Successful sci-fi author Rucker has no shortage of support from publishers but has chosen to self-publish some of his work. Why? Well, with the art, you might see why, but where will he go from here?

Self-Publishing Review: Tell us about some of the ways in which you’ve been getting involved in non-traditional forms of publishing.

Rudy Rucker:   For a number of years now, I’ve been posting documents online in the Acrobat PDF format on my Writing page.  I’ve posted a book-length collection of my collected interviews, and book-length writing notes for each of my last seven books.  Recently it’s gotten to the point where my writing notes are longer than the novels that I’m working on.

In an idealized writer’s paradise, I’d be able to publish and sell these books of writing notes to fans and devoted scholars, but in this real world, I’m happy to just give them away—although I do put copyright notices on them.  Publishing my real books is hard enough, without trying to find commercial publishers for my notes!

Recently I decided to get two of my earlier novels back in print, The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts.  I’d hoped that Tor Books might reissue them under their Orb imprint, but they didn’t feel this was a commercially viable option—and I didn’t find much small press interest either.

I started doing some research on POD (print on demand) books, and ebooks, and I began thinking about possibly publishing my reprints in these formats myself.  If you’re handy with a computer, it’s not particularly difficult or expensive to do this, and, if you buy an ISBN (book ID number) and put the ebook into a certain format, you can get your title listed on Amazon.

The one thing that hung me up in terms of reprinting my two old novels was that I didn’t have them in electronic form, and I had the impression that scanning them through some OCR (optical character recognition) software would be fairly painful and time-consuming.  So I arranged for the company E-Reads to put The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts into POD and ebook form, including the Amazon Kindle format.