There are excellent resources available to help you plan for and produce your book or therapy materials.

Start by asking yourself some key questions:

• Who would be interested in buying this product/book?
• How much might they be willing to pay?
• How much time and energy do you want to invest in producing this product/book?
• How involved do you want to be in the development and marketing of the product/book? (i.e., do you want to control all aspects of its development, or do you want to make a rough draft or prototype and let someone else make decisions about the final product?)

You have many options for how you can produce a book or product. There are many parts to producing and selling a book that you can either do yourself or work on with a publisher. 

• Writing
• Illustrations
• Design
• Printing
• Sales & Distribution
• Marketing

If you want to do all or most of this yourself, there are helpful resources on the internet for “self-publishing” – ideally, you find sites that will give you free information without you having to ‘register’ with them (e.g., www.writerswrite.com/selfpublishing/, or www.essencegroup.com/). Some of the large services are www.lulu.com/, www2.xlibris.com/, and www.iuniverse.com/. Some sites (e.g., www.authorhouse.com/) will send you lots of information for free, but you will have to give them your name and address. Amazon.com has a large site at www.booksurgepublishing.com/. Try an internet search for “self publishing”.

A self-publishing company may help you with sales, distribution or marketing. You may also work with a printer, who will simply print what you ask them to print. There are ‘on-demand’ printers who will print a small number of copies at a time (www.trafford.com/). Try an internet search for “on-demand printing” or “printers london ontario”. Or, look in your local yellow pages for printers. For both this and self-publishing, you will have to pay up front to get the book published, then get money back as it’s sold.

You may prefer to work with a publisher who will basically buy your writing from you and take care of all the other aspects of producing and distributing the book. Many ‘therapy’ or ‘rehabilitation’ materials publishers are very interested in hearing your ideas (e.g., www.linguisystems.com/) The Ontario College of speech-language pathologists has a list of website links for therapy material publishers (not just for speech therapy – some are much broader):
www.caslpa.ca/english/profession/conn7.asp You will not have to pay to get your work published, but you will not have as much control over the process, and the royalties (money) you get per book sold may be small (though sales will likely be higher than through doing it yourself). Look at products or books you/your therapist uses and see who the publisher is, then contact them to find out what their process is for submitting ideas for new products/books.

Other authors can also be a great source of information – try a large yahoo group (http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Self-Publishing/ or
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/Print-On-Demand/), or a discussion board (http://www.self-pub.net/) to get great practical tips.

We provide examples of websites only as examples – we have no experience with or knowledge of these companies beyond what is on their websites and we are not endorsing them in any way. Please be careful about any contracts or arrangements you make with publishers or printers, and get legal advice before signing anything.

last updated: June 2006 by This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it