I listen to the vapid resignation coming from capital-P publishing and to the stories of corporate awfulness my friends endure, and I think if we landed half the punches we’re pulling now out of misplaced deference and outdated political instincts, we would bury them. — Erin Kissane via Twitter, October 10, 2011

I published my first book, Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes (Well-Red Bear), five years ago, and I learned the process as I went through it. The tools for doing so have gotten much better, faster, and easier to use. I did Follow for Now largely “the hard way” at the time because I wanted control over every aspect of the book. I didn’t want it to look self-published. Due to advancements in the available technology, those concerns have lessened quite a lot, and I probably wouldn’t do things the same way now. Here are some of the things I’ve learned in the process, in the hopes that you can avoid some of the same issues now.

Design: As I said, I didn’t want my book to look self-published, so I hired a designer. I am also fortunate to have designer friends, some of whom have book design in their repertoires. I tapped Patrick David Barber and his partner Holly McGuire to do mine. I was originally going to hire Patrick to do the cover, but they took on the whole project, and I am very, very thankful that they did. It’s difficult to put a price on great design, and I didn’t pay them near what the job was worth, but I can confidently say — thanks to Patrick and Holly — that Follow for Now looks at home with any book on the shelves at the various bookstores, libraries, and homes that carry it.

Editing: Follow for Now consists of the best interviews from my old website frontwheeldrive.com. I spent a year and a half choosing, categorizing, and arranging the interviews into a form suitable for publication as a book. Once I got it pretty close to what I thought the final version would look like, I’d read those interviews so many times that I didn’t feel comfortable doing the final copyediting. I was simply too close to the content. I hired another old friend, Adem Tepedelen, to help me get the words all together. This was a step I didn’t anticipate when I started this journey, but again, I’m glad I did it. Adem found so many inconsistencies, misspellings, awkward sentences, and other holes that I’d never seen — even in all the years some of this stuff had been online. Get a skilled third party to help you get your copy tight.

Indexing: I cannot express how frustrating it is as a researcher to pick up a book, flip to the back to look up something that you know is in it, and find that there’s no index to help you locate it. Since Follow for Now contains so many people, ideas, books, records, and so on inside, I thought it was imperative that one be able to find the information in as many ways as possible. I was advised not to do the indexing myself (and I felt the same way I felt about the copyediting), so I hired Steve Connell (from the awesome Verse Chorus Press) to do mine. It was well worth it. There are rare cases when an index might be superfluous, but most nonfiction books should have one. Don’t skimp on the index. Your readers will thank you.

Distribution: I ordered a thousand copies of Follow for Now. They arrived on my doorstep in Seattle on a wooden palette. A thousand books is over forty boxes of twenty-four books each. It’s about half a standard palette. As a physical presence, it’s no joke. I’ve moved three times since then. Maintaining one’s own inventory at this point is absolutely ludicrous. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless you happen to have your own warehouse and aren’t planning on moving anytime soon. The print-on-demand services have gotten much better, and if I were doing a book myself right now, I’d certainly be looking hard in their direction.

I moved just a few months for a new job after that palette of books arrived, so I missed out on shopping the book to a lot of independent distributors. If you go this route, look into distribution before your inventory comes knocking.

Digital: Given the current battles over digital distribution, I am loathe to mention Amazon, but there’s no denying their power. If you have an ISBN (and you shouldn’t have a book out without one), then you can get your book listed on their site. I make no money from Amazon sales of my print book, but having it on their site has raised its profile. If you choose to use one of their services for digital and print-on-demand publishing, you get their distribution platform automatically. This is powerful stuff, but be sure check out all of the terms of service in full: You can certainly use their strength without signing over your soul. I hired Josh Tallent at eBook Architects to convert my book’s raw files to Kindle-readable ones. Google Books and other digital distributors have their own sets of legalese to sift through. Don’t sell yourself short.

Local: Check with all of your extant local independent bookstores. Most have consignment deals and many will buy books from you outright. See what they have as far as local events as well. A reading or talk from your book can sell a few copies and raise your profile in your own area, which, if done well, can lead to more exposure online as people post and Tweet about you and your new book.

Web: I am fortunate enough to  have a background in web design, so can build my own websites. If I didn’t, I know several people who could help in that area. Again, in the five years since Follow for Now, the technology has advanced enough that free sites can do the trick. Having a website to highlight elements from the book and press about it is invaluable, but at least a landing page with all the pertinent details about your book is imperative.

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There are many other things you can do to get your book out and raise awareness about it, but these are the basics. “Self-publishing” is a misnomer if there ever was one. It still takes a team of people to do it successfully. You should be prepared to do most of the work yourself, but chances are you have friends who can help where you fall short. I have told many classes that if you have a book written, you can have it out tomorrow. Just make sure you’re ready for the challenge: Be prepared for years of work. Having a completed volume in hand is only about half the job; it’s the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I’m still learning as I go.

It’s also in Cyberculture & History, and right now, in the New Arrivals.

So, if you’re in Austin and don’t have a copy, stop by and get yours.

Many thanks to Michael McCarthy and everyone at BookPeople for their support. And to you for yours.

