In this age of technology and ebooks, traditional books often suffer.  The only way for them to be affordable is to be published by a traditional publishing house, which requires your novel to fulfill certain criteria – particularly in the sense of genre.

These days there are POD (Print On Demand) services which offer the opportunity of being “self-published”.  Unfortunately, such books are rarely affordable.  It’s difficult enough for a new writer to become accepted without the added hurdle of the book price being so high.  The cost issue is negated with ebooks because these can be sold much cheaper, or even free, without any loss in the cost involved with printing.

The traditional printed book still has its place, though.  Even though the individual book price is often too high, it invariably works out cheaper than printing a draft copy through a home printer.  There’s something so tangible about having your own words printed and bound and sitting in your own library.

The Dreams and The Death is the first book in my series and is shown here as printed via the online POD service Lulu.com.  It’s 493 pages of 169,554 words (according to MS Word’s wordcount).  Printed on a laser printer, it’d probably cost £5-£10 which is about the same as the copy printed by Lulu.com shown here except without the professional binding and colourful cover.