I went with Lulu, a POD (Print on Demand) service for both books because there is no initial investment required (none, only your time) which allows you to make changes and improvements to your book on the fly. I can't tell you how important that is!
Once you've got your book written, edited, formatted and released to the public via Lulu, Lulu (for a fee) will get you into the big online retailers like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and a bunch of small ones. I've seen Zero to Superhero in online stores based in Norway (or was in Finland?) and niche online vendors elsewhere in the world.
And you can have it both ways. You can have a conventional run done as well from Lulu (pricier though). It's a win/win.
I probably sound like a pitchman for Lulu, but it's a great service. I can't understand why someone would take a big upfront risk and do a traditional launch without testing the market first (and a POD soft launch is perfect for that). You'd have to be pretty darn sure that you've got pre-built demand for the book, and that your marketing plan is a solid multi-channel one (you'll need that anyway).
To date, I've sold maybe 500-600 of Zero to Superhero, mostly the ebook format. I marketed Zero to Superhero through the website and blog (won't mention the urls because I'm not trying to sell anything), and answered questions on related discussion forums (I put a link to my website in my sig).
The most sucessful of these marketing vehicles was the blog. I "linkbaited' posts I thought were compelling on Digg (which was huge at the time).
Sales for Economtricks, on the other hand, have been quiet. I've sold maybe a dozen. Then again, I never marketed it in any serious way - just a landing page and some SEO.
I went with Lulu, a POD (Print on Demand) service for both books because there is no initial investment required (none, only your time) which allows you to make changes and improvements to your book on the fly. I can't tell you how important that is!
Once you've got your book written, edited, formatted and released to the public via Lulu, Lulu (for a fee) will get you into the big online retailers like Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and a bunch of small ones. I've seen Zero to Superhero in online stores based in Norway (or was in Finland?) and niche online vendors elsewhere in the world.
And you can have it both ways. You can have a conventional run done as well from Lulu (pricier though). It's a win/win.
I probably sound like a pitchman for Lulu, but it's a great service. I can't understand why someone would take a big upfront risk and do a traditional launch without testing the market first (and a POD soft launch is perfect for that). You'd have to be pretty darn sure that you've got pre-built demand for the book, and that your marketing plan is a solid multi-channel one (you'll need that anyway).
Good luck to you.