Getting published has never been an easy endeavor, and it’s become the closest thing that the non-gambling world has to a crapshoot. Before we start looking at getting published, I’d like to talk about—well, what we’re talking about!

So let’s start by looking at some definitions:

1) POD: this stands for print-on-demand. It is not a kind of publishing, it’s a publishing technology. Subsidy presses, self-publishers, and traditional publishers alike all use POD technology. It’s used most extensively in the subsidy press arena, causing many to confuse the terms. Resist that temptation. It’s a printing technology that developed after the advent of digital printing, enabling a company or individual to print a copy of a book when it is ordered, as opposed to accumulating expensive inventory. As Wikipedia says: “Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing out to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain a large backlist; some even use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older titles that had been out of print or doing test marketing.”

2) Subsidy presses: they used to be called vanity presses; they take your money and in return publish your book for you. Anything can and is published (few require editing; some offer it at additional expense), meaning that the books published by subsidy presses vary wildly in quality. Leading subsidy presses include iUniverse, Authorhouse, Booksurge, XLibris, and Trafford. Contracts vary: some provide all necessary services for a set fee, others are more a la carte in their offerings; some copyright your book in their name, others allow the author to retain copyright. A subsidy publisher also distributes books under its own imprint. However, it does not purchase manuscripts; instead, it asks authors to pay for the cost of publication. With the exception of certain types of publishers (such as university or scholarly presses), any publisher that requests a fee from the author is a subsidy publisher. As with commercial publishers, the books are owned by the publisher and remain in the publisher’s possession; authors receive royalties.

3) Self-publishing: Here you set up your own publishing company, and contract with printers, distributors, editors, graphics and design folks, cover artists, marketing professionals, and so on, to perform the tasks associated with publishing. Many self-publishers only publish their own books; others go on to take on other authors and eventually may become small independent presses.
Self-publishing resources:

The Indie Author Guide: Self-Publishing Strategies Anyone Can Use by April Hamilton.
Self-Publishing for Dummies by Jason Rich.
Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print and Sell Your Own Book.

4) Traditional publishing: And then of course there’s the traditional publishing route, the one with which most people are familiar. In this model, a writer—or a literary agent representing the writer—sells a book to a publishing house. There may or may not be an advance offered against royalties. The publisher takes the risks associated with the book — i.e., editing, layout costs, cover art, working with distribution channels, printing, and marketing (though more about the marketing part later).
Traditional publishing resources:

The Writer’s Market Guide to Getting Published by the Editors of Writers Digest.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published by Sheree Bykofsky.
The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published: How to Write It, Sell It, and Market It Successfully by David Henry Sterry.

4) Ebook publishing: Everything that I said about the technology of print on demand goes the same with the newest technology on the scene: electronic or ebooks. Again, here you can have traditional publishers producing them, or self-publishers producing them.

Ebooks are exciting for a number of different reasons, the major one being the low cost involved. Since there are no production costs (printing, distribution, etc.), traditional publishers are more liable to accept first-time novelists, or mid-list authors, than they would be if they had to carry all the production prices.

The distribution giant, Amazon, is making it even easier for you to get your work out. Anyone can publish an ebook on the Kindle platform, for free. Depending on the pricing you set for your book, the author may reap as much as 70% of the book’s price. Compare that to a meager 10-15% you’ll get from a traditional publisher, and you’ll see why this is such a big deal.

Here’s a personal example. I’ve been published by a number of traditional publishers, but one of my favorite creations is a very very long novel set in the middle ages. Publisher after publisher loved the book, but it was just too expensive to produce: long books make for bigger prices, and there just aren’t enough people out there who want to read a medieval novel for a publisher to be sure to recoup its investment, never mind make a profit.

So I went with Kindle. I hired a cover artist to create a cover for me, and that was the only expense I had. Since Kindle books can be read on nearly every platform out there—iPads, laptops, etc.,—there was a fair amount of reach. I’m now selling about a copy a day, and at 70% of $3.99, I’ll soon recoup my investment in the cover and will be making money. Will it get me a world tour? No; but it does mean that I was able to get my novel “out there,” rather than just sitting on my hard drive.

So you can publish your book today and have people buying it tomorrow. Who would have thought?

Now, we’ve looked at all sorts of ways of getting published. How do you decide which one is for you?

Here again you want to select the proper tool for the proper application. If you’re a public speaker who goes around the country making personal appearances, you probably don’t want to go the ebook route: you want to have something that is physically “there” with you, so that you can make the famous back-of-the-room sales.

If on the other hand you have a website that is part of marketing yourself, you may want to offer the ebook there, either as an incentive to come hear you speak or a followup after a lecture, or indeed just to show visitors that you know what you’re talking about!

