Publishing Methods

As the administrator of an online writers forum and the editor of a Small Press publishing house, question I see time and time again is: Is *name of business here* a self-publisher, vanity press, or traditional publisher? How do I tell the difference?

While there are many branches of the publishing tree, these three are the big limbs, from which all the branches shoot off. POD-People can fall under any of those three, while The Big Five are considered traditional.

#1.) Self-Publishers
#2.) Vanity Press Publishers
#3.) Traditional Publishers

This lens is here to help you know how to tell them apart.

I hope this helps.

~~EK

NOTE: As of October 25, 2007 this lens is a member of Squidoo's Top 100 Best Lenses!

A writer, simply put is one who writes. Everyone who writes on a regular basis is considered a writer whether or not they have ever been published.

Writers can mean those who write for newspapers or those who write fiction, those who write for medical journals, or those who write TV sitcom scripts. They all write. They all get Writer's Block. If I was to start detailing all of them, I'd have to write an encyclopedia on the subject, so, for the sake of simplicity, in this article, we will assume that a writer is one who writes fiction in novel or short story format. Now, back to the question: What is a writer?

A writer is someone who writes, probably every day or nearly so. Usually they feel compelled to write, as though they have no control over it. It is as though they will die if they cannot write something down. Their every fiber burns with the sensation, the uncontrollable passion, that they must put words to paper in order to survive. They feel every emotion their characters feel: the love, the pain, the horror, the fear, the anxiety, and the lust for adventure. They not only feel their characters, they become their characters. Everything in life sparks a new story idea. They awake at night from their sleep to jot down in notebooks. They pull their car off the road to write down ideas on the edges of maps. They are obsessed with the fever that is coming known as writing. That is a writer.

An author however, is generally perceived as a writer who has been published. For some writers, it is enough that they write, publishing their work is not their goal. For most writers, however, the goal is to become a published author. The trick is being published. You have many options. Which one should you choose? Let's look at your options:

A self publisher, is an author who gets a business license, buys the ISBN #s, hires a printing press (print shop/printer) to print the books, than sells the books themselves. The author keeps 100% of the profits, because no one pays royalties; you keep 100% of the copyright (which btw, does not cost a penny). You market the book and distribute the book yourself through local bookstores, a personal Website, your blog, and on online bookstores such as Amazon.com.

Self-Publishing gets it's name from the fact that the author does everything themselves.

The author gets their book printed up in two common ways:

1) They hire a local or online print shop to print up the book all at once. Most printers require a 5,000-copy minimum, with cash up front, though it is common, for printers to require a minimum of 20,000 copies. Printing up your books in this manner, unfortunately requires the author to have a very large sum of money all at once. If you choose this method, be sure you have taken into account the cost of printing the book, which for most writers is rarely under $30,000 and often more than $200,000, and this money has to be paid to the printer BEFORE they will print up your book.

2.) The other method is to hire a print-on-demand printer. These may or may-not ask for money up front, depending on how they run their business. To find out more about print-on-demand, simply scroll down to the POD section of this article.

It should be noted, that regardless of the method you use to have your book printed, you are the publisher. The company that printed your book up, is just a printer and only a printer, never are they considered the publisher.

Only you can answer that question. There are hundreds of reasons to self publish your book. Likewise there are hundreds of reasons NOT to self publish your book.

I self publish, and people always are asking me if I recommend it to others, and you know what? They get shocked when I don't! Why? Well, for me, self publishing works, because I write in a very tiny niche, for which there is almost zero interest and is next to impossible to find a publisher for, simply because my niche is "not marketable enough". I write chap-books (too long for a short story, too short to be a novel), short story anthologies, plays, and niched non-fiction. So, for me it works because the sales market is so small, that I'm able to personally market to pretty much every one interested in the niche. It is pointless for me to even attempt to traditionally publish my stuff, because there simply is not enough demand to warrant it being mass produced.

However, if I was going to write something that would cover a wide audience, I'd send it out to traditional publishers, because they are better equipped to reach the mass market.

