Book About the Outlaws - Status

Bottom line
This weekend a book titled "The Austin Outlaws, Women Who Play Football" will be available from the print-on-demand publisher, Lulu.com.  It will be available for printing or for download as a PDF file.  It will be a little under 200 pages with lots of color photos.  Essentially it will be a compilation of the posts from this blog that are specifically about the Outlaws.  I am not including the random fan photos nor posts about sports other than football. 

You should be able to find it by just going to Lulu.com and searching "Women Who Play Football."  The print copy is expensive (in my opinion) because of the color photography and the print-on-demand format.  This is not a mass-production book because it is intended for a specific audience - Outlaw players and fans.  Your copy isn't printed until you buy it.  So that makes it expensive.

I don't know the price yet because I haven't sent the final copy to Lulu.com. 

History
If you're into long stories, here's a little history behind the publication of the Outlaw's book. 

I have long believed the story of the Austin Outlaws was worthy of a book.  My interviews with players for the website "Featured Player" articles provided wonderful and interesting insights to the remarkable ladies who play full contact NFL rules tackle football.  But writing a book is a big project.  And getting published is extremely difficult in today's market.  No publisher would consider the book unless there was a realistic market demand for thousands of copies.  I doubted the book would sell more than a couple hundred copies.

This blog was started as a kind of marketing test.  How many people would be interested enough in the Outlaws to visit the blog regularly?  If there was a lot of interest in the blog, that interest might justify publication of a book. 

The blog has been fun and interest in it has been pretty good.  But not enough to impress a major publisher. 
I've kept on with the blog because it is fun and feedback I'm getting says you're enjoying it.  But I've thought the book idea wasn't going anywhere.

Until last week.

I noticed my blog host, blogger.com, has a service called "blog-to-book."  It is what the name implies - for a small price blogger.com will compile my blog posts into book format and deliver it to me as a PDF file.  The price was small enough that I immediately placed my order and within a few hours I had my book in hand!  And it looked good!  So good that I immediately connected with Lulu.com to get it published.  And within a few hours Lulu.com had my book published and ready to offer for sale.  Wow!  That was so easy. 

In my excitement at being a published author, I put the word out to a lot of friends and some of them put the word out to more friends.  And some people actually started buying.

One of those buyers ordered the PDF version and had trouble with the download.  I helped solve that problem but in the process discovered that there were problems with the book itself.  I had blindly trusted the blogger service to produce a perfect product.  I spot-checked but never went through the book page by page.  When I was working on the download problem I realized the pages weren't formatted correctly.  Copy didn't match pictures.  Posts on different topics were merged together. 

Yikes!

I took the book out of publication.  And set about editing.  I first tried using a PDF editor, which I had to purchase on line.  I couldn't figure out how to use it to edit so I changed to a Word document.  Couldn't edit it, either.  Managing the photos with text just didn't work.  I finally decided to start all over.  I obtained some page layout templates from Lulu.com and set about using copy and paste to reconstruct the book.  As I do this blog posting, I'm a little over halfway finished and I'm confident I'll be able to publish this weekend. 

Barring further technical issues. 

So stand by folks.  The book is coming.  The book is cool!