* Have you checked out self-publishing companies and found them wanting? 

* Do you need better writing tools? 

* Are you searching for a better way to market your book once it is published? 

* Is eBook publishing important to you, or an afterthought?

However, with FastPencil you can actually incorporate the best of both worlds, by incorporating reader comments into print and eBook simultaneously. Because you're printing books only as needed, you don't have an inventory of old versions that need to be sold before you can move on to the next version. Your readers can choose print or eBook and always receive the latest version of your work. Nice!

Speaking of crowdsourcing, we're already using our simplified crowdsourcing online form for one Ivy League university's alumni organization, and for Heroes in Our Midst: Stories from Afghanistan and Iraq collaborative book project.

We are accepting stories about heroes from now through April 9th, and we'll take the best 100 stories and publish them as a book. We'll also provide 80% of net profits from sale of the book to the USO, because they so consistently support the troops and stay out of politics. This isn't about the big picture of these wars. It's about the ground truth of people being their for their comrades. So if you served in Iraq or Afghanistan, please take a few moments to tell us the story of someone who was a hero to you. And if you didn't serve there, please pass the word to anyone you know who did.

We're all so used to using WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processors that we expect the text on screen to look like the text that will appear on a printed page. But our writing tool was designed so that authors could focus on the structure of their books, rather than fiddle with formatting. Notice that the table of contents are nested:

Cast of Characters and Key Events are chapters. The items below Key Events are subchapters. The name of each subchapter serves as a header, and the text of each subchapter is placed below the header in the writing tool:

For the subchapter The Truck Wreck, in a traditional word processing program you would probably type The Truck Wreck, apply formatting to the header, then continue typing your text normally. But what if you decide to change the style of the header? You have to go through and change each header. With our writing tool, once you've placed the text into the hierarchy, you can apply one of our eight templates to the entire project and everything, from font face to sizing, leading, and margins is changed automatically. 

This separation of content from presentation is at the core of our ability to deliver eBooks in multiple formats, as well as printed books of different sizes, all from a single FastPencil project. Admittedly we need to do a better job of explaining this to our customers, so they can understand the value of a non-WYSIWYG approach.