Lingua Translations

There are 4 ways that you can publish a book:

1. Commercial Book Publishing

2. Self Publishing

3. Subsidy Publishing

4. Ebook Publishing

1. Commercial Book Publishing – This is the main way that authors have been getting published and can be very challenging. While there are thousands of publishing houses, today there are more writers than ever before.

A publishing house is a business and like all businesses they have a goal to create profits in an efficient manner. It is unlikely that you will be able to make contact with a publishing house if you don’t have a good literary agent.

Surveys show that only 1 out 400 applicants are accepted by literary agents for representation. The majority of literary agents prefer to take on clients that have previously been published.

To get published with a publishing house will take a combination of talent, timing and luck. You can be an very talented writer and have a wonderful book but if the publishing house just finished publishing a book that is similar to yours you may not be accepted – or if this is a “red hot market” then you may be lucky.

For these reasons it is important to do research and see what are the trends and what people are buying. An excellent resource for this type of information is Amazon’s Bestseller section.

Publishing is an extremely competitive business. There are three main ways to go about getting your manuscript published; through an agent, directly through a publishing company, or by taking the increasingly popular self-publishing option.

The best way to improve your chances of getting your book published by a traditional publisher is to find an agent who will ‘take you under their wing’ and add you to their list of clients. Publishing companies very rarely read or pay any attention to unsolicited manuscripts (i.e. a manuscript submitted by an author NOT by an agent). Therefore, you are in a much more likely to get your manuscript published if you have an agent.

Unfortunately, getting an agent to agree to take you on as a client is almost as hard as it is to get a publisher to read your work. Agents give your work approximately 20 seconds of time before making a decision to either pursue you or reject you.., and 90-99% get rejected. It is tough!

So getting an agent…

- There are hundreds of Literary Agents in the UK. You need to target those agencies that handle the kind of writing that you do. So, get a copy of the ‘Writers Market UK 2008’, or the ‘Writers and Artists Yearbook 2008’. These list literary agents, telling you what genre of writing each agency deals with.

- You can contact the Association of Author’s Agents (www.agentsassoc.co.uk) or the Society of Authors (www.societyofauthors.net) who should be able to point you in the right direction, and provide a list of suggested agencies that would suit your novel.