Is that family history you've worked on for years ever going to be published? If you feel your book is ready to go to press, what is holding you back? Is the risk factor stopping you? Perhaps you have visions of money spent and a stack of boxes in the garage full of the unsold story. When is risk transformed into opportunity? The answer to that question certainly has a lot to do with money, which is where on-demand publishing comes in. On-demand publishing is a process that has become available for specialized topics not likely to generate high sales. Lower up-front costs help dispel fears that you are gambling.

In September of 1996 I was discussing a book venture with Nora Hickey of Cork Family History in Kinsale, Ireland. We wanted to produce some booklets on special topics and use them as an experiment in self-publishing. Considering the project in terms of traditional methods, our major concern was how many copies to print. About that same time I received a flyer in the mail from a local company that outlined the features of on-demand publishing. It appeared that this high-tech process addressed many of our concerns: our book could happen quickly, at a reasonable cost, and with its own Web page as part of the package. I wanted to know more. A telephone call and a personal visit provided me with the following additional information:

• Books would be printed in response to orders, not in advance.
• The author sets the retail price and royalty (price must cover paper and production plus the chosen royalty; fifteen percent of the royalty is held by the publisher for an accounting service charge).
• The author can order copies at wholesale and sell them at the retail price, thus getting the full mark-up.
• The publisher issues quarterly statements and royalty checks.
• Revisions can be made whenever the need comes up (since print runs only fill current orders), and are not limited to times a pre-printed stock runs out. Consequently, material can always be marketed as current.

The format offered by our publisher was limited to one-color printing, soft cover, and a coil binding. Though plain and simple, it suited our project. A traveler's guide needs to be pocket sized, and is just the sort of book that lends itself to a coil binding which can be opened and folded back.

The publishers supplied me with a guide for authors, a copy of the publishing agreement we were to sign, and a checklist of author's responsibilities. The agreement had to be signed in these early stages and the setup fee for the first year had to be paid.

In order to make the Web page happen, we had to supply:

1. Photographs and biographies of Nora and myself—just as they would appear on the cover of the book
2. A promotional blurb to be shown under the heading "about the book"
3. Indication of which sample page could be displayed (we selected the Introduction)
4. A list of twelve key words to be used to cross-reference the book; these would be submitted to Internet search engines.

Once we had signed the agreement there was no going back. During the months of November and December 1996 and January 1997, Nora and I were busy writing our respective sections of the book. We exchanged disks and faxed back and forth between Ireland and Canada. We dealt with the usual concerns about the bottom line, requests that facts be checked, and preliminary discussions about format. Then I took the first draft of the finished manuscript to a desktop publishing service since neither Nora nor I had the necessary skills to lay out the book ourselves.

The process of going from first draft to final camera-ready copy took longer and required several more versions that I expected. I am still not sure if this was due to some inability on my part to visualize things in their final form, or because of some of the limitations of the software (Microsoft Publisher) selected by the layout designer. In this program, running heads on each page are not automatic, there are file size limitations, which became a factor that caused problems at the end, and the process necessary for making corrections seemed cumbersome. Subtleties of meaning in the text precipitated the re-wording of sentences or a paragraph—another source of extra work. Through all this Nora remained in Ireland, so there was constant faxing back and forth to be sure we were both happy with composition and design.

The process produced three proof copies. The first was from the business center; it had pages side by side on letter-sized sheets and was formatted in Microsoft Publisher. The second I didn't expect and never actually saw in hard copy. It was the book converted to a Postscript file, ready for the printer. The conversion expanded the size of the file dramatically and shifted the text slightly and unpredictably. The text shifts played havoc with the index. Several hours of extra work, checking things on the screen, and some blind faith, produced the final manuscript on disk. Surely this was time for celebration; but we were not free and clear yet. The Postscript disk went back and forth between layout design and the publisher four times because the text was not aligning properly on the page. Eventually light dawned—when using the 8.5 by 5.5 paper size, two pages of text side-by-side on one page which is 8.5 by 11, the printing marks must be turned off. The third and final proof was an actual copy of the book. We required no corrections at that point.

The publisher provided support for final production details. I provided the artwork for the illustrations; they scanned and sized them. To complete the cover design, the publishing staff put my picture of a round tower inside an outline map of Ireland, which did involve an additional charge. I selected the card stock for the cover, but the publisher purchased it, billed us, and stored it for use as required. They provided the International Standard Book Number, but I applied for the Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data and sent the required copy to the National Library of Canada.

When it came time to print the book, my imagination (which has no technical training) pictured the Postscript disk being slid into a slot on the half-million dollar printing machine. However, the process of going from disk to printed book is not quite that simple. The Postscript copy was put onto a small 8mm tape which holds anywhere from forty to eighty titles. A computer filing system keeps track of book catalog numbers and the tape number where each title resides. When copies of a specific book are ordered, the indicated 8mm tape goes into a drive, the computer searches for the requisite title, and that file is sent over to the printing device-in this case a Xerox Docutech 135. This selection has been likened to requesting a song title on a jukebox. There is no danger that the wrong title can be printed or that the book will be produced on anything but the cover stock and paper specified by the author. The prompts stop the operator along the way, and the Docutech will not run unless the correct paper is installed.

