On last week’s episode of Gweek, I interviewed Kevin Kelly about his upcoming Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities, an oversized book that reviews over 1,500 different tools. Over at the Cool Tools website (which I run with Kevin) Kevin wrote about the different “tools” he used to self-publish the book.
I like to say it is self-published for all the right reasons — not because I could not find a real publisher to back it, but for three other important benefits. I’ll describe those below and I’ll also tell you how the economics of self-publishing work for this book. Finally, I’ll include a few of the cool tools used to create this huge book with only two of us on staff. The first benefit of self-publishing was speed. I finished writing and assembling the book in September and by October I had the book listed on Pre-Order status on Amazon. It will be available to customers (in bookstores, too!) the first week of December. If this book was being published by a New York publisher I’d still be in negotiations to maybe have it available next summer.
