Do you want to write a book or have you already written a manuscript but never published? Maybe you published a vanity publisher and they took you for a lot of money. Here are some common excuses for why people do not publish:
“It is too hard and I have no idea what to do.”
“Costs too much.”
“What if I publish and no one buys it?”
“I don’t have time.”
Sound familiar? How did you go from; “I should write a book” to those excuses? Well, allow me to take some of the mystery out of the book game. First of some brief education on how things work.
There are two basic types of publishers:
Publishing Houses
These require no money, they cover the cost of publishing, and some of the bigger ones pay advances. The bigger ones called the “Big Five” are at the top of a mountain in terms of making your books returnable so bookstores will consider carrying them, getting your book out there marketing-wise, and have the means and influence to sell a lot of copies. The problem with the bigger publishers is they require an agent typically. Your odds of getting a literary agent is often worse than finding Bigfoot. Unless you are famous or rich to bankroll the risk of your book, it is not likely an agent will stake their reputation on an unknown. It has happened and many agents are easy to reach, so it is not impossible.
Your second option is second-tier publishing houses. These are small publishers that often do not require an agent so they allow submissions to be sent to them by the writer. If they accept your book, they will cover the costs of publishing and market your book under their banner. There is usually no advance as they are already taking the risk of paying the production costs to publish your book. Some may or may not make your book returnable. Returnable means that bookstores are allowed to order the book on credit for 60 to 90 days and then can return unsold copies back to the publisher at their expense. If you have a publisher, they will absorb this cost.
Publishing Services
This is any publishing company that charges you for anything. They simply are a printing service that does what you pay for. They may provide other services to prepare your book like cover art, editing, layout, ebook conversion, audiobook narration, and so on for extra costs. However, this option puts you more in the driver seat but can cost many thousands of dollars. Also, those services that allow you to sell your book as returnable will pass the returned books costs to you. Those services that do will give usually give you two options: Keep every copy returned (which is they could be damaged), or destroy the returns (this is the cheapest option). You may think that setting your book to returnable is the way to go so that bookstores will carry your book, but bookstores only represent averagely 12% of book sales in physical stores. However, if you manage to convince a major book chain to buy a lot of your books and they do not sell, you can get stuck with thousands of dollars in return book costs.
Okay, so what other options do you have? There is self or indie publishing. This includes the aforementioned publishing service. However, there are much cheaper methods and even free. The cheaper is learning how to do most of the tasks associated with producing a book yourself. Learning graphic art to make covers like Photoshop, which by the way you can subscribe to Adobe for a reasonable amount each month and get all of their software to use without having to buy them. You can learn how to convert text to ebook using Sigil and other programs. Take courses in editing and edit your own documents or use Wordrake, Grammarly to help. Although I would not recommend editing your own books, you tend to miss things another set of eyes would not.
Vanity publishers are a bit different than regular printing services. They will act like publishing houses and cater more to you but you pay a great amount to make your book happen.
But I said something about free though. Well yes, there are services like Amazon CreateSpace and Kindle that have wizards to walk you through everything including making covers and ebooks. There is also Draft2Digital that will auto-convert your ebook and let you have the ebook in pdf, Mobi, epub versions for free whether you use them or not. But they will publish your book on every platform just like Amazon will. The one advantage Amazon has is if you publish with them your books in print will always be listed as “in stock” and ebooks can be given away for free every few months on Kindle promotions. Also, these services provide you with serial numbers at no cost, however, they belong to them.
Now if you are more skilled and want your books to be returnable so that you appear like your books come from a mainstream publishing house then Ingram is the service for you. You buy your serial numbers from Bowker and use them from any publishing service you like. Ingram will allow you to set your books to be returnable so bookstores will consider carrying them. Again, this is a risk for you if they return. Some indie bookstores will carry your books on consignment if you wish to not take the returnable risk.
So here are your options:
Get a literary agent (good luck). Literary agent evangelizes your book to big publishing houses and they accept your book (good luck). Publishing house sells millions of copies of your book and gets Hollywood to make a movie based on it (buy a lotto ticket).
Break out the “How to” books and learn how to do it all yourself.
Something to consider if you are already published and translating your books to Spanish, this is a very reasonable priced organization to narrate audiobooks and soon will be providing translation services as well:
https://www.facebook.com/narratorshub/
