Would it be really, really difficult to put the stories together in an anthology and get it out on the shelfs.

I even saw somewhere that amazon have a scheme where you can send them books & they take a cut if they manage to sell some.

I'm just wondering. I dont have the cash. But I wondered how hard it would be to start something moving.

They, of course, charge you XX per book, depending on size and number of pages, and YOU set the retail price of it. It's a great resource for folks who want small pressruns, and don't have the money to pay a traditional printer to go the self publishing route.

I like cruising on cafepress... they also offer customized goodies like t-shirts, mugs, and a whole host of stuff. You can use your own photos and do things onsie twosie as gift ideas, or set up a shop and get serious about making some money. Obviously if you are turning a lot of inventory, this isn't the best route to go because the cost per unit is a bit steep (I recall a small paperback ran around $10/unit), but if you only want a handful, or don't mind making only a few bucks per item, you are in good shape.

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx

There are organizations for folks who want to be self-publishers; I belonged to one called, I believe, the Pacific Northwest Association of Self Publishers. They were mavericks who felt they had a great book and didn't let the rejection notices of traditional publishers dissuade them. Several of those folks had successful printings and were making decent money through becoming their own publishing house. The demands are far higher on a self-publisher. You have to also be a public relations expert, a press-release expert, you have to try to hawk your book on local talk and radio shows... there is a whole industry for the self-publisher to not only print a book, but market it. It takes a lot of determination to wear ALL the hats required to sell a book.

The second thing is that at the time I belonged to this organization I was contemplating publishing and selling a book of clip-art, for use by graphic designers. I was debating the simple question of bindery: to use a perfect bind format to create a spine, or a saddle stitch format that would just leave staples & no spine. I talked a well-known local bookseller, Michael Powell, into going to lunch with me so I could pick his brain about what is sellable. For what it's worth, he said the spine of a book is it's most important feature. Most booksellers don't have enough real estate on their shelves to display a book, cover out. The potential reader usually sees only the spine, and that brief image needs to be enough to capture their interest, to pull the book down off the shelf and give it a look.

I suppose we should consider the spine the cover art's equivelent of the "13 lines" rule. Just something to keep in mind, should your book ever go to print - try to keep the spine interesting.

In addition, if you don't have that ISBN number and a bar code on the BACK of your book, you can forget about selling it in the mass market. Bookstores like Powell's won't even consider your book without it because they use scanners to put stuff into their inventory.

If you really want to know how difficult the publishing business is, buy a copy of "The Best New SF XX" (where XX is the latest number, I suspect is probably 18 or 19), edited by Gardner Dozois. This is what it's called in England, anyway... It's probably called the "The Year's Best SF XX" in the US.

Then, read the Mr. Dozois's summation at the beginning. You'll find that about most of the start-ups go under sometime before their first two years have passed, and many of the established mags have become skeletons compared to what they once were. Booksellers fare no better.

It would be more difficult to make a fictional novel stand out in the glut of mass-marketed stuff.

One should always keep in mind that getting the book printed is simple - it's a matter of money. Anyone with enough money can print a book.

Getting it sold? That's an entirely different ballgame. The self publisher has to have a solid marketing plan in place, and had better find a distributor to pick up their book.

The general consensus amongst the self-publishers that belonged to the group I attended was that actually WRITING the book was at best, only about 1/10th of the labor involved in turning that book into a success. I heard that comment over and over. Marketing your book and getting it into the pipeline via book wholesalers / distributors is a herculean task.