If you choose to stick with a paper book then there’s no question in my mind that you should first try to be published the traditional way. Names like Wiley and Knopf and HarperCollins are likely to impress your audience – people look for things they recognize in order to validate what they’re hearing or reading.

To get your foot in the door if you don’t have a literary agent (and even if you do), you’ll need to write a book proposal. Have someone work with you on your proposal –- as they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression!

And in any case, it may not be possible. There are fewer and fewer editors buying fewer and fewer books at traditional publishing houses, and rejections do not necessarily reflect on the quality of your work.

I do want to caution you about the subsidy presses. Look at how they make their money: from you. They don’t care whether or not your book sells; they make their money by selling you things. And, as we’ve seen before, they will publish anything, which leaves readers in general with very little respect for them.

What I would suggest that you do is true self-publishing. It’s not as daunting as it sounds, and you will be the one making the money from your book. There are a number of self-publishing information and discussion lists on the internet, and all you really have to do is join them and listen at first. If you want someone to guide you through the process of self-publishing, there are experienced guides available: the one I recommend the most often and the most heartily is Dick Margulis.

No matter how you choose to publish, you’re going to be doing the marketing yourself. Gone are the days when traditional publishers sent midlist authors out on expensive tours’ that’s reserved for the bestsellers these days. In fact, part of selling your book to a traditional publisher is the proposal I mentioned earlier, and one of the required components of that proposal is a section in which you’ll tell the publisher how you intend to market the book. Yes, you. The reality is that no matter which route you’ve chosen, you’re going to be doing your own marketing.

However, it’s not all daunting. Let’s see … you probably think that bookstore signings are difficult to set up but give you the most exposure, right? Wrong. Bookstores are the WORST place to sell your book! How many times, when you dreamed of readers finding your book, did your dreams center around them finding it in a “brick-and-mortar” bookstore? Chances are, most of the time… This is the fantasy the leads too many authors to the endless pain of the author-agent-publisher rejection cycle. And it rarely sells any significant amount of books. 


The realities of bookstore sales are frightening – far more books fail, courtesy of bookstores, than succeed. Consider these facts:
 


Returns rates exceed 70% in many categories. That means bookstores send back seven out of every 10 books they buy.
You, the author, bear the biggest pain of returns. The publisher has other books it can rely on.


 

Bookstores buy very few copies on a store-by-store basis, and they typically only merchandise the books that have big marketing dollars behind them.
Unless you can afford a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign, it is highly unlikely that your book will be stacked anywhere a potential buyer can find it (let alone in the front of the store).
Author signing events typically sell only about seven books – all your scheduling, time, calling stores to set up events – results in selling seven books…
 

Bookstores take up to 90 days to pay for your books – and to mitigate what they owe you they will quite often return your remaining stock within the 90 days.

The typical retail buyer is not a destination purchaser, but a browser (most readers who know what they want go to the online retail sites). A reader in search of a book can be a GREAT customer. But when you are shelved next to all the other books in your particular category, your competition stands as good a chance at getting bought as you do… and if you are stocked near a well-known author, most buyers will bypass your book to pick up the well-known name. 


Here’s the good news. Over half the books sold in the publishing industry are sold through non-bookstore vehicles.
That means that more books are sold in other places than bookstores, and your book is likely to be most successful through these outlets. And online sales—driven by a targeted, effective, and comprehensive marketing plan—will be the cornerstone of your book’s success. Authors spend a lot of time and money chasing the improbable, when the “golden egg” of self-promotion is right in front of them. I’d sell my books everywhere except the brick and mortar bookstore!


And this isn’t just for midlist authors. Bestselling author Jodi Picoult told me that even her books are selling far more copies in places like CostCo and Walmart rather than Border and Barnes & Noble.
So if you’re not on the internet, it’s high time you were! Search marketing, social networking, blogs, newsletters, email campaigns, websites, and your personal appearances (yes, the human touch still has meaning in book sales) are the new tools for building great book sales.

Well – let’s see what we’ve talked about today. I hope I’ve given you at least a high-level view of getting published. I want to add a couple of pet peeves/suggestions before we go:

Have your work professionally edited. Trust me, even if you yourself edit other people’s writing, NO ONE can edit their own. Be humble and open and get it done.
If you feel you need to improve your writing, join a critique group. Again, you need to be humble and open and ready to hear criticism, but it’s the best way to improve. If you don’t have a local group to join, then there are some internet resources you’ll find on my blog, which is, again, at beyond.customline.com

We’ve looked at the process of writing a proposal and submitting it to a traditional publisher. We’ve talking about the difference between self-publishing and subsidy publishing, and I hope that I have convinced you to never ever use the latter. We’ve explained print on demand as a technology rather than a publisher, and we’ve looked at ebooks as perhaps the most interesting thing to take place in publishing since the advent of the printing press. Finally, we talked about alternative routes for marketing your book.

Do all this, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!