My Experiments with writing a Book – the Dynamics of Trade

It was  a busy day at office. I wasn’t even remotely thinking about my book. when I came home, a surprise awaited me. It was an official looking envelope from Ministry of HRD, Parliament Street with my address neatly written in my own hand writing. I gingerly opened the envelop and started reading the letter addressed to me. By which time I knew what it contained. And as expected by now, it contained the thing that I was waiting for since past two months. My book’s ISBN number. So the first step towards self publishing. Guess what was the first thing that I did. I sifted through the working copy of my book and added the ISBN number in the copyrights page (where it is supposed to be). And then googled some barcode generation sites and generated the bar code representation of the ISBN number. Then I called up my designer after sending him those files as I wanted the Barcode, ISBN and the price of the book on the back cover of the book. Everything sad and done, I contacted my printer once again to let them know that I had received the ISBN number and I would be ready to send my book to printing in a few days time. But why few days if everything already seems to be ready. Well, it is not!

Before I want to send my book to printing, I need to decide on a date when I would want the book to be available for sales and set up the distribution channels. I have zeroed down on Amazon because of the obvious reasons. So I googled some information on how to add a product on Amazon and what would be the paperwork required. Amazon seller central pages and equipped enough to provide this information. Then after so many aberrations, I went ahead and created an account on Amazon Seller Central and added the book as a product. Now I have set a date for my book launch (everyone will get to know about that soon) and me and my friends have decided to plan an actual book launch. So I am off to do one most important task, get the actual book printed and packed and ready to roll.

 

It is rare in India for a self publisher to take things into his or her hands, my reason was simple, there are not many options available and the ones that are available for POD, increase the cost of the book so much that reader is reluctant to spend that amount (dynamics of sales). But that is a long story which I would share some other day. If you have had similar experiences or want to share something of your own or have queries please feel free to post your comments. I might be able to give an in depth account of how it is like. It may seem difficult but it is not impossible.