I had a couple of really solid months of working on Teaching Machines, but when the Fall rolled around, and I looked at my traveling and speaking schedule, I knew that there was just no way I’d finish it this year. That sucks because (somewhat reminiscent of the pressure to finish a dissertation) folks would often tell me that they were looking forward to reading it. But I realized that I’d actually written a different book this year: if I were to pull together all my talks into one collection, why, I’d have fourteen or so chapters. So I decided to self-publish The Monsters of Education Technology. (You can read the blog post announcing the project on Hack Education.)

I want to jot down a few thoughts here about the process of self-publishing. The why and the how. This is something that David Kernohan and I talked about at the recent Reclaim Hackathon. Here’s the Google Doc where we threw down our thoughts. And here’s the link to buy David’s book.

Why a book?: When I give a presentation, I write down my thoughts ahead of time. (I am a writer after all.) That makes it possible for me to immediately publish a “transcript” after I’ve delivered my talk. So why put these in a book? Why not? By writing and publishing a transcript on my blog, I am making my work available to a larger audience. A book just expands that. And because these transcripts are words written to be read aloud, these pieces of writing tend not to be highly hyperlinked – that is, is isn’t writing of the Web, despite my putting it on the Web. That works nicely in a book, I think.

Why self-publish?: Self-publishing lets me control the layout, the content, the editing, the formatting – for better or for worse. I have control over how the work is licensed (CC-BY-SA) and how it is distributed. The book is open access – there are free and DRM-free versions available on Hack Education. I’m not terribly concerned in this case, with this book, with having the “prestige” associated with a publisher.

Formatting: The biggest pain-in-the-ass about self-publishing a book is formatting the book to meet the specifications of the various platforms. Most do offer a template. I found Amazon’s template to be really frustrating. I found Smashwords’ to be really overwhelming. The problem, in both cases, is that these templates rely on Microsoft Word, a piece of software that I do not use. Thankfully, you can now by a subscription to Office, so I didn’t have to lay out a big chunk of cash. (Buy the subscription; cancel the subscription. Words to live by in a subscription economy.) For e-book formatting, I found that the easiest thing to do was to go as simple as possible. Remove all formatting. And then use the Styles function to create the different formatting needs for chapter titles and the like. The printed version – via Amazon Createspace in my case – was more complicated, and I had the book rejected by the approval process a couple of times for reasons.

ISBN: Many of the self-publishing services will give you an ISBN for free. But you’ll need a separate ISBN for each version. So the e-book needs an ISBN and the printed one needs an ISBN. (In the US) You can purchase these via Bowker.

The Cover: I suck so bad at graphic design. I’m a huge fan of the simplicity of Noun Project icons, so I used that plus a monster-related font. Amazon has a cover-creator tool, but once I figured out what the dimensions should be for the cover, I just threw it together myself. For the printed version, the cover matters; for an e-book it matters a lot less.

Distribution: Amazon is clearly the dominant player in the world of book (printed and digital) sales. So I went with Amazon, somewhat begrudgingly. Part of the reason I opted to self-publish was that I wanted a little bit more control over my work. I opted not to use Kindle Select, for example, which grants Amazon exclusivity to my e-book. I also published via Smashwords, which handles the distribution to Amazon’s competitors, including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. I’ve also posted the files on Hack Education. And I’m selling three versions – a PDF, a MOBI, and an EPUB – via Gumroad.

Royalties: My cut of book sales differs depending on whether you buy the printed book, the e-book from Amazon, the e-book via Smashwords, or the e-book via Gumroad. Gumroad only takes 5% + $.25 on every sale; the rest goes to me. I’ll have more to say on this topic in a couple of months, I imagine. What is better? The wide distribution of Amazon (but only 35% of royalties?) Or the smaller distribution of my blog (with almost 95% of royalties)?