Today there are more options than ever before for getting your book published. Here are four ways that you can get your book published:
1. Commercial Book Publishing
2. Self Publishing
3. Subsidy Publishing
4. Ebook Publishing
1. Commercial Book Publishing - This is the most well known way to get published and can also be the most challenging. While there are thousands of publishing houses, today there are more writers than ever before.
Publishing houses are businesses and like all businesses their goal is to create profit as efficiently as possible. It is unlikely that you will be able to make contact with a publishing house if you don't have a good literary agent.
Surveys indicate that literary agents only accept 1 out of 400 writers for representation. The majority of literary agents prefer to take on clients that have previously been published.
To get published with a publishing house will take a combination of talent, timing and luck. You can be an very talented writer and have a wonderful book but if the publishing house just finished publishing a book that is similar to yours you may not be accepted - or if this is a "red hot market" then you may be lucky.
For these reasons it is important to do research and see what are the trends and what people are buying. An excellent resource for this type of information is Amazon's Bestseller section.
2. Self Publishing - Where in the past commercial publishing was the only option, today you can "self-publish" your book. Self publishing is when you find others who offer all of the services that you will need to create, print and distribute your book.
Some of the services required are:
*Editing - This is very important for most types of books
*Proof Pages - Preparing the pages and page order
*Artwork - You'll need both Front and Back covers plus the internal artwork which is any images or clip-art that appears within the text
*Printing - You will need to turn your electronic files into hard/soft cover books. There are 3 options for printing: get a small amount printed, get a large amount printed or use a print-on-demand service
*Distribution - How will you distribute the books? You can contact retailers and online distributors yourself or utilize a professional service
The first step is to decide which tasks you will do and which tasks you will hire someone else to do. Thanks to the internet, there is a wealth of information online for you on each step of the process.
3. Subsidy Publishing - In this case, the author pays a printing company to produce the book and then earns royalties from the sales of the book (usually a percentage). Sometimes this is confused with self publishing. With self publishing the author pays all the expenses and in turn receives 100% of the proceeds.
Another name for this is "Vanity Publishing Houses" which sometimes can have bad reputations. They will often claim that they can sell the book and then after paying for everything the writer is left without any real distribution and stuck with a bunch of books.
4. Ebook Publishing - This is a relatively new phenomenon in the book publishing industry. It is very easy to take a digital file and turn it into and ebook to sell online. A good way to do this is by having a personal website or blog and putting up articles and content to attract visitors and get publicity.
Alternatively, you can order an ISBN online and then companies like Amazon and Mobipocket will sell your ebook through their distribution network and you earn royalties from each sale.
Thanks to the internet there has never been a better time for an author to get published. Some people feel that because there is so much information online that traditional books will become obsolete.
I feel that while this may be true in some categories, for the most part it is the opposite - all of the free information creates a hunger for more!
When radio first came out, the music industry was worried that they wouldn't sell as much albums and then they started selling much more. It's similar to how in a grocery store you are offered free samples, if it tastes good than you are more likely to buy.
It's a good idea to spend a lot of time doing research until you feel what is the best way for you to approach publishing your book. I highly recommend utilizing the internet to share with others and grow your readership.
Jason Storm is a contributor to the online resource center for authors: Book Publishers Online [http://www.bookpublishersonline.net] blog, and runs the search engine optimization consulting business SEO Publicity [http://www.seopublicity.net].
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