This is the introduction to a series of four posts detailing my experiences flash-publishing Barefoot into Cyberspace last year. These posts are intended to be of interest to people who are thinking about the changes underway in publishing at the moment, to those who study the business models behind Creative Commons projects, and to anyone thinking of setting up a publishing project in the future, either for their own work, or for somebody else.
Book signing at the launch party, July 2011
Overall, I’ve been pleased by the critical response the book has received (see these three posts for a taster), and by the fact it has reached over 10,000 readers. My goal with this project was to get attention for myself as a writer of books, and to make something of a work I realised was unlikely to get mainstream sponsorship in the timeframe it needed. If you know nothing about me, or my book, you might find reading the post I wrote about why I decided to flash-publish Barefoot Into Cyberspace offers some useful context. The bottom line was not my primary concern, but as I said, publishing is changing, and there are now lots of opportunities to make money publishing your own books, some of which I took full advantage of, and others of which I missed or mishandled.
My first post takes on this topic. The series, which I plan on completing over the coming weeks, will run as follows:
- Pricing and Distribution – the bottom line
- Licensing – or giving stuff away for fun and profit
- Marketing and Publicity – or how to throw a great party
- Book poetry/book plumbing – or “what do you mean, html doesn’t know what a page is?”
Enjoy!
Photo courtesy of paul_clarke@Flickr
The Barefoot Technologist 
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