[pwcosol]

Bill: Family & job commitments are certainly priorities over any book. Most guys do one out of a desire to share their knowledge with fellow collectors and perhaps receive a bit of recognition for the effort. This is not a money-making enterprise either. The amount of time expended, and outlay of funds to privately print your book (rather than going to a publisher whom is only interested in how much money the title will generate, & likely edit your work until he feels it is commercially viable), will take a lot of time to recover. Profit will likely be minimal, if any, when all is said & done.
The one alternative is to do a work on CD such as Otto Ottobre did with his study of Turkish Bayonets. There are many desktop publishing formats available. I think this may be the way to go. Next would be good quality photographs and with today's digital cameras, should be relatively easy to take, or get a professional to do them. Everything gets compiled on CD, which is easily marketable and cheap to do. The only drawback is your work being copied & distributed free of charge (although I believe there is a way to code or encrypt the material so it can't be copied easily). If a collector wants a paper copy, then he can have the material copied from the CD onto quality paper in book form. However, you might prefer that form of desktop publishing yourself, & literally sell hard copies only from your desktop exclusively. I am thinking of going this route if I can get my act together, on a S84/98 T-III book I have long hoped to do. I deferred to another collector when he said he was going to pursue this, since he had already done a similar book, but now has apparently changed his direction...