Of course the other thing is, I don't as a general rule write novels either. There is a huge world of difference from self-pubbing plays, anthologies, and small niche non-fiction books, and trying to self publish a mass marketable fiction novel. Self-pubbing fiction is very hard to do and not recommended (by me) to anyone seeking a wide readership.

As a general rule, self publish only if you are writing one of the following:

a short story anthology
a book of poems
a technical journal (which will only be read by a 100 or so college professors)
a non-fiction niche market (alien abductions interviews; sky-diving how tos; etc.)
a local history book or local travel guide
a play
a memoir
a church/business/family cookbook

The reason for sticking only with these types of books, is because these are not going to sell many copies to begin with, thus traditional publishers won't bother wasting their time on them. They'll sell 10 to 100 copies per year at best, even with a traditional publisher's best marketing team promoting it, and because of this, they are best suited to small press or self publishing instead.

So, if your book does not fall into one of those categories, than avoid self publishing it.

I do recommend, however, that you self publish a book, before you go on to anything else. It doesn't have to be anything much, maybe just a 30 page book of poems which you will only hand out to your cousins at the next family reunion, and try to sell a few copies of off of your MySpace page. The reason I recommend this, is, because it gives you a first hand "feel" of the actual publishing process and will help you to better understand the inner workings of what a publisher does to get your book, typeset, printed, and marketed. Think of this "first book" as a sort of test run learning exercise to see if you really want to self publish your other books later on, and not as a book that will make you rich and famous.

Remember, when you self publish, you are very unlikely to ever become either rich or famous, and you will have an extremely difficult time traditionally publishing later on, due to the "invisible rift" that causes many editors to not look kindly on any author who ever self-published a book, regardless of their reason for doing so.

(IMPORTANT: Never "test run" a book which you plan to "later" traditionally publish, because once you've self published it, traditional publishing houses won't republish it. It is very hard to convince them that they should REPRINT your book, if you didn't sell thousands of copies within the first few weeks of it's self published run!)

Many self-publishers are also first-time publishers with little or no knowledge of the laws regarding copyrights, ISBN, EAN, and other such things. All those online sites can confuse those new to publishing. Problem is, many sites offering, "advise" to new self-publishers are run by scam artists seeking to make a quick profit and leave you hanging. How can you avoid being caught in their snares?

1.) NEVER pay money to buy a copyright! If you wrote the book, you own the copyright.

2.) NEVER buy an ISBN from anyone other than ISBN.org themselves! They are the ONLY ones who can assign your book an ISBN.

Below are direct links to both of these government sites, as well as the EAN site, and the BISGI:

A vanity press is a print shop/printer/printing press, which does all the layout, designing, font setup, cover design, and printing for you. Most will say that they are the publisher and not you, even though they ask you to pay to have the books printed.

Vanity press publishing is very similar to self-publishing. It differs in that it usually costs a lot more, and more often than not, for a poor quality item. It gets it's name from the fact that it is most often used by authors who have had their manuscripts denied by several traditional publishers. These authors generally only want to see their name in print, and usually have enough cash laying around to pay to get a lot of copies of a poorly written manuscript printed up by a publisher who rarely pays royalties. In other words, a Vanity Publisher is a publisher who is paid by the author to publish a book.

Vanity publishing has been around for over a hundred years, and some of the world's great classic authors used this method. It was very common during the late 1800's and early 1900's and most of the books we consider the great classics of that period, were published via vanity press methods. Vanity publishing has had a long and successful history and many author prefer it to other publishing methods.

Unlike traditional publishers, vanity publishers usually ask you to pay money for them to edit your manuscript. They also often charge you extra if you want a color cover. In some cases, if you don't pay the extra you end up with a blank colored paper cover with black ink, so be sure to find out what they offer before you agree to pay for their services.

Some Vanity Presses offer to sell your books through their home page Website. A few offer to list it on Amazon.com for a fee. More often though, it is up to the author to do the marketing for the book, so be sure you find out what services they do when it comes to marketing your book and getting it in front of customers.

