I’ve always had dreams of writing and publishing a novel, it’s a dream that I’ll probably never realize but it’s one that still buzzes around in the back of my mind. I ran across this article on makeuseof.com about publishing your own book through Publish America.
With Publish America you write your book, e-mail or mail it in to PublishAmerica. They review it for quality and grammar and see if it will garner some sort of market. If that’s all good, they’ll talk to you about a contract. You sign the contract. They design a cover for the book. They market the book on their website and to different booksellers such as Barnes and Noble, Ingram, Borders.com and others. They also give you some advice on promoting the book yourself. Your book sells and they send you royalty payments. You retain complete control over the intellectual property and rights to it, for say, movie deals or what have you.
You could certainly use a vanity published or hire an agent but that costs money and unless you are a superstar marketer with a genuine bestseller on your hands, your odds of recouping what you paid to self-publish are pretty slim indeed. You have to take care of getting your own ISBN, or copyrighting the book as well as the cover design and art work. Or you can pay the vanity publisher more to do that for you.
If you choose the literary agent route, then you’re looking at trying to find an agent who will take on an unknown author, and will actually work hard to get you published. Then they take a slice of what you make on the book, on top of everyone else traditionally involved in publishing taking their slice. That might work out if you sell 4 million books, yet the odds are slim on that as well.
While they don’t publish every manuscript that comes to them, supposedly they do take more risks than other traditional publishing houses. They have published over 40,000 authors since 1996. Some of those authors have gone on to make writing their career, have movie deals and receive some pretty significant critical praise.
Read the original article on makeuseof.com.
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