INSIDER INSIGHT!
Self-Publishing
Not too long ago, self-publishing was a small, idiosyncratic part of the business. Authors who arranged for their books to be published usually sought out vanity presses — companies that would typeset, print, and bind your book, often for a hefty fee and with no further commitment to sell or distribute it. Today, however, self-publishing is a thriving part of the business, thanks to advances in the way books are produced and to the innovations of the Internet. Many authors, tired of beating on publishers' doors to get their books published, have produced and sold their books themselves, often with great success. The Butter Busters cookbooks, for example, were originally self-published, as was James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy (a phenomenon that sold hundreds of thousands of copies on its own before being picked up by Warner Books and going on to sell several million more).
What's involved in self-publishing?
There's more to self-publishing than most people anticipate. You have to arrange for all the functions and services that publishers are set up to do — everything from copy editing the manuscript and proofreading the proofs, to designing the cover, to arranging (and paying) for a printer and binder, to getting the books distributed, to handling marketing and sales and publicity efforts, to taking orders, to warehousing and shipping inventory.
It can be expensive — up to tens of thousands of dollars — but the upside is you have total control. You don't have a publisher telling you what you can't do or what they won't do, or treating your book like another widget on their assembly line. And every dollar in sales you get belongs to you.
What about self-publishing options on the Internet?
With the advent of the Internet, self-publishing has been made a little easier. You may be able to find an Internet publisher that will take over some of the traditional chores (for a fee). You may even be able to find a non-traditional publisher that will print and bind your book, list it with Books-in-Print, national distributors, and Amazon.com, and help you figure out your own marketing plan — again for a fee, and also for a share of the royalties, just like a traditional publisher. Still, if you have a book that doesn't fit into a popular market or you don't have a large national platform, but you still think readers are out there, this may be something to explore.
Why we self-published:
You may be asking yourself, “If the founders of YouCanWrite. com are so smart about publishing, why are they self-publishing this guide to getting published? Why don’t they have a publisher for their book?”
The answer echoes one of the main points we make in this site and in our book: Our platform is pretty modest. Though tens of thousands of visitors have come to our site and we’ve sold several hundred YouCanWrite.com Insider Guides — and gotten lots of compliments on them and the website — that isn’t enough to convince most publishers that they could make money from publishing our guide. The bookstore shelf (virtual and real) for books offering advice on getting published is just as crowded, if not more so, than any other career or self-help shelf.
But we’re both realists. We know how publishers think. And we believe we have something distinctive and helpful in the guide we’ve written. Our website customers have told us so, as have our professional friends and colleagues. We wanted to make our practical, realistic, and compassionate approach to getting published available to a broader audience, so we decided to self-publish through iUniverse. They’ve made it possible for us to make our book available through most of the usual sales channels that publishers use, at the same discounts — that’s really what we wanted. We also get to keep more of the control over the whole process, which we both like (as do many self-published authors).
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