Which Publisher is Right For Your Masterpiece?

Most everyone feels they have a book in them. If you feel you do and you eventually write your masterpiece, how will you get it published? With advancing technology, anyone can now get their book published in some form or another. For authors, the world of publishing has pretty much blow wide open.

There are two types of publishers- traditional publishers and everyone else. Traditional publishers are any publisher who pays an author an “advance” in hopes of getting their money back through sales. The traditional publisher model has stayed fairly consistent over the years. However, changes in the publishing industry are slowly forcing the traditional publishers to modify their business models.

The other publishers  have  been more flexible and have evolved with the times. Subsidy and vanity publishers publish any book for a fee, no matter the quality of the manuscript. Off-shoots of these ideas developed such as co-publishing and shared publishing, where publishing companies took an active role in helping the author and were more discerning about what manuscripts they published.

More recently, as technology allowed, POD or print on demand companies formed. They may or may not work with the author, but their main purpose was to only print a copy of a book when the book was bought. Finally, publishing has evolved most recently into e-books; books that are read on a computer and not physically printed. This e-book niche exploded beyond computers with the advent of e-readers such as the Kindle, Nook or iPad and people can even read books on their smart phones. Nowadays, the opportunities for an author to get their work published seem endless!

Book publishing is difficult no matter how a book is published. And like all industries, there are good players and bad players which can give the different types of publishing a bad reputation. But each method of publishing has its benefits and detriments and one is not necessarily better than another. They are just different.

With the new and different publishing opportunities come new and different responsibilities for authors. Authors need to be aware of these prior to choosing any one specific method to publish their book. But at least, there are now choices for any author to get out their masterpiece.

If you are interested in a publishing consultation regarding a book you want to write, please contact us for a free consult at http://www.ourlittlebooks.com/contact/

Traditional vs. Self-Publishing. Is One Better Than the Other?

Everyone knows about traditional publishing. That is where a publishing company offers you a contract, pays you an advance and publishes your book for you. In the past, traditional publishers would accept around 2-3% of all the manuscripts sent to them, either unsolicited or via an agent. Unfortunately, nowadays, due to numerous different factors, many publishers are not even looking at unsolicited manuscripts and only publishing less than 1% of the books they see from agents.  

If you were not in the lucky 1-3% accepted by traditional publishing houses, and if you wanted to publish your work, you needed to somehow get your book out there by self-publishing whatever way you could. So, for publishing purposes, anything other than traditional publishing fell under a “self-published” umbrella. 

Although there have always been very successful self-published authors (e.g., Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Beatrix Potter, Anis Nin, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf just to name a few), self-publishing has always been under a “not as good as traditional publishing” stigma. However, with recent technological advances, various different methods of self-publishing have come into their own in the recent years and self-publishing has taken on a more respectable label. 

There are still the “vanity press” houses which will publish anything that comes their way (hence the name “vanity press- i.e., publishing houses which court the vain people who want to see their name in print). These vanity publishing houses do not do justice to the self-publishing industry by allowing poorly written, and poorly edited works to be published. 

However, there are many and varied kinds of self-publishing houses out there that do care what they publish and these companies are slowly eroding the self-publishing stigma. They provide all editing services for an author and want to see a good book getting out into the market. 

The bottom line for authors that do not have a contract with a traditional publishing house is to do their homework and find a self-publishing company that will enhance their writing experience and produce a work that they can be proud of. Self-publishing can be a viable way to get your masterpiece out into the public.