OK, you've finished your book and now you want to share it with the world. In other words, you want to get it published.
Pre-1996, there were only two ways to satisfy that desire—find an editor to buy your work so that, many months later, you'll see copies of your masterpiece on the shelves of your local book store. Or pay thousands of dollars to a vanity press and end up with 2,000 copies of your masterpiece in your garage. There really wasn't much in between.
But enormous changes in printing technology and the growth of the web mean that writers now have as many publishing options as flavors in a Ben & Jerry's Scoop Shop. We're not talking simple vanilla or chocolate here any more.
So what avenues should you pursue? What path makes the most sense for your book? Let me give you the lay of the land as it stands today so that you'll have some information to help you make that decision.
By the way, this is a long article so if you want to print it to read on paper, by all means do so.
Big Publishing and Micro-Publishing
First of all, I'm not crazy about the terms "traditional publishing" and "self-publishing." When you think about it, the only difference between what Gutenberg was doing in the 16th century and what Random House does now is size. So I prefer the term Big Publishing to refer to companies that pay authors for the right to print and distribute their work.
And I think that the term self-publishing is kind of misleading. When a writer decides to send her own work out into the world, she's really setting herself up as a small publishing company because she's going to do everything that a big publisher does, just on a smaller scale. So I think the term Micro-Publishing is actually more descriptive of what's really going on here.
Publishing with the Big Five
Because of consolidation, five publishing conglomerates now control 80% of all book sales. They are: Bertlesman (Random House), Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, Disney, and Viacom/CBS. Only one of them is an American-owned company.
What if you want to sell your book to them? Well, the trend for celebrity books and blockbusters is the rule in these houses now so if you want to try knocking on these doors, you better have a guaranteed audience for your book. In the business, this is known as "having a platform." A platform can be a popular blog, a television show, a well-known name in a particular field, or a sister who produces the Oprah Winfrey Show.
And you must have an agent to even knock on their doors.
In others words, it's very competitive, and you need to know—not guess at—the market for your book.
What About Smaller Publishers?
What about smaller companies, those that publish less than 100 titles a year? If you are selective in how you market your book, these may be a better bet than one of the Big Five. By selective marketing, I mean researching prospective publishers to make sure they buy the kind of book you are selling, that they are in the market for new material, and that you approach the right person in the company with your proposal.
Sounds self-evident, right. It's not. Approximately 85 percent of all books are rejected for the same two reasons: the writing is bad or they are sent to the wrong place. If you want to enhance your chances of being published, you need to know who is buying what you are selling.
Like everything else, there are advantages and disadvantages to publishing with a smaller house. First, smaller houses have a tendency to specialize in a particular field. For example, Martingale Press publishes how-to books for crafts. Lonely Planet does travel books with a particular attitude. Poisoned Pen Press does only mysteries. If your book fits a small publisher's niche, this could be the right path to choose.
Your work will get more personal attention in a smaller house. By comparison, the editors in large publishing houses don't edit any more. They buy "properties" and hand the editing off to a freelance copy editor who won't know a thing about you. There will be no marketing budget for your book in a big house (unless you are a celebrity).
Small publishing houses still do their own editing, will help you with as much marketing as they can with their small budgets, and will know who you are when you call.
The typical advance for a first-time author in a big house is $5,000. The typical advance for every author, no matter how many books to his credit, at a smaller publisher is $1,000.
And remember, while you may find a good fit for your work at a smaller publisher, the number of open spots for new material is just a fraction of the number at a larger house so the competition is still keen.
What Do Publishers Do?
This may sound like a question with a self-evident answer but when it comes to making a decision about what to do with your book, it's important to know exactly what a publisher does—and does not do.
1. A publisher pays an author an advance for the right to print and distribute the author's work.
Yep, someone pays you for your book. Sounds great, right? But it's trickier than that.
The term "advance" is really shorthand for "advance on royalties." In other words, a publisher gives you a set amount of money that you will pay back through the royalties you earn on your book. Until the advance is repaid, you won't see another dime for your work. If the sales of your book don't earn enough royalties to pay back your advance, the publisher will not send you a bill for the difference. But not earning back an advance makes it nearly impossible for an author to sell a second book.
2. Once an advance is repaid, the author collects royalties on the sales of her book.
Sounds straightforward enough but please don't plan to retire on your royalties just yet. Royalty rates are quite variable. Depending on your publishing contract and the discount a publisher gives to its distributors, an author royalty on the sale of a $20 book could range from a nickel to $4. Unless you are truly knowledgeable about royalties or you have a reasonable comfort level with your prospective publisher, I would recommend employing the services of a good agent for this reason if for no other.
3. Publishers pay all the costs of producing and printing your book.
In publishing, the term production refers to all phases of editing and proofreading, creation of the cover, and design of the interior of the book. This is the area where Big Publishing (even when it's done by a small house) still shines though budget cutbacks throughout the industry are dimming this luster.
Some background: As publishing grew out of the printing industry, starting in the early 19th century, it set standards for grammar and punctuation so that, for example, the word "apple" would be spelled the same way no matter the book, and that the use of commas was uniform. Publishers developed tables of contents, the index, footnotes, appendices, everything we associate with how a book looks and works. Not because they were sticklers for apostrophes but because readers liked to know that every book they bought adhered to a common standard. In other words, good book production enhanced sales.
Bear this in mind if you decide to publish your own book.
And yes, the cost of printing a book is a publisher's responsibility.
4. Publishers market their books for their authors.
This used to be true no matter how large or small the publishing house but it's not true any more. Big houses extend their marketing muscles for only a fraction of the books they publish, the ones that have the greatest sales potential. Lesser known authors are on their own in this regard. Smaller houses do, generally, make more of a marketing effort for their authors.
5. Publishers get books into book stores.
This statement would be more accurate if it read: Publishers try to get your books into book stores. It's estimated that there are 2 million titles in print in the US at any one time and there's no bricks and mortar book store on earth that could hold even one copy of each of these titles. So there's no guarantee that your publisher will get your book into a particular book store. They are responsible for trying to sell your work in every appropriate venue but there is never any guarantee of sales.
By the way, online booksellers such as Amazon, because their inventory is only digits, have the capacity to carry every book that's in print (or even out of print). In fact, the founding of Amazon is one of the two developments that have made micro-publishing possible. Every author who publishes and sells her or his own work owes Jeffrey Bezos a big thank you.
