FastPencil is another self-publishing service company that plans to rival Lulu with its simplicity. For instance, you don’t have to wade through pages and pages of material to figure out how to self-publish your book or ebook. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing yet. I’ll know once I finish the final draft of Shades of Evil and start their process.
Four Big Reasons Why I Signed Up at FastPencil
1. Ebook Conversion and Distribution: Writers can publish their books in ePub or PDF format with or without DRM. Kindle formatting is available, once you buy the distribution package. You can also download their app for the iPhone. As of this date, Lulu does not offer Kindle formatting, which is very stupid on their part.
2. Convert Your Blog into a Book: You can import your blog directly by entering your user information or use the RSS feed. I’ve wanted to do this for several years but couldn’t find a program to work correctly. There are some glitches, which I will discuss in another post.
3. Social Network Interface: This feature allows writers to invite their colleagues and/or readers to their project via Twitter or FaceBook, whether it is to collaborate on a project or ask for feedback.
4. Their customer service is friendly and knowledgeable.
Pros
- Write your book directly on their site. Not only that, but you can collaborate with other authors on the same project. They also offer outlining, feedback, and automatic versioning tools.
- The FastPencil system formats your book for you, complete with a Table of Contents and copyright page. You can also move chapters around with the drag-and-drop interface.
- Publish your book traditionally and electronically, with or without DRM.
- Turn your blog into a book by direct import or use the RSS feed.
- Interact with other writers, editors, designers, etc.
- Ebooks cost $9.99.
- Book Publishing Interface: Drop-dead simple to use. You can write your book directly on their site and customize it so the pages go where you want them to go.
- Book designers and editors can post their services.
Cons
- Price: Multi-format distribution costs $199. Print distribution costs $149. Then there is the yearly $19.95 renewal fee for ISBN listings, which Lulu doesn’t enforce.
- Marketplace: Pitifully small at the moment, but that may change.
- Book Publishing Interface: The word processing feature is too basic. For instance, I’ll have to find the HTML code in order to make a first-line indent on my paragraphs. Images are a pain to format. The good news is that you can format your pages in Word or InDesign and upload the file as a PDF.
Conclusion
Although their service costs more, I like what FastPencil has to offer. The site isn’t bloated like Lulu, and I hope they keep it that way. I’ll be watching this company close over the next year. They still have things to iron out, but they show a lot of promise.
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Hi Deborah,
Thanks for giving FastPencil a spin. It really is helpful for us to read thoughtful, well-considered feedback.
With regard to the book formatting options, we haven’t done a good enough job of explaining to users how our template system works. I actually just wrote a short blog post about this the other day: http://fastpencil.posterous.com/what-you-see-is-not-what-you-get
Thanks for stopping by, Erik. One thing I would like to see on the book design interface are screenshots of the different templates. That way, we know what we are choosing before we click on the template title.
Good point about previews of the templates, Deborah. We’ve been talking about how to best integrate that into the workflow, and we should have ‘em up soon.
Great! I’m going to delve more into the book cover design templates over the weekend. I’ll post my thoughts once I’m finished testing it.
Excellent. Looking forward to reading your thoughts about the book cover design process, Deborah.
I just finished experimenting with with the book cover design process. The best option for me, as of this date, is to create both the front and the back covers on my computer and upload them. Although the copy and paste process for my synopsis worked great, I had no control over how the text was displayed. The text came out centered. When I previewed the book cover spread, I saw that there is no spine.
One of the biggest frustrations I have with Lulu is their publishing wizard for the cover. They have an online template where you can manually type in format the text. However, I’ve never any control over where the text is placed. Lulu’s template forces you to place text according to their template guidelines. That’s why I’ve always designed my covers offline and uploaded them.
What I do like about Lulu’s publishing system is the ability to upload one-piece covers. They tell you what dimensions to use and they have a spine width calculator that helps you determine the size, based on the number of pages in your book. Is it possible to implement something like this on FastPencil?
Hi Deborah,
We’re working on some improvements to cover generation, specifically around how the spine is handled. As for one-piece cover upload, I’ll check with the dev team and get back to you. To delve into it a bit further, was there anything about the cover design process (when using your own uploaded images) that you liked or disliked in particular, and what about the one-piece upload process do you find most useful? I’m thinking a one-piece cover upload takes less time, but I do wonder if it also creates more work for designers when actually creating the single file that will be used for front, back, and spine.
Hi, Erik,
The uploading process was pretty easy. As far as designing one-piece covers, I find that better than having to design three separate pieces. Once I figure out the measurements of the covers and the spine combined, it’s a piece of cake, unless I have a thin spine. Then it’s a challenge to get the title looking right. I guess it’s all about the designer’s preference.
I think you’re right about it being a designer’s preference, Deborah. That said, we’re always looking for ways to improve the cover setup process. It’s tricky because we need it to work for people who are design-savvy as well as those who might not have any experience with crops, bleeds, etc. Keep the comments coming!
Regarding crops and bleeds: You can set up a downloadable template that has the bleed boundaries. Both Lulu and Lightning Source do this. Or, you can have an online help guide that not only explains what crops and bleeds are but gives their dimensions. This will help beginners and experienced designers alike.
We’re actually working on a template. The trick is to get it right, so we can avoid some of the problems that other publishers have, wherein their files have to be adjusted by the printer because the templates were misleading or didn’t do a good enough job of taking into account the spine width (which can be a big issue).