The book was originally published in 2007, which makes it a rare, paradoxical and infinitely fertile cross between sort-of-contemporary cultural critique of the present and near-prophetic time-capsule of the recent past, swiftly fluttering across disciplines and ideologies to deliver a powerful cross-pollinator of modern intellectual and creative curiosity…

The time elapsed since the book’s publication makes it particularly fascinating to reverse-engineer how the ideas in recent popular books by these thinkers originally germinated…

Relentlessly stimulating and insight-packed, Follow for Now is the kind of book I’d like to see published every decade, and devoured every subsequent decade, from now until the end of humanity.

You can read the full write-up here. Many thanks to Maria for the kind words and attention, and to my man Jeff Newelt for making the connection. These two truly get it, and it’s inspiring to have connected with them.

As always, Follow for Now is available from Powell’s, Amazon, on The Kindle, at various retail outlets, and from its very own site.

Contemporary culture has eliminated the concept and public figure of the intellectual. A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their stupor. Zer0 Books knows that another kind of discourse — intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist — is not only possible: it is already flourishing. Zer0 is convinced that in the unthinking, blandly consensual culture in which we live, critical and engaged theoretical reflection is more important than ever before.

While I can’t completely agree with such a dismal view of contemporary society, I couldn’t state my purposes as a writer any better than that.

The Medium Picture is a history of the future of our relationship with technology. Technological mediation has changed and continues to change our relationships with each other, our information, time, space, and ourselves. It isn’t going to go away. In fact, it’s only going to become more pervasive. The Medium Picture explores these relationships at all levels, from language and literature to television and cell-phones. It’s about mediation, not just technology: It’s about the ripple, not the rock. That is, it’s about the process we undergo with our tools and toys. It calls attention to the effects of ever-expanding mediation and urges the reader to be more mindful of what constitutes authentic experience. It isn’t about relying on technology less, but it is about what relying on it means.

Given their commitment to critical and engaged theoretical reflection, I am happy to announce that I signed The Medium Picture to Zero Books.

Thank you all for your continued interest and support,

And many thanks to the early readers of this material. I’ll never remember everyone, but here are some helpful folks who read early drafts of the proposal and gave invaluable notes and advice: David Patterson, Mark Wieman, Alex Burns, Steven Shaviro, David Barker, David Miller, Matt Schulte, Kristen Sensenig, Matt Bialer, Rebecca Oliver, Kasey Pfaff, Micheal Schandorf, Doug Sery, Erik Davis, John Brockman, Max Brockman, Jason Weidemann, John Oakes, and Doug Rushkoff.

The post I did on How To Do Stuff and Be Happy provides some context. Enjoy!

My friend and colleague Mike Schandorf required Follow for Now for his Writing for New Media class this semester at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He snapped this shot of the stack of copies in their bookstore. I’m stoked.

Many thanks, Schandorf. See you soonly.

Is this image in the Public Domain? If anyone knows anything about it, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

I am very stoked to have my work in MonkeyWrench. As their website says, “MonkeyWrench Books is more than just a bookstore. It is a library and educational resource. It is a place for meetings, film screenings, talks, benefits and book readings. It is also a relaxed space to network and make connections over a cup of organic coffee or tea.” They’re located at 110 E. North Loop here in Austin, Texas.

Follow for Now is also available from the following fine places:

• Powell’s in Portland, OR.
• Reading Frenzy in Portland, OR.
• Skylight in Los Angeles, CA.
• Last Gasp in San Francisco, CA.

If you are near any of these stores, support the independent: Buy my book there. If not, it’s also available at Amazon and at its own site.

Thank you,

-Roy Christopher

Spanning over seven years, Follow for Now includes interviews with such luminaries as Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, DJ Spooky, Philip K. Dick, Aesop Rock, Erik Davis, Howard Bloom, David X. Cohen, Richard Saul Wurman, N. Katherine Hayles, Manuel De Landa, Rudy Rucker, Milemarker, Steve Aylett, Doug Stanhope, Paul Roberts, Shepard Fairey, Tod Swank, dälek, Eric Zimmerman, Steven Johnson, Mark Dery, Geert Lovink, Brenda Laurel, and many, many more (click here for the full Table of Contents). It includes interviews by John Brockman, Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Paul D. Miller, and myself, among others.

Published through my own Well-Red Bear imprint, Follow for Now is an eclectic, independently-minded snapshot of the intellectual landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It also includes an extensive bibliography, a full index, and weighs in at nearly 400 pages. Click here to look inside on Amazon.

Follow for Now is also available from Powell’s and several other fine retail outlets across the country. You can also join the Facebook Group or find out more.

Thanks for reading,

-Roy Christopher

The snapshot includes voices ranging from Howard Bloom (a pop music PR star who’s become a biological science fanatic) and DJ Spooky (an aspiring science fiction writer who’s become a hip hop music star), to Howard Rheingold (the virtual anthropologist who interpolates the present through a futuristic lens) and Bruce Sterling (the etymological founder who extrapolates the present into futuristic fiction). Follow for Now thus drops sufficiently many known and intriguing names in its table of contents (and on its cover) to stay on the shelves of both snooty philosophers and free-thinking subculturalites for decades. But the nuggets those names provide are intriguing enough to justify that stay, on those shelves and others. In short, the content is as intense as the cast.

The full review is here. Founded and directed by my friend and colleague David M. Silver, The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies is an online, not-for-profit organization whose purpose is to research, teach, support, and create diverse and dynamic elements of cyberculture. I am damn proud to have Follow for Now acknowledged by them.

Follow for Now is available from Amazon, Powell’s, and directly from me.