A lot of fictional writers always have the one question on their minds, Self Publish? Traditional Publish? Now rught off the bat if you think you have a super seller then go for Traditional Publish, now a Super seller isn't a book that's necessarily great, it just needs to be able to sell well, that's all the publishing companies want, so if you write about vampires, then you have bumped your likely hood of being accepted even higher! But Vampires are lame, so what happens when you write a story but don't now where to go from there?
Self Publish! Why? Because when you self publish you have full control and authority of creative control. You can always go to Traditional Publishing later if you need to. when you self Publish your book will most likely never be on store shelves, but you still have online retailers like Lulu.com and Amazon.com Barns and Nobles and Borders....
Lulu is an easy self publishing company that is truly simple, and the best part is if you don't have enough money to print millions of copies of your book that's fine because for the super cheap price you can digital publish your book through Lulu to the iBook storem Kindle or other online Ebook stores!
Self publishing is easy and you get to keep about 80% of the profits, so why not? Or at least Start as a self publisher when you publish your first book and if you get good reviews then go ahead and try Traditional Publishing!
...You really have nothing to lose.... besides your self esteem if it doesn't sell well....
Also always make sure you Copyright your book and if you really want to be good buy and ISBN, Lulu offers free ISBN's but if you get your own you will be your own publisher and Lulu and other sites will only take a limited portion from the profits. ISBN is the international bar code number on you book, it allows your book to be "official" so have fun writing!
Another nice Post. However, I would say that it depends on what the author wants to do more than the subject as to whether self-publish or not. For example, I could write about vampires, but I like to do my own cover designs, which traditional publishing probably will not let you do. I also want digital rights, so I can distribute ebooks of my books freely, which may or may not be possible under traditional publishing.
ReplyDeleteI liked my experience with Lulu. There were a few problems with them rendering my manuscript as a PDF, so I decided to create the PDF of my second book myself.
For those considering Lulu, They paid me every cent that I asked to be paid in revenue.
The main downside to self-publishing is that you need to proofread it and edit it yourself. Luckily, I already have a proofreader, so I only need to make the edits.
For both traditional publishing and Self-publishing, you should be ready to do all the promoting yourself, as you will not sell well, unless you are famous or meet some other special condition.
If you only want to distribute digitally, I really recommend you make the digital versions yourself, then upload them to Lulu or wherever, especially if you plan to use the epub format, which is the format used for the iBooks store.