Geek's Guide to Publishing a Book Part 5...

...Options.

An author has options for getting their work published. As you read what follows, keep in mind what has been presented to you in previous posts.

Traditional publishing - This is the Holy Grail of publishing--someone actually pays you, the author, for the right to publish your work. Now, since they are paying you for this right, they will have some (a lot) of say in what is actually published (remember "content editing") and how it is published. But, they do take care of all those other tasks (sometimes they even let you input your own thoughts.) The biggest problem is just getting a publisher to look at your stuff, which is why many authors search out the services of an agent. Of course, finding an agent (especially if your are unpublished) is probably as hard as finding a publisher, but no one said this would be easy.

Now a brief word about financial side of selling a book: Traditionally, books are published with their price printed on the cover (sometimes it is part of the barcode on the back of the book.) This "cover price" is the basis for the amount of money everyone makes off of selling the book. For example, take a book with a cover price of $10:

1. Publisher sells book to a distributor for 55% off cover price discount. Thus publisher gets 45% of cover as revenue. In our example this equals $4.50.
2. Distributor has paid $4.50 for book and resells it to a bookstore for a standard 40% off cover price discount, or $6.00. The distributor thus pockets the difference or $1.50.
3. The bookstore sells the book for whatever it can, but remember: it paid $6.00 for the book.
4. According to Poynter, the average royalty is 10.7$ of net, or what the publisher actually gets after discounts, returns, etc. In our example, the author would get $0.48. At this rate, a book would have to sell 100,000 copies a year to net the author a salary of $48,000 (by the way, if you get an agent, you pay them out of your royalties.)

So, for the traditional publishing route: writing the book was hard, finding a publisher is hard, finding an agent is hard, and you will have to sell a lot of books to make any money. On the plus side: you didn't have to spend any money.

Vanity Publishers - This works like traditional publishers except that you have to pay the vanity publisher up-front to publish your book. Vanity publishers make their money primarily off the authors. Vanity (or subsidy) publishers have a real bad rap in the industry, though some seem to be on the up and up. Remember: vanity publishers want money up-front to publish your work and may have little or no say in the process.

Self-Publishing - Ah, the choice of thousands of authors world-wide. You become your own publisher by starting your own publishing company. Going this route means that you are responsible for all aspects of the publishing process, including the part where you tell yourself how your story needs to be changed to make it more marketable! In my humble opinion, a self-publisher needs to either know all of the aspects of publishing, or be able to hire people who do. You will also need to have significant funds to cover operations until the revenues come in. This option really works when the author is honest about why they are publishing and are willing to treat the venture as a real business, not a work of love.

LuLu.com and Blurb.com - These two were made possible by the Internet and the personal PC. In a nutshell: you write and prepare your book for publication (which may require the use of the services of other people) and upload it to the website. When someone buys a copy of your book a chunk of the purchase price goes to you while the rest goes to the publisher. There are no up-front fees for uploading and setting up--they make their money off of sales, just like you. You set the price and thus your profit.

Next time: What the Heck is POD?

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