wall type of credit cards or foreign credit cards and they don't discriminate on what country you're coming from when you place an order of course the best way is to set up a DBA account with your bank that means you have to go through the process of creating an assumed business name and that varies from state to state what you have to do in order to do that in California you have to place an ad basically in a local newspaper a fictitious business name statement announcing that you're going to conduct business under a certain name and that's just basically a check and balance to make sure that you're not going to say I'm going to conduct business as McDonald's or something like that and then you can accept and process checks under whatever business name you want and there's no fees ok reviews there really is no such thing because any press is good because it gets people talking about your book or your CD or your DVD or whatever it is good reviews come from people who are excited so you got to be excited about it I sound really excited right now I'm sure you have to be really excited about it if you want people to give you good reviews you have to say yeah this is great this is awesome this is the best book ever I can't live without it that sort of thing never stop promoting because we're all still being reviewed a year after we published or a year or more after we published it just takes time for reviews to come in find target websites as Flak was mentioning if you're writing about Commodore BBS you should find retro gaming websites and Commodore websites and things like that give free copies away again if you want if you want reviews you're going to have to give away copies contact websites these newspapers offer to give interviews you'd be surprised people will actually interview people who self publish books because they say oh I didn't know you could do that they're just curious so they'll actually interview you and maybe it'll run in some Pudong Town newspaper but it's a review and it's in print give electronic or PDF copies for reviews that's another solution or another alternative that would be cheaper free for you cheaper than giving out a print copy use people's positive feedback as a review so put it on your books website and say so and so said this in a MySpace comment or in a blog post or whatever even if it's not a formal review if they say hey this book was great you should mention that again talk it up to your friends and have them write about it and review it and what not make sure that you have everything set up before you start asking for reviews though or your reviews will be bad if you don't have your website set up they'll say well I couldn't even figure out how to order the book or you know if your website says under construction or whatever they won't come back they'll move on to something else move on to the next book so you guys have anything to add about reviews get slash dotted get slash dotted that would help I sold I started selling my book at a computer convention and over a month I sold about 30 copies and then after Jason's review of Commodore Grand on Slashdown I sold 124 hours so I highly recommend it yeah alright so the conclusion is that everybody should do this because there's really no reason not to thanks to the internet everyone can be a published author so you can all put on your resume that hey I wrote a book or hey I wrote a zine or I wrote an article in a magazine or I published a DVD or a CD or whatever and you should share the knowledge and share the wealth because that's the whole hacking thing right it's all about being free or cheap so there you go and that is that we have a little time for questions and then we will move to the Q&A room in a few more minutes when they cut us off so you sir me specifically this is the first this is the first event that we've been to with this book and we sold 150 copies so we I mean sold just through the website we did issue a press release and I think we got picked up on Boing Boing with that but we haven't done any face to face and we haven't really done much as far as reviews either so it's just been from our website of course we have a pretty high traffic website you guys pretty much the bulk of my sales have come from online I run asset.org the amount of traffic still it's kind of amazing actually the amount of traffic it gets and you know as far as marketing goes really the main marketing that I've done is through conferences and things like that and competitive computing events and that's about it most of my