48hrbooks.com
Written by John Erianne on June 23, 2008 – 2:56 pm -I ran into my friend, Jen, in the supermarket the other day. Jen is an artist and teacher who dabbles in writing dark and high fantasy. She’s had some minor success writing articles for regional publications, but was unable to get any of her books published. So, last year, she decided to put out one of her books through one of those vanity service. She lamented to me that her book only sold 12 copies and didn’t quite understand why. “There is a difference between working with a vanity publisher and being a self-publisher,” I told her. Any idiot can get published by a vanity publisher regardless of the quality of the book. Self-publishing requires a little more effort. The first thing you need is a good, quality manuscript — one that has been professionally edited and vetted. Second, you need a quality printing service. And, third, you need to do some heavy-duty promoting.
As a friend, I offered to give her latest project a read through and tell her what I thought of it. But everything else would be up to her. I can, however, cite 48hrbooks.com as an alternative to a vanity publisher. They are not book publishers and they do not offer book publishing. They are book printers and offer this service for self publishers. That’s right. They don’t make phony promises to pay you a “royalty” like a vanity publishers would. Nor do they charge you a marketing fee or offer in any way to distribute your book. They print your book and ship you all of the copies and it’s up to you, dear writer to sell them. How well you sell them depends on you.
Now I’m not going to lie to you. You will have to lay out some coin to have your book printed. However, the cost isn’t wholly unreasonable. I took Jen’s first book and plugged it into 48hrbooks calculator on its website. It would’ve cost her a minimum of $460 dollars (estimate included shipping) to have her book printed with this outfit. That’s not exactly cheap, but it is comparable to other offset printers and isn’t prohibitive when compared to the overall cost of doing business with a vanity publisher. Plus, they are currently offering a bonus of 25 free printed copies of your book on a minimum order of 100 and promise to ship within 48 hours (hence the name of the company).
As with any other product or service, Jen and anyone else should investigate 48hrbooks.com for themselves rather than simply taking my word for it, and as with any project a writer should be armed with information as well as their passion. It takes a lot of work to create and sell a book as Jen discovered the first time around.
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