Writing Biz Knowlege Input Needed
Dear FList,
I need your collective advice in response to a post in a community I maintain that someone is being published by Author House and that they recommend going the self publishing route if the regular publishers were too elusive.
In good conscience I thought I'd point to writer_beware for starters. What would you say to the people possibly ( Read more... )
I need your collective advice in response to a post in a community I maintain that someone is being published by Author House and that they recommend going the self publishing route if the regular publishers were too elusive.
In good conscience I thought I'd point to writer_beware for starters. What would you say to the people possibly ( Read more... )
The second is to submit to publishers and attempt to make a (at least part time) career out of it. This is not a quick and easy solution. There was a writer's meme going around recently - here's jaylake's version - and every single one of them I've seen ran along the same lines: wrote several novels, eventually sold one, with five or ten years between serious writing (not just scribbling a bit) and publication. It's a long, hard route, there will be many rejections, and you'll have to work on your skills.
The rewards? While it's not easy to break in, many people *do* make a living from their books, and a first printing at a major house will outstrip self-published books by a factor of ten to a hundred. (And yes, there are self-published books - a couple - with 50.000 copies, but there are traditionally published ones with millions, so it still holds.)
The other alternative is to self-publish. If you do that, do it right, and be a responsible (micro) publisher - keep control over everything, hire your own editor (rather than getting 20h of editing in a 'package' from a vanity publisher), hire a cover designer, hire a publicist. All of this needs an outlay in money; you get what you pay for, and if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Publcising a self-published book is *hard work* because there are so many of them, and so many bad ones, that most bookstores and readers don't want to know. Vanity houses make money from new authors, not from having bestsellers; they are not interested in the success of your book, they want you to cough over money and go away quietly, happy you are 'published.'
If you're traditionally published, you have an agent to handle paperwork and negotiations, and your publisher pays people to market the book, so maybe 10-20% of your time are spent away from writing.(The best sales tool IMHO is to write another great book). If you're your own publisher and sales force, expect to spend 80-90% of your time away from writing.
Still want to self-publish? Fine. But please do it right, or you will end up either out of pocket or frustrated or both.
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For the Win! You made me laugh!
Thanks, Green_knight. That is a nice break down.
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