My first book is here

I’m happy to announce that the book I’ve been working on since earlier this year has been published. It’s a complete handbook for Norwegian freelancers that covers everything you need to know in order to set up a company, manouver the bureaucracy, get the jobs, get paid correctly, get the contracts and accounting worked out right, and protect your copyright. Among lots of other things.

Yay, I finally got to photoshop one of those products with shiny web 2.0 reflections on the table

While working on it I told people it would probably end up at around 300 pages (A5 size). As I was new to both writing and designing books, it was pure guesswork. But when the whole text document of 508 050 characters and 199 A4 pages was laid out, it totaled exactly 300 book pages, plus eight color pages that show a few examples of what freelancers in Norway actually do for a living.

The project and the first few chapters had initially been accepted by three publishers. However, I finally decided to publish it myself, as I started believing I could sell just as many books as the major publishers just by knowing my niche market. None of the publishers wanted to get involved in the website Frilansinfo.no as a part of the package. This is the website that was the outspring of the whole book idea and it is a great marketing channel. If they didn’t want to market the book directly to the biggest group of buyers, I didn’t see why I should accept 13% royalty and sit back and see them promote the book to the book stores only, where it would most likely end up in a dark corner anyway. So I decided to go for the full freelance solution: DIY. I immediately granted myself a 90% royalty. Well, except that the extra hours and economical investments probably got my share down to say 17,5%… But hey, that will definitely change on a longer term (if there are enough freelancers around to break even, that is).

The extra work of setting up my own publishing company, getting a distribution deal, getting an ISBN number, putting up a website, designing the cover (and the 300 pages…), etc., came on top of the already huge job of pulling together the manuscript. I could finally send the pdf document to the printer after an intense final work period of two months where I basically worked 7 days a week, 17 hours a day (and a lot of nights, too!). Thanks to some good helpers I survived!

You’re more than welcome to check it out at www.frilansboka.no, where you can also buy it if you wish. About 100 copies have been sold the first week, so let’s hope it continues like that and reaches a level where the effort pays off.