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Article - Where to Publish
How to get what you have written out into the world. This is by far the most difficult thing to do successfully for an author. There are just so many decisions to make, and any one of them can make or break your book.
How good is the book really, is it a potential best seller, or is it more of a clique read. These are two questions that need answering, and you are not the person to answer them. It is really very hard to be subjective about something that has taken you months, or even years, to write. Most authors, successful or aspiring, have an overrated opinion of their own work, it is vital that an author finds some objective unbiased opinion of their work.
Let's say that what you've written is a potential best seller, what is the next step, how do you get it out there. Again, there are several options, I'm not going to go through them all in any great detail here, there's plenty of websites that give advice on this. But, things to think about are:
- What is your market - fiction, children, historical
- Do you need an agent
- Which publishers to contact
- Contact more than one publisher/agent at a time
- How to promote your book
The world of traditional publishing can be a soul destroying one for an aspiring author. It is extremely difficult to find an agent, let alone a publisher, to even look a your work. Since the advent of computers, and good word processing packages, it seems as though the world and his wife want to be authors. So, another way to do this is self publishing. This comes in many forms, and with the cost of printing being at an all time low, it has become extremely popular. In the past, the only way to guarantee that your work was published was to use what is known as a vanity press. These so called publishers will simply take your money and produce your books, often at an exorbitant cost to you. Other ways that have become available is what is known as Publish On Demand (POD). This is where you produce your book, and then it is sold only if someone wants to buy it. Again there are a plethora of these publishers, some good, some bad, and finding the right one for you can be a minefield. A couple of sites that proved invaluable to me were Preditors & Editors, and Writer Beware. Both of these sites attempt to sort out the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world of writing with regards to publishers and agents, the latter also point out the numerous scams out there that target desperate authors.
Eventually, after many days, and weeks of research I plumped for a company called Lulu. One of the main reasons for this was that they are one of the few that:
- Allow you complete control over your book
- Allow you to only pay for what is sold - one book at a time
- Allows UK authors
- Has a great community of fellow authors to ask for help
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