Over the years, literally thousands of Vanity Press operations have come and gone... often disappearing with tens of thousands of dollars from the author, who never sees their book. In the early 1990's, there was an alarming rise in scam artists poising as Vanity Press Publisher, given rise to a massive breakdown in author trust in any small-press publishing house. Luckily, this scam seems to have died down, and Vanity Press publishers are once again what they were originally: A publisher who is paid by the author to publish a book.

Do beware of the telltale signs that the vanity publisher is a fraud artist and not a real vanity publisher: The fraud ones usually charge you for such things as "the right to keep your copyright", or to put an ISBN # on your book.

A common trick the scammers use is to promise to pays you a percentage (royalty), after you first pay them for the books. The royalty they pay, though it may sound high at first, is actually very low. You don't see that money until after they have deducted what you "owe them" for printing the books. In short, they make money, while you go broke, and you may or may not get to keep the rights to your book, depending on how much money you paid to buy your own rights back from them.

The scam artist vanity publishers are illegal, if you think you have run up against one, be sure to report them to the B.B.B.

One of the most common of all Vanity Press scams is what is commonly referred to as "The Anthology Scam". Sadly, these scams are often promoted to teens and young adults by none other than their English teachers! The problem here is that many English teachers are just that: teachers. They teach you how to write, but they know nothing of the publishing field and rarely are published themselves. Personally, I think it would be best is all English teachers were required to be published authors, so that they would know better than to recommend these no good scams to their students, but alas, nothing in life is perfect. But, let's take a look at these scams.

There are three types of anthology scams out there: Poem Contests, Short Story Contests, and Photography Contests. Only two of these are important for writers to be aware of, but all three run under the same basic principles.

Usually you will hear about them via a classified ad. One common place to see them is in the ever popular magazine for teenage girls: Seventeen. Go to the store, pick up a copy of Seventeen magazine, flip to the back and it won't take you long to find it: an ad proclaiming to be holding a short story, poetry, or photography contest. They tell you to hurry up and send in your entry, that it'll be considered by professionals and if you win, yours will be published in their next upcoming anthology.

What they do not tell you is this: there are NO LOSERS to this contest! EVERYONE who submits their poem or short story, will be published in the anthology. There are no editors rejecting manuscripts, and oddly, though they tell you this is a contest, there is NO PRIZE!

So you'll get published in their anthology. Well, whoop-dee-do! So will every one else who entered. Now comes the crucial point. Who will read the anthology? No body. Why? Well, send in a poem, and you'll find out why about 6 months later, when you receive a post card in the mail, telling you that the anthology is now in print, but that you can only buy it "direct from the publisher". They'll give you some line about how it's "so exclusive" that they can't offer it up to local bookstores, and "not even Amazon" is being allowed to sell it. They'll glamorize the exclusiveness of this book several times, telling you how great and wonderful it is to be part of this "limited time offer" to "buy the book" during it's "only print run". At the bottom of the post card is a place to add your credit card information, followed by "a one time offer" to buy this anthology "at the low half price of just $99.95".

I pity these poor would be poets and story writers who fall for this. They are so taken in by these glamorous claims and their desire to see their work in print, that they quickly dish out the $99.95 cover price. When they get the book, they find that it's printed on shoddy newsprint, in an 8pt font which can't even be read by someone with 20/20 vision AND a magnifying glass.

One thing writers need to keep in mind here: there are very few REAL publishers who actually publish short story anthologies, and when they do, it is a single author anthology, which compiles many years' worth of short stories previously published in magazine (for example: Stephen King or Kieth Laumer). The author has to be pretty damn famous to begin with, for any publisher to even consider publishing a short story anthology.

Short story anthologies are a hard sell, and 90% of the publishers who produce them, are scams which make money by selling copies of the anthologies to the authors and their families. These books never see mass production, never go on store shelves, and are not even listed on Amazon! If you come across a request for poems or short stories for the inclusion in an anthology, I seriously recommend you do a background check of this publisher.

