The Book

The book is published.  Looks really good!

I don't know if anyone would pay for the book when the blog is free.  Consider this a market test. 

Blogger, host of this blog, offered a blog-to-book service.  I accepted.  Then published the resulting book through Lulu.com.  Lulu.com is a Print-on-Demand (POD) publisher.  They print only when someone orders a copy of the book. 

The benefit of POD is it permits publication of books where there is a limited market.  Mass publishers expect to sell thousands of copies of their books; PODs may sell under a hundred. 

The downside of POD is the cost per book - our book is close to $60 - and that's with an author's discount.

But it is cool!   Full color, hundreds of photos.  Size 8 1/2 x 11, slick cover and high quality paper.  It is a compilation of selected posts from this blog.  I omitted non-football posts and the "Random Fan Photo" posts.  I had to do some editing to make the content fit the book format.  But it is very close to what you've seen in the blog.

Another benefit of POD is it costs nothing for initial production.  I haven't had to invest money in this project so if nobody buys, I'm not out any cash.  There was a lot of work involved but that was a labor of love.

It is published in paperback (as pictured here) and PDF format.  The PDF is a form of eBook but does not support Kindle or certain other eBook devices.  The PDF is intended for display on your computer using Adobe's digital edition (available for free download at the book publisher).  If there's a lot of interest, I'll learn to do the total ebook thing. 

You can see the listings at http://www.lulu.com/.  Just search the site for "Austin Outlaws."

Or here are links directly to the listings:  Paperback Edition,   or PDF version.

If you see me at any Outlaws events I'll have a copy of the book with me for show.

Where's the Book?

Whatever authors are paid isn't enough.

I have advance copies of the book in hand.  But still imperfect.  Somehow going from a Word manuscript to a PDF with font embedded (I don't know what that means but the publisher requires it) caused pages to change.  My print-ready format got distorted and I didn't notice until I received the copies I ordered as proofs.  So tweaking is in process and then back to publisher.

One bit of good news here - all the hassle had me checking out other publishers.  One was recommended to me by other Print-on-demand authors.  I've uploaded my book this publisher and ordered proof copies.  I'll use this publisher instead of Lulu if the quality is comparable.  Because their prices are substantially lower.

Print on demand is understandably costly.  Anything I can do to reduce the price will make the book more attractive to Outlaw players and family. 

I should have my proof copies by Thursday and I'll update the book status then.  Until then, I'll just state here with zero modesty - it looks great!

All About the Book

Once again the book about the Outlaws is back in publication.  You can check it out a Lulu.com.  Here's the Link. 

I've already reported on some of the problems with the book - first trouble getting the computer to compile the files, then convincing the publisher's computers to accept the PDF file.  Uploading took most of today.  Doing page layouts took most of this past week. 

It was worth it.  At least in my opinion.  The book is slick, looks like something you'd buy at Barnes and Noble.

The price seems high but that's because of the limited market.  Big publishers get economies of scale printing  thousands of copies of books they publish.  I think the book about the Outlaws will appeal very much to players and family but doubt there are enough of them to buy more than a hundred copies or so.  The only way I know to deal with a small market is the Print on Demand option. 

Right now I have the paperback version in the Lulu catalog.  I'm planning to add an ebook format soon.  Just ran out of energy today.

Soon we'll get back to talking about football on this blog.

Where Have I Been?

My last fun post to this blog was Wednesday.  I've been posting practically every day.  So why this big gap?

I've been working on the book.  If you saw my last post you know the sad story of the perils of blind trust in computers.  The book is a compilation of posts from this blog.  All I had to do was tell the blog computers which posts to include.  Right!

To err is human, to really screw things up you need a computer. 

After buying several copies of the book - hey, the publisher did a great job.  The books are beautiful.  Photos came through just great - but the internal parts were all scrambled and I had to rework the project.  For the past several days I've been editing and laying out pages and making certain everything is perfect.
And not blogging.

But I transmit the manuscript to the publisher this afternoon.  Tomorrow I'll get back to my blogging.  I've missed it.  I hope you've missed it too.

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!