Publishing Options

We live in an author’s world.

It used to be that authors were dependent on publishers for getting their work out into the world and getting paid for their labors. Publishers were the ones with all the power and authors were completely at their mercy.

An author, if they were lucky enough to even have their work accepted, had little choice but to agree to editing changes to their book, and new authors had to submit to title changes, bad covers, terrible back-cover copy. They had no say over how or when their work would be published. And for the honor of having it published, they accepted pitiful advances and as little as 5% net royalties. They were not informed properly of sales, nor even of whether their book had been translated into another language and sold in other countries.

There are advantages of being published by a traditional publisher — distribution and the prestige of having gotten past the gatekeepers. But today authors have so many more choices. There are medium-sized publishers who work on a similar model to the big ones. There are small publishers, and, of course, self-publishing.

Self-publishing has lots of pros and a few cons as well.

The most difficult parts of self-publishing are

1) learning how to do it;
2) finding a team (because even though it’s called” self”…