By Larry W. Bryant

Over the past several years, the world of UFOlit-publishing has received a technological injection of vital fluid -- enough to keep the presses rolling for generations to come as this niche attracts new and old writers alike in their quest to find loving homes for their memoirs, UFO-encounter case studies, bibliographic analyses, novelizations, and polemical pronouncements.

I'm talking about the cultural revolution engendered by combining the Internet's transmittability of files with the printing industry's development of print-on-demand (POD) publication. We all know that anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can become an instant publisher -- via creating one's own web site, contributing to others' web logs, submitting commentary to various newspapers' web sites' forums, etc.

For example: for the past several months now, I've been serializing my book-length satire The Bu$ch-Cheezey Impeachment Chronicles upon the web site of http://www.bushbusiness.com/Bryant_OP.htm . And, several years ago, my first book's 20-some-year-old manuscript finally saw the light of day when Arlington, Va.-based POD publisher Invisible College Press brought it out as UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally 'round Jimmy Carter's Promise (now in the updated 2005 edition from Galde Press, Inc.). If we still were living in the mid-eighties, neither I nor many of you yet-to-be-published book authors would succeed in overcoming all the obstacles to conventional publishing of UFO literature. (If only Ben Franklin could see us now!)

When you peruse recent issues of Bob Girard's Arcturus Books' catalog, you'll note the growing trend toward POD publishing of UFO tomes. It seems that, unless you're a Whitley Strieber (with agent), you'll be pounding futilely upon the cold, closed doors of the mega-sales book publishers if you possess anything short of the ultimate UFO-book manuscript. Sure, you can go the route of total self-publication -- forking out hard cash to a printing company, housing your own shelf stock, selling copies by mail, paying for your own advertising, etc. -- but you may not have the stomach (or up-front funding) for such a labor-intensive and time-consuming ordeal.

Enter the POD genie. Your wish becomes the book buyer's fulfillment: (s)he can order as few as one copy or as many as hundreds, and -- ta-da! -- off they'll come from the press in a couple of weeks' time. You'll have to enter into a formal contract with the publisher, but you'll have lots more control over the process and over your rights than were you to deal with a conventional publisher. And you'll be paying no commission fees to an agent. The saved time will help you stay busy cranking out other POD-prospect projects. Of course, you might get lucky in having your POD-published book attract the attention of an agent or of a conventional publishing house -- especially if your sales record reaches the thousands.

Peruse a couple of the newsstand's writers magazines to compile your own list of POD companies to approach. At the high end of the service-fee scale, Amazon.com's subsidiary booksurge.com levies a hefty processing fee; whereas, at the low end, lulu.com charges next to nothing. In between, you'll find that such niche publishers as invispress.com and anomalistbooks.com would better serve your literary rapport and advertising needs than would most other POD outfits. Of course, depending on your own editorial prowess and on the availability of funding, I'd urge you to retain the services of a professional ghost-writer/book doctor to polish your material into final form before submitting it for POD publication.

If you happen to have an out-of-print book crying out for reprinting and/or updating, I can assure you of Anomalist Books' track record in doing just that (e. g., as with their reprinting of a series of books by the late D. Scott Rogo).

Imagine: POD from cradle to grave. Who knew!?

[LWB Update for July 15, 2008: As you ponder the POD alternative, you'll note that it can achieve symbiosis with the ease of today's new blogging software. For example, with the advent of such user-friendly blog-hosting sites as offered (for free, by the way) by http://posterous.com, the leap from cybertext to printed-bound text (and vice versa) has become shorter. By establishing your own blog keyed to your already-published work or to selected works-in-progress, you'll not only have a tool for attracting prospective agents but also a worldwide-access resource for publicizing your work and building a writerly platform for the future.]
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Larry W. Bryant's second book, "Conjuring Gretchen: The Saga of Virginia's Preacher-Hypnotist," has bypassed the POD system by being published, in the summer of 2007, by a small press in Lakeville, Minn. -- http://www.galdepress.com . He remains reachable at his e-mail address: overtci@cavtel.net .