Spike The Book

Written by:Chris Mitchell.

Next year is the 10th anniversary of Spike Magazine being online. Unlike Yahoo and Amazon, who recently celebrated their first decades of existence, Spike hasn’t made me a paper billionaire. But it’s what got me into journalism and from there into web design - essentially, Spike created my entire career in the real world. And, more importantly, it’s brought me into contact with scores of interesting people and thousands of ideas, opinions, polemics and plain insanity from around the globe.

So, as Spike’s 10th anniversary falls in June next year - I can’t remember what day I actually launched Spike, so I use my birthday as the benchmark - I was thinking that producing a proper anthology with pages and ink and things would be a good way to celebrate. We’ve got over 60 interviews, 200 book reviews, 50 features, 30 music reviews… even half of that could make for a fat book of great stuff, all simply laid out with no ads, page navigation, or anything else besides the text.

I’ve discussed this a bit with Steve and Ben before now, and I need to get hold of all of Spike’s contributors from over the years and get their permission to reprint their stuff in a book. It’s going to be self-published, using Lulu or similar - I’m keen to get first hand experience of self publishing books and then selling them online. I don’t kid myself that Spike will sell many - I’ll be happy if it shifts a hundred copies. But besides my time and effort, there’s nothing to lose even if it does tank. I can learn from and ruthlessly exploit the whole process in time, I’m sure. See, I’m still convinced that you can self-publish and market your own book successfully online - so I guess this is where I get to see if it’ll actually work.

I think I can get some good help for a page layout template, so that’s good - what I am going to need though are some sub editors, so if anyone wants to volunteer for trawling Spike articles for typos and style etc, let me know.

I’ve got in mind a large format, like .45 Dangerous Minds from Seconds Magazine, which is very similar in ethos to what I want to do - and I imagine Spike The Book would have a similar price, $20 or £15. If I sell more than a hundred copies, I could use the surplus cash to start paying Spike’s contributors - or at least buy them some presents. I figure that up to a hundred copies would cover my own expenses and time to do it, and after that, it’s all gravy. Of course, it’s a dangerous game as soon as money gets involved, because if you offer someone £50 they don’t think, “Nice, £50 I wasn’t expecting” but rather, “Am I only worth £50?”. Still, that’s academic. I can’t imagine Spike The Book would sell much beyond a hundred copies, but I am still think it’s something worthwhile doing, that it’s not just vanity. I want to know it’s housed in a few libraries and that all the work that’s been poured into this site by so many people has another way of being read. Plus it will look snazzy for those who cite Spike articles to be able to reference a proper, real book.

Hmm. There we go. Thoughts?

More on self publishing:
Spike | Google | Amazon UK | Amazon US | Wikipedia

Posted on July 30th, 2005.

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