My Upcoming Book Plans

For the past year or so, I've been promising/threatening to publish a book or two. The idea was to take advantage of Lulu.com, which offers print-on-demand, and, more importantly, an ISBN number and bar code which gets you listed on Amazon.

I haven't forgotten or put anything off, really. I just haven't been satisfied with the material to put together. It's a case of figuring out which songs go on the album. Before, my plan was to throw as much together as possible, treat it like a crazed smorgasbord. But that never really held for me. I always thought I was a little thin in this area or that area. So I do what many artists do: I put everything aside for a while to let it age.

Now I think I'm ready, and after a lot of heavy thinking, I should have a much better book to publish. As soon as I'm online and with a functioning computer, I'll begin the serious work of assembling and arranging the pages (Lulu lets you do everything yourself).

I've wanted to publish three games-related books - Videogame Classics, the greatest-hits column; a book of the Virtual Console Reviews; and a book of posts from this humble blog. I'm going with the blog book.

So pretty soon, I'll be unleashing Videogames of the Damned - the book. I think I'll be printing all the videogame-related posts from this blog, aside from the VC essays, of course. I haven't taken the time to see how many pages I've got just yet, but I'm hoping it's a decent amount. These blog books are something to publish once a year, depending on how often I write, of course. These things always come in cycles of feast and famine.

With Lulu, I'll have a print version which you can buy from Amazon. I should also release a digital version, a PDF file. I haven't thought much about pricing, but my reading of the masterful book "The Long Tail" - I've been raving about it on the Ghibli blog, don'tcha know - has inspired me to be aggressive with the prices. Which means that I could give away the digital version for free, and sell the paper book for as little as possible.

For me, exposure is probably more important than anything, which also taps into that whole artist mystique. If you're an artist, you're always thinking about future generations. Those are the boys and girls you're really talking to, anyway.

I won't worry about that until the time comes. First I have to get my hard drive working again.