There are some anthology publishers out there (the Chicken Soup series, probably being the most popular) and if you can find one, than go ahead and send in your work. Just remember when it comes to anthologies, this is an area where writing scams are the most rampant, so tread lightly, and know what to look for, and if it starts looking like a scam, than walk away.

Some anthology scams are hard to tell from real publishers. After you submit your short story they will send you a letter asking for "edit requests." Watch out for these sly devils! These scam artists know that you are not going to fall for a contest that "accepts everything" so they have devised a plan to make their scam "seem real".

Here are three real "edit requests" one such scam sent to one of it's contestants:

---- The story setup is very linear - could you start in media res and flash back?

---- Some of your characters are two-dimensional.

---- Could one of your supporting characters have a treacherous secret mission? Just a possibility.

I do question one of the requests they have listed: "start with a flashback". uhm . . . is this not sending up red flags to any one else? Starting a story with a flash back is one of those major biggie no-nos that publishers use as a reason for rejecting a story. It is very difficult to find a publisher who is actively promoting let alone requesting, that stories start with a flash back. Most, readily cut flashbacks, beginning, middle or otherwise.

Secondly, if they think your characters are "two dimensional" than why did they accept your story? In my experience if the characters are perceived as two-dimensional, the publisher will not even consider the story at all. This is a huge issue for most publishers, one that they hire people to write articles about, one that editors rant on their blogs about, one that agents get all huffy about. It's a really big issue. A MAJOR big issue, and one that is usually really hard to change, due to the fact that the author tends to have great difficulty in changing a character once they have created it. As a general rule, editors actively seek out three-dimensional characters, and than request story/plot changes. An editor will receive several thousand manuscripts each day, and 90% of those have two dimensional characters, and are instantly rejected.

The last request is typical of what a real publisher would ask of you. Most real edit requests coming from real editors of real publishing houses, will consist of grammar changes for clarity, style changes for saleability, the cutting of flashbacks to maintain ease of story flow, and plot changes to maintain reader interest. Yes, change requests are normal. But the first two change requests are NOT normal requests you would see coming from a real publisher.

The best way to avoid the scams, is to get to know as much as you can about the publishing business. While you can't always avoid all scams, you can go a long way to avoiing most scams.

As a general rule, real publishers DO NOT take out classified ads. If you saw it in a classified ad, than you can bet it's a scam. Real publishers don't need to take out classified ads because their books are available on bookstore shelves, and any author wanting to send them a manuscript, only has to open to the copyright page to find the publisher's address.

A traditional publisher hires editors who read your MS, which you send to them. They receive thousands of MSs each week. It may take up to 2 years before they get around to reading yours. After they read it, they either reject it or accept it. If they accept it, you well be sent a contact (and often with a recommendation that you go over the contract with your literary agent/lawyer before you sign it). Once you sign the contract and send it back, than the publisher's lawyer checks it to be certain that all is in order (and done legally). The publisher is given a "temporary copyright" allowing them to print and distribute your book to the public. In most cases, you still own the copyright, but while the book is in print from the publisher, you can't do anything with it until it goes out of print.

They hire an editor/typesetter to type set and spell check your MS. Cuts and additions are not unusual at this point. You the author have no control over this, and it is not unusual for an author to read the finished book and ask: "When the hell did I write this?" or "Where is that chapter I wrote on....?" Next they hire an artist to create the cover art. You the author has no control over this either. Finally, they distribute the book to bookstores worldwide. You never own them a cent. They pay you royalties. Some also pay with advances. Most do 100% of the marketing and promotion, as well. You the author are free to sit back and relax, while the publisher does the work, leaving you with plenty of time to write your next book. Something Self-published and Vanity Press authors can only dream of, while they are rushing about writing press releases, and hunting down places to sell their book.