Special software developed for our publisher automates the functions of order-taking and book-keeping, as well as tracking the royalties paid to authors. This process produces the quarterly reports for the authors of each book in the system.

I took delivery of the first twenty-five copies in early May 1997, ten months after Nora and I first discussed the idea in Cork, Ireland, and just six months after we signed the contract. We then shifted our efforts to marketing, which remains a priority. We have sent out a number of review copies. Since we have to buy them at the wholesale price, we carefully evaluate the promotion potential of each one. We have also produced a brochure which we distribute. Whenever and wherever Nora and I are lecturing in the coming months, we will have copies of our book available for sale.

At the end of the first quarter, personal sales by Nora and me are way ahead of sales generated by our Web site. I see this as a problem. Our book site is a mere speck in the gigantic mass of information that is the Internet. Even though twelve key words have been sent to search engines such as Yahoo and AltaVista, most of them end up lost in a list of hundreds or thousands of key words. Whether or not our site is actually visited is probably dictated more by chance than anything else. Sometimes the loop works—some books are being sold—but help is needed to make the process more effective. The most successful of the authors listed with our publisher has managed to get several fellow enthusiasts for his topic to create hyperlinks from personal home pages to the book's site.

Will we produce and sell more books using on-demand publishing than we would have had we gone the more traditional route? We don't know. The verdict is not yet in, but I do feel that the process of on-demand publishing is best suited for titles that fall into one or more of the following categories:

• Small print run
• Need for regular updating
• No need for classy format
• Limited market

In the final analysis, however, it will be costs and net return, which determine the success of Going to Ireland. Overall up-front costs were significantly less than having an initial 500 copies printed as per traditional methods. Bear in mind, however, that production costs of on-demand publishing will be higher if your book must be perfect bound, if it includes many illustrations, or if it must be composed of higher-quality paper.

Costs would be decreased if authors could do their own desk-topping, but Nora and I do not intend to develop the skills to do our own. Yes, it would save money on future projects, but the time to learn would be taken away from our businesses and they would suffer. The real test of the profitability of this method will be our margin once five hundred copies are sold.

When we were in process of determining the retail price, we had the tendency to undervalue what we had done. The publisher urged us to think positively about its worth to others, and suggested that Internet shoppers are more concerned with getting what they want promptly rather than price. Only time will tell if there is truth to that. Certainly we had to price the book so it would produce some return on our investment in production costs, in time, and in years developing our knowledge and expertise. Because we chose on-demand publishing, our book sells for perhaps a dollar more than it might have otherwise. Customers with whom I have talked think the price that we set is reasonable, and worth it because the book is current and future editions will also be current. People are intrigued by what we have done and impressed by the fact that this book will have regularly updated editions without the waste of shredding out-of-date copies. From our experience we can tell others that on-demand publishing does work in certain situations. The process will suit any author unable or unwilling to invest in a larger print run all at once, particularly if he or she does not need a classy format, has a title that requires regular updating, and has a limited or specialized market.

Finally, there is another attraction, best classified as psychological. The contractual obligation with this process makes one get on with the job. Authors, editors, and publishers all face that moment of reckoning—letting go in order to get the book off the press. Knowing our money was sitting with the publisher and not yet working for us was an incentive to complete the project; we knew there couldn't be a Web site or a return on our investment without a finished book.

Going to Ireland: A Genealogical Researcher's Guide by Sherry Irvine and Nora M. Hickey, published by Ancestry Ireland, Victoria, 1997. (Visit the book's information page on the World Wide Web at: www.trafford.com/robots/97-0002.html.)

On-Demand Publishers
Trafford Publishers
3050 Nanaimo Street, Suite 2
Victoria, B.C.
V8T 4Z1,
CANADA
Toll-Free (Canada & US) 1-888-232-4444
Tel: 250-383-6864
Fax: 250-383-6804
http://www.trafford.com/

Other Helpful Links and Addresses
ISBN (International Standard Book Number)
R.R. Bowker
http://www.bowker.com/standards/home/index.html

U.S. Copyright Office
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington DC 20559-6000
Tel: 202-707-3000 (Information)
202-707-9100 (Forms Hotline)
202-707-2600 (Fax on Demand)
202-707-6737 (TTY)
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/

Related Articles
Publishing Your Genealogy
by Christine A. Reed
(Ancestry Magazine, Jan/Feb 1998, Vol. 16, No. 1)

Out-of-Print? Not Anymore
Borders to Try 'Instant Paperback' Printing
By John Flesher, AP (ABCNews)
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/
tech/DailyNews/instantbooks990602.html

Helpful Publications and Products
Producing a Quality Family History
by Patricia Law Hatcher

GenIndex
(Software for creating an every-name index for your family history.)

Sherry Irvine is the author of two other books on British research, Your English Ancestry: A Guide for North Americans and Your Scottish Ancestry: A Guide for North Americans. She operates her own genealogy retail and consulting business, edits the Newsletter of the International Society of British Genealogy and Family History, and is a member of the faculty of the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, Samford University.