I started writing some kind of an autobiography in French in 2002, after moving to Brazil, but mixing poetry and prose. (More)
While I was living in Montreal, I had discovered that using sites like CafePress or Lulu, you could write and print your own book on demand. I had had the idea of writing a book for a long while, but always thought that going through an editor/publisher process, my project would have been dropped pretty fast. Thing was, my object was not relevant to many people, if any, and I was more interested in putting something out there, for others to discover, eventually.
After months of writing, I submitted my work for revision to parents, formatted everything elegantly, from front to back cover, and ended publishing at CafePress. Realizing later than their distribution scheme was suboptimal for other countries than the US or Canada, I then reworked all the formatting to publish at Lulu. Unfortunately, some mishap happened, and these versions were eventually showing typos that should have been fixed. Too bad that I had sent a dozen of samples to my family…
I ended submitting my book to Google for archiving Google Books. Since it’s really a niche book, I might as well release it in the public domain some day…
This experience eventually suggested me to my next project: planning to develop Print On Demand in Rio de Janeiro, for Brazilian users…