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Understanding Your Publishing Options

Do You Find Book Publishing Confusing?

The Three Ways to Publish a Book

If you love books and have always dreamed of becoming a book author, you are not alone. If you:

• Have access to a defined target market.
• Have one or more completed manuscripts.
• Are committed to seeing your name on the cover of a book.

You may have determined that authoring a book can help your bottom line.

Seeing your name on the cover of a book is also incredibly satisfying on a personal level.

So you go forth on your publishing journey. You have three primary options for publishing a book:

1. Traditional Publishing: You get an agent, write a book proposal, and get signed by a traditional publishing house.
2. Subsidy Publishing: You write the book and use a "pay-to-publish" subsidy press like iUniverse, AuthorHouse or Lulu to produce it.
3. True Self-Publishing: You purchase a block of ISBN numbers, write the book, set up your own micropublishing company, hire freelancers (or produce the book yourself), line up a printer, and self-publish the book.

Each of these publishing options has pros and cons, which are described below. The "right" way to publish depends on your goals for your book.

Traditional Publishing

Most people figure that they'll write a best seller and get on Oprah. Unfortunately, the publishing world is not quite that simple. Publishing through a big traditional publishing house has advantages and disadvantages. In fact, if you've looked into it at all, you may have become a bit discouraged. After all, when you publish through a traditional publisher:

• It is hard to get accepted by an agent, and even if you have an agent, it is hard to get accepted by a publisher.
• You earn very little money on each book you sell. In fact, the advance is probably all the money you will ever see.
• You lose control over the layout and design of your book. If you don't like the way the book looks when it is packaged, you don't have much recourse.
• You lose the rights to your book and must take care to be able to get those rights back from the publisher when the book goes out of print (and hopefully before the publisher goes out of business).
• You suffer with a very slow time-to-market. It can take as long as two years for your title to become commercially available.

Subsidy Presses (and Confusing Terminology)

After learning how long it takes and how little money you make going the traditional route, you think "I'll publish myself!" But that road can be a bit confusing too.

For your next book you decide to publish the book yourself. You do a search for "publish a book" in Google and you see all these ads that say things like "Self Publishing Made Easy." Wow that sounds great; they'll do everything for you.

But what's really happened is you've signed up with what's called a "subsidy" or "vanity" press.

Although it sounds "easy," publishing through a subsidy publisher has some serious disadvantages:

• It is expensive. You pay a lot to get every book published and pay nickel-and-dime charges that add up quickly for supporting services that have questionable value.
• The subsidy press gives you higher royalties than a traditional publisher, but they still take a good chunk of the earnings.
• If you do take advantage of their layout and design offerings, you are often stuck with a canned, unappealing design. (As a reader, you know the difference between a high-quality book and junk; generally books from subsidy houses are junk.)
• Finally, the book market associates your book with the other authors who used the same publisher and were careless with the quality of their books. This quality stigma is a big reason many people avoid vanity presses.

You often hear hear the terms subsidy publishing, self publishing, and print-on-demand used synonymously.

This is wrong.

If your books are published under someone else's imprint (iUniverse, AuthorHouse, etc.), you are not self publishing, you are subsidizing the publishing of your book through their imprint.

You also sometimes see the term print-on-demand associated with these companies, such as POD publisher.

Print-on-demand (POD) is simply a practice that takes advantage of digital printing technology. With POD, books are printed only when they are ordered.

The term has nothing to do with self-publishing or subsidy publishing per se. It's a way to print books. Even traditional publishers sometimes use POD for their older back list titles (just as self publishers can choose to print their books through traditional offset printing methods).

The True Self-Publishing Option

If you have bad experiences with traditional publishing and subsidy publishing, at this point, you might decide to just do everything yourself.

After all, if you are going to have to take responsibility for the quality and promotion of your books, you may as well go all the way.

When you self publish your book, you form your own publishing company. As a business owner, that means you are responsible for every aspect of producing the book -- everything from editing to printing and distribution.

You decide whether to print a big run using offset technology or to take advantage of digital printing and its print-on-demand capabilities. You purchase ISBN's for your books, which include the prefix assigned to your publishing company. You are the publisher of record.

The bad news is that learning what you need to know to self-publish a book can be challenging. It can take time you just don't have.

• Although the Internet has plenty of information on self-publishing, you have to weed through the information that does not apply to your situation. Plus, you may decide to self publishing using new print on demand (POD) printing technology. This area of publishing is newer, so it is not as well covered as other publishing methods.
• Plus unless you happen to be a graphic artist with high-quality desktop publishing software, you need to learn where and how to outsource layout and design work. This too requires research time and experience.

Self publishing obviously gives you the most flexibility and power. It also gives you the highest income earning potential because no middlemen get a cut of the action (as is the case with either traditional or subsidy publishing).

Of course, with greater power comes greater responsibility. You are solely responsible for the quality of your printed book.

Consider the Goals for YOUR Book

You may have legitimate reasons for selecting any one of the three publishing methods. Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Self publishing gives you the most power and flexibility, but it may seem like a difficult road to travel. Fortunately, the Internet has made it easier than ever to access the resources you need and to market to your audience, so self-publishing is not nearly as daunting a prospect as it once was.

The Publishize System

After years of being traditionally published and researching self-publishing, we developed an approach we call the Publishize System.

Using the Publishize System, you can self publish a book without spending thousands of dollars in printing or warehousing cartons of books in your garage. You are the publisher of record and make more profit per book than any other publishing approach.

You can learn more about our approach to self-publishing with our free weekly Publishize Newsletter. Every week, you'll receive inspiration and advice that will help you become a successful author and self-publisher. Check out the newsletter archive to see the topics we have covered so far.

For the big publishing picture, you may also be interested in our award-winning book Publishize: How to Quickly and Affordably Self-Publish a Book That Promotes Your Expertise.

If you're tired of being "Out of Sight, Out of Mind," visit our...

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