Once you jump into the publishing race, a term you'll start to hear is "The Big Five". You hear warnings, not to even attempt to submit to The Big Five, unless you have already published three or4 books and have a high-fee agent. You'll hear others say that it was one of The Big Five who gave them their first big break. On one hand authors will sing their praises, while on the other hand, authors tell the worst horror tales of their evil corrupt editors. What's a beginning writer to do? Whom should you believe? The answer, believe all of them, until you have a good reason to believe otherwise. Why?

Well, when it comes to publishing, about 90% of the publishing houses classify as Small Press. Small Press simply means that they are a Traditional Publisher, who pays author royalties, but they publish less than 100 titles per year. Vast majorities of Small Presses publish less than 10 titles per year. Many Small Presses only publish titles within their "niche market". Some publish only cookbooks, others publish only law books, some only publish books about their local history, some publish only horror, others publish only books written by women over 50, and so on and so forth.

Small Press is by far the easiest to be published by, esp. for the first time author. However, the pay is often very low, advances are rare, and payments may even be a "one-time-fee", such as $1,000 payment regardless of how many books are sold. While payment is low, many authors prefer Small Press, because they often keep the book in print for many years, and do more to promote the book than larger publishing houses do.

Large Press Publishing Houses are what most authors strive for. Higher payouts, a name that most people have heard of, and usually bigger sales. Most pay an advance (usually less than $5,000), and 4% - 12% royalty. They usually have a catalog and keep titles in print less than 2 years.

The Big Five are the mega giants, whom nearly everyone in the world knows their name, and whom most every author sends their manuscripts to, regardless of how many other places they are also sending it. They pay in large advances and higher royalties, but most titles go out of print in just 6 months or less and usually the author has to sing away reprint rights, meaning the book can never be reprinted by anyone else.

The Big Five: They are the five giants of the publishing world, known for gobbling up Small Presses and spitting them out under a new name. Sometimes they even take turns buying out each other, and then they become The Big Four or The Big Three. But who are they? What are they? Why should you try to be published by them?

They are not actually five publishing houses, but the way they buy and sell each other out, usually there are five big names being thrown around at any given time, so the term "The Big Five" is just easier for most authors and editors to say.

But who are they and why should you try to be published by them? I can answer that in one word, well, two: Harry Potter.

Who reading this article has a copy of Harry Potter near by? Pick it up; look at the name of the publishing house. What does it say? Scholastic Books. Yep, Scholastic Books is one of The Big Five, possibly the biggest of the big house publishers out there. If Harry Potter hadn't been picked up by Scholastic Books, chances are, that no one would ever heard of it at all. Why? Because Scholastic Books has nearly unlimited finances and a marketing team that can literally make or break a book.

Random House. Dell. Penguin. Signet. Bantam. DoubleDay. TOR. Who hasn't at least heard of Harlequin Books? These guys are not only big press, they are monster-sized huge press. Because they are so big, unfortunately, your chances of getting your foot in the door are rather slim and requires that you hire the best agent money can buy. Why? Because these huge publishing houses, shred anything that comes their way that was not sent to them by an agent. It won't do you any good to explain why you don't have an agent in your cover letter, because they will never even open the envelope. Each of these publishers get an average of 15,000 manuscript submissions each week, many of which they never open. The secret to being published by one of The Big Five, is to go out there and make a name for yourself, write a best seller, hire a high profile agent, and than do what your agent tells you to do.

Self-publishing is you starting your own business (a publishing house) and earning an income.

Vanity press is you doing a lot of hard work, getting your book printed, and possibly being scammed out of the money that should be yours, while they get rich and leave you with nothing, unless of course you can sift through the scams and find one that is not a scam.

Traditional publishing is you hiring a business to do the work for you and you both earn an income.

There is a common change that is overtaking thousands of authors all over the world. They no longer send their manuscripts in for consideration to be published. They are writing books faster than ever releasing two or three books a year instead of one every 2 or 3 years. This new mutated breed of authors are no longer authors as we know them... they are: The Pod-People!

