…Self publishing is taking your book, doing the work that a traditional publisher would do, like editing, picking out a book cover, formatting, and publishing it to the various platforms.
Self publishing is good if you like having control, if you’re comfortable on the computer, and if you don’t want to wait for traditional publishing. Or if you’ve had roadblocks because your story doesn’t fit the standard genre, or is too diverse. Self publishing does require a lot of work, determination, and investment; but I enjoy it.
In between Traditional Publishing and Self Publishing are a lot of other options.
You have companies that will help anyone self publish. In other words they’ll do the work of editing, formatting, or more and then you publish the book yourself.
Or you have small press publishing companies that if want your book, they publish your book but they can’t give you a royalty check up front. Instead they pay you as your book sells.
And then there are hybrid publishers. They may ask for some money up front to cover some work of editing and design, but they have professional publishing standards.
And then there are vanity publishers. And these are the ones I want to steer away from. Vanity publishers charge a significant fee to publish your book. They’ll take anyone who comes their way. And will ask you to pay anything up to $10,000 to publish your book. And then they put your book out for a terrible price that no one will want to buy, and they don’t give a fig if you ever sell a book, because they just made all of their money off of you. They will also charge you a terrible price to buy copies of your book, or they might require you buy enough to fill your garage.
I still remember when I was a teenager, finding an advertisement for an anthology looking for a poem. I submitted my poem, and they came back and said they loved it. I was accepted. I just had to buy 10 copies of the book at a ridiculous price and I was in. Thats another example of a vanity publisher. Again, they don’t care if they sell any more books – but they sold 10 copies to every poet who submitted and easily made their money back.
At first I was excited, because yes, I fell for it. But when I realized that I was published by a company that didn’t care about sales and that no one else would ever see that poem, I was bit devastated.
Now I’m okay with it though, because it was a pretty bad poem.
Notes:
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