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Act Now, See your Book in Print . . .


                             

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).

Star Liner

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