The Pod People have invaded the earth. Editors run away screaming in terror. Publishers shake their angry fists vowing revenge, and agents devise plots to put an end to this newfound reign of the pod people. Yet, in the daily lives of the average civilian, people have no idea of this invasion that has taken the publishing world by storm, uprooting every tradition that traditional publishers hold dear.

But who are these Pod-People and what have they done? They are authors who have turned their backs on traditional publishing and set out to self-publish. Not only do they self-publish, but also they do it using the Print-on-Demand method.

Print on Demand or POD for short is quite simple: the book is stored on a computer hard-drive and when a customer wants to buy it, the printer prints up, one single solitary copy. Just one. Not 10,000, not 1,000, not 100, not even 10... just one single copy, custom printed and bound just for you. This environmentally friendly method saves trees by not having tens of thousands of copies stored away in a warehouse not being sold. This method uses small sheets of paper, not giant rolls with lots of scrap-waste, also helping to save trees. There is no longer the need to store 2,000 unsold copies of your book in your basement. And best of all, your book NEVER goes out of print, it's always there, always available at any given moment, and ten, twenty, fifty years from now, it'll still be in print whenever a customer asks to buy one!

The answer to that is they do both. They offer two services: one is free and the other you have to pay for.

For their free service, they are a print shop, which you, the author and publisher hires to print up copies of your book. In this instance, you are the publisher. You are self-publishing a book. LuLu is simply the printer.

For their paid services they act as the publisher, provide an ISBN#, print their name in the book as the publisher of the book, and market your book for you on Amazon.com. In this case, they are the publisher.

In both cases, you, the author, keep all copyrights, and all profits. In addition, in both cases you never pay the costs of having your book printed. LuLu.com is paid by the customers who buy your books. LuLu.com takes a commission off the cover price of the book, which varies depending on if it's a hardcover or paperback; has b&w text or color pictures; is 4" x 6" or 8" x 12". For most books, they get $4 - $7 per book. You the author get to pick your own commission. How? LuLu's commission is automatically in the cover price; your commission is determined by how much you decide to sell the book for.

Example:

Let's say that for the book you have chosen, LuLu takes a $4 commission, yet you decide to sell the book for a cover price of $9.95. When a customer buys the book, LuLu takes their $4 and you get the $5.95 extra.

If you self-publish via POD than you have printed up this book's "first edition" and when you finally find an agent and the agent finally finds you a traditional publisher, you will only be able to offer "second edition" (also known as "reprint") rights. As a general rule, unless the book as sold over 10,000 copies a publisher will not buy second rights.

The average book sells just 500 copies. (at the average 4% royalty of wholesale price that averages out to : $1,000 - $1,500 total pay for you the author for the entire life of the book)

Rarely does a first book make over $2,000 for it's author.

The average life of a book is 3 months. (meaning the publisher pulls it off the shelves and stops selling it just 3 months after it went to print)

In order to keep you book in print past those 3 months it must become a "bestseller".

In order to become a bestseller, you must sell an astronomical total of 10,000 copies in that 3 months time.

Most publishers DO NOT promote your book. The books that become bestsellers, had an author that put a lot of their time and money into marketing the book themselves. Most books, regardless of publisher, sell only as many books as THE AUTHOR promotes. This is true wither you publish via Scholastic Books (with it's 100 new titles each month, including Harry Potter) or Twighlight Manor Press and it's 10 books every other year.

Basically all a book publisher does is list your book in their catalog and hope that book stores choose to stock it on their shelves.

Books (such as Harry Potter -- traditional published--- and Eragon ---self-published---) get famous, not from the publisher's promotion, but from THE AUTHOR'S having gone out there and told everyone under the sun how great their book was and paying large amounts of their own money (we are talking hundreds of thousands of dollars of the author's private pocket money, money they already had BEFORE book's release, in the case of such authors J.K.Rowlings, Palini, Steven King, etc.) for advertising in such newspapers as The New York Times. Eragon, a self published book, became an over night best seller because of a single one day full page ad in The New York Times, that cost Palini's parents over $14,000! Within a few weeks he had big name book publishers begging to sell the reprint editions.

