Welcome to the wild and wooly era of
self-publishing. Anyone can publish a book now. The only requirement is that
you have to actually, you know, write it. To be fair, there have always been
ways to get your book published. Vanity press is the term used for a
“publishing company” that, for a fee, would publish your book, no questions
asked. It didn’t matter what the book was about, or if it was any good, or if
it was even legible. If you put up the money, they would publish it. Vanity
press companies have been around for eighty years or more. They are still
around today in one form or another. There are also hybrid quasi vanity platforms
that have some discernment about what they print, but you still have to pay for
it up front. The advice I was always given was to avoid publishing companies
that you have to pay. If they are legit, they should be paying you. Vanity
press companies have the reputation as being not the most scrupulous
organizations to deal with. Some of them are downright toxic. But I suppose if
you know what you are getting into the choice is yours.
The gold standard of publishing is
still the traditional publishing houses, your Penguin Random House,
Harper-Collins, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and lesser known imprints
whose primary or sole business is the publication of books. If you get your
book accepted by one of these guys, wonderful. They have staff editors to make
your book the best it can be, although you may lose control of how your book
gets edited and what it looks like. They
have marketing departments to actually try to get your book noticed by the
public (although if you are not one of the big guns, they are probably not
going to spend a lot of marketing dollars on you). Getting in with a traditional publishing
house is the brass ring that many authors hope for, but it is pretty hard to
get in the door.
Next we have independent publishers.
These typically have small staffs and don’t produce a lot of books each year.
An indy publisher usually has some kind of editor, but they may or may not be
able to spend a lot of time on your book. You are also probably not going to
get anything in the way of marketing from an indy publisher. You are going to
have to do most of the marketing yourself.
If you are a first-time author, your odds of getting published by an
indy publishing house is way better than it is of getting published by a
traditional house. That being said, it is still not necessarily easy. An indy
publisher may only produce a very limited amount of books a year so they want
to publish the best ones they can. If an indy house publishes five books a year
but they get queries for 500 books a year, well, do the math.
Which brings us back to
self-publishing. If you have written something you think is good and you want
to get it out there, but can’t get it accepted by a publisher, and don’t want
to pay a vanity press to do it, there are now platforms that will allow you to
publish it yourself. You can actually do this without spending any money
whatsoever (although free is not necessarily a good price). Of course ebooks
can be published through various platforms at minimal or no cost, but even
printed books can now be self-published for no cost to the author due to “print
on demand” (POD). Print on demand means that they only print a copy of a book
when an online order comes in to buy one. As I said, an author can literally do
this for no cost, but if you want the book to look professional, you better
hire an editor (or more than one editor, as there are more than one kind of
editing). You may want to hire a cover artist. Yes you can do it yourself, but
unless you have experience in cover designs, it will look like you did it
yourself. You get what you pay for.
The reason I am writing about this is
that I now have recent experience with it. My novel Star Liner was accepted by an indy publisher and was released as an
ebook last year, but there were some setbacks getting the paperback published.
After some delays and unforeseen problems hit the publishing house, my
publisher informed me that it would still be months before he could get the
paperback out and he would understand if I wanted to go a different route.
After some thought, I told him that I was going to self-publish it, and he was
okay with that. A lot of people have told me they are waiting for the paperback
to come out because they don’t do ebooks. So I have been learning about the
self-publishing process (YouTube has been my friend). I am putting it out
through Amazon’s KDP platform. I have approved my proof copy (I am very happy
with it) and the book is now “in review” at Amazon. After it passes review I
will have a release date. Hopefully, I should know within a few days. As my character
Blant would say, “cross fingers!”
(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an e-book
through Amazon, or the other usual online sources. For those who like to turn
physical pages, the paperback will be out soon).
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