Mike Holman, author of the Money Smarts Blog and a financial services industry veteran has published a book about registered education savings plans (RESP). The RESP Book provides a comprehensive look at the subject: from how to get started to contribution and withdrawal rules and avoiding penalties. He and I spoke in September about the new project and print-on-demand self-publishing.

You’ve got a lot of great RESP content on your blog. Is this an extension of that?
Mr. Cheap, a former writing partner, encouraged me to write the book because I had the knowledge and I’ve written about the topic quite a bit. There aren’t any other RESP books out there. And given the amount of people that have RESP accounts, there is probably a demand for it. The other thing is that the amount of misinformation out there is just unbelievable. It’s probably the most complicated investment account in Canada. It’s not rocket science, but there are some relatively complicated rules so I thought a book would be a good resource for a lot of people.

Can you describe one of the most common misconceptions?
One of the biggest ones is the withdrawal rules. People don’t understand the tax treatments. A big misconception is that if a child doesn’t go to school and you have to collapse the account, the penalties are very harsh. The penalties are sort of severe, but it’s not that hard to get around them, and they’re just not as bad as a lot of people think. People think there’s a big penalty on the actual account, when in fact it would only be on the non-contribution portion, and if you have RRSP room it’s really easy to avoid the 20% penalty that’s applied.

You self-published this book. How does that work?
There’s a subset of self-publishing called print-on-demand. There’s a company called Lightning Source that I used; they’re the main printing press for most self-publishers. They’re connected to Amazon. Once you get a book set up there, they automatically send the information to Amazon and people can order it. So you don’t have to order books in advance. I can just sell through Amazon, which means I don’t have to do any of the actual selling of the book, I have to promote it and provide the link but I don’t have to mail anything, accept the orders or deal with the cash. The way print-on-demand works is that they will literally print one book. Once somebody buys a book from Amazon the order goes to Lightning Source. Because they work with Amazon, they’ve got their packaging technology. The package is mailed off, and away it goes.

Is it economical?
Yes. My book is six by nine inches and 126 pages, including title pages and index and all that stuff. The actual printing cost is $2.85, which is pretty low. Amazon takes 20% of the sale price. It’s amazing.

Did you write the book to promote the blog, make money or as a career move?
Probably all of those. Money is definitely a motivating factor. Taking 20,000 words from a blog and getting it into a published book is quite a bit of work, so if you’re not going to sell a few, then it’s probably not worth it. I’m also hoping it can raise the profile of the blog a bit.

You said it took about 6 months to write. How’d you tackle the work?
I think I did the actual writing in four weeks. I had intended to space it out a bit, but once I got going I kept going and got it done. Editing took a long time. I let other people read it as well to get their feedback, and that added a lot of time. The editing phase was probably a month or more. I also had to set up my account at the publishing company, which I won’t have to do for future books. And there are other things: you have to format it a certain way to get it published and get a cover done. All that takes time. The writing is only one portion of it. It’s a significant portion, but there’s definitely a lot of non-writing tasks you have to do.

Writing a book is a dream for a lot of people. Is it for you?
No. I never dreamt of being an author. Once I had it in my head that it might work, then I actually got pretty excited about it. And I actually enjoyed the whole process. If it’s not a total flop – and I don’t think it will be – I wouldn’t mind doing a few more.