So you see. What you the author are willing (or can afford) to pay for a marketing campaign, is going to determine how many book you sell, not who you choose for a publisher. Keep in mind that when you see ads for book, either in newspapers or on tv, those ads were paid for by the author him-herself, NOT the publisher.

Most writers, once hit in the face with the harsh reality of these facts, never attempt to write a second book, which is why there are so many one book authors out there.

On the other hand a self-published POD book never goes out of print and you earn 100% of the profits off the retail price.

If you are willing to promote and market your book hard enough, you'll make more money in the long run by self-publishing, because you can keep selling your book for the next 10 or 20 years.

If you want to do both POD self publish AND traditional publish, than you MUST do it the other way around. Traditional publish first and POD later.

Your best bet is to hold off on the POD right now, and focus on finding that agent. Let the traditional publisher buy the first edition rights, get paid your advance and your royalties, let them sell the first edition, than next year after the book has gone out of print, you bring it back out as a POD reprint and continue to sell it for the rest of your life. (A lot of authors do this and after writing 4 or 5 books, they have a pretty steady monthly income coming in.)

I hope this helps.

You've reached the end of this lens and you now have a better idea of the different roads you can take to get your book published. Now the question is, which of those roads should you choose?

I'd recommend that regardless of which you choose to do, you should at least self-publish one book when you are starting out. Why? Because there is no better, way to learn what it takes to bring a book to your readers. By self-publishing a book, you the author, can't just stop after writing the script. When you self publish, there is no editor for you to send the MS to. You are the editor. YOU must strive to up your editing skills and edit the MS yourself. This is not only a great learning experience, but it well help you to be less critical of editors you may deal with in the future.

After editing the book, you must than track down a printer to print up copies of your book. This like-wise is a good learning experience for beginning writers. It helps you to understand the difficulty that publishing houses have to deal with when getting your book into print: typesetting, cover design, layout, format, getting an ISBN, etc. etc. etc. It'll do wonders to open your eyes to the reason it takes 2 to 3 years for a publisher to get your book in stores.

Lastly, you must do all the marketing and research and advertising yourself. You must track down dealers and distributors. You must contact bookstores and place adds in newspapers. Once you have put in time and money into selling your self-published book, you'll have a greater understanding of the work that your publisher puts in.

In the end, there are two advantages to self-publishing your first book:

#1.) You won't head to a publishing house all high and mighty and demanding to see your book on shelves next week. Yes, many first time authors approach publishers and editors with such demands, in fact, 9 times out of 10 a new write comes in, acting like they a the greatest thing since Stephen King or J.K.Rowlings, and they often say as much. They seem to think that publishers just wave a magic wand and voila, a book suddenly appears. By self-publishing their first book, they get knocked off their high horse and get to see the publishing world for what it really is: a lot of hard work, time, and money, with very little return.

#2.) Secondly, by having self-published your first book, you now know how to do it again, and do it better next time. Why is this important? Because less than 1% of all manuscripts that are sent to publishers, well ever get published. Nearly all MS are rejected, tossed out, or mailed back unopened. If you should find that you are one of the millions of authors who publishers reject, you can always say: "I did it before, I can do it again!" That way you have something to fall back on if your next greatest hit, gets ignored by the publishing houses.

The content of this lens was created by Wendy C. Allen compiled from posts on EK's Star Log, the official blog of author and artist Wendy C. Allen, a.k.a. EelKat. Reprinted here on Squidoo with permission.

EK's Star Log Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 2005-2007. Star Log, Space Dock 13, The Twighlight Manor Press, Moonsnails, Buried Treasure, Copper Cockeral, and Xavier's Nest Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 2005-2007. Twighlight Manor, EelKat, White Rock Asylum, Planet Ptarmagin, Crystonite Chronicles, Etiole, Sir Roderic, The Swanzen Family, and all other related characters, info, writings, names, images, and content Copyright © Wendy C. Allen 1978-2007.

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