Self-Publishing

Continued

2. Subsidy presses. These companies may have professional editorial and production staff, and produce a respectable finished book. Some do, some don’t. What makes subsidy presses different from vanity presses is that usually they do exercise editorial discretion and select or reject manuscripts based on their quality. And they may do some legitimate publicity and marketing of the book. But they require the author to pay the production costs. If the book sells well, the author is reimbursed for her costs through her share of the profits. This has been a way for small presses that cater to niche audiences to share the financial risk but produce a reasonably professional book. But an author should investigate the professionalism of any subsidy publisher before signing on. And ideally, money should flow to the author, not in the other direction.   

3. Printers.  A third possibility that has taken on new life is to go directly to a printer and pay all costs. In the past this could be ruinously expensive because job printers would not print in small numbers. Today’s technology is more agile, and the paradigm now is Print on Demand (POD). An author typically delivers a spellchecked electronic file via e-mail or ftp to a printer’s website such as www.lulu.com/ or www.iuniverse.com/  and the file is quickly turned into as many or as few copies as the author wants. This means no more piles of un-sold books in your garage. Additional copies can be printed as sales are made, an economy of scale that combines well with Internet shopping. Prices are very competitive since authors can easily shop around for the best deal. All to the good, but the bottom line is that a POD company makes its money from the author, not from sales of the book, and so has no incentive to ensure that the books ever sell. Although these POD printers do offer editorial and other guidance (for a fee), self-published books can end up having an amateurish look to them. An author is rarely also a professional book designer, type designer, cover artist, or printer. There’s a good chance that the finished product doesn’t look quite right, despite the expense of self-publishing it. And as noted above, it’s hard to get anyone influential to review a self-published book.

POD is a viable method of ensuring that a copy of your book does exist as a book, not just as a huge file on your computer. If a writer’s ambitions are modest, such as wanting to print a family history in limited quantity to hand out at a reunion, POD can be both economical and sensible. But any author who imagines that self-publishing is the best way to make a splash in the publishing world is usually mistaken. Sometimes authors turn to self-publishing out of despair at being rejected, yet it is foolish to believe that every rejection is a mistake. Anyone seriously considering self-publishing for their novel ought to look at the rejection letters they have received first, before spending any money on printing something that professionals have deemed below standard. And of course the ideal is to get your book published using other people’s expertise and money.

Pages: 1 2