Talk about taking your project to the people: Kevin Spaise, the former editor of Hot Boat magazine and a regular contributor to Performance Boats magazine, is putting together a book called “100 Great Hot Boats.” According to a post from Spaise on the Performance Boats message boards, the book will be sold through Amazon.com and will retail for $29.95.

The book will only feature West Coast custom performance boats. It will be “a mix of contemporary boats and classic customs from every decade. Every boat will be professionally photographed and featured in a full-color layout.”

But here’s the cool part: You don’t have to wait for your boat to be “discovered” for the book. Owners who want their boats showcased in the publication can pay a $595 participation fee, which includes 20 copies of “100 Great Hot Boats” and a CD of the photos from a shoot for the book.

“There is a selection process but it’s very informal,” Spaise told me this afternoon. “The boat just has to fittingly represent its genre— cats, Vs, vintage flat-bottoms, hydros and so on. No junk—the boat has to be a quality piece. And we can’t have too many of the same manufacturer’s boat. The first four entries I got were DCBs, (Dave’s Custom Boats) and I accepted three of them. Now, we can’t have any more DCBs in the book.”

So far, 26 of the 100 slots for the book have been filled.

OK, you could call the book project a form of “vanity publishing” and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But so what? There’s something appealing about having your go-fast pride and joy memorialized in a hardcover coffee table book along with 99 other spectacular, high-performance machines.