Lingua Translations

Self publishing your own book is one of the publishing industry’s dirty little secrets. Mainstream publishers, editors, and authors easily dismiss self publishing and print on demand publishing as a rip-off for both the writer and reader. After all, if the writer was a real writer then they could find a real publisher, right? That has been the conventional wisdom for a long time but in today’s modern, technological society that conventional wisdom does not always hold true. So who should consider self publishing?

Real writers should consider self publishing. Published authors often find themselves placed in a prison of their own making. Once they have achieved even modest success in a specific niche it is often hard to break out of that niche and publish something different. However self publishing gives authors control over their own writing so they can change direction or genre if they choose. Published authors who have taken some time off from their writing often find it just as hard to return as it was to break in initially. They can often easily parlay their experience and audience into a successful self publishing career. Finally, writers who have an idea that does not fit neatly into one of the major publishing houses slots may find self publishing their only alternative. Just because it doesn’t fit into a neat slot doesn’t mean your book doesn’t have great potential — think about Diana Gabaldon and J.K. Rowling.

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.

Book publishing templates are cover templates that are generally used by self publishing companies. Most mainstream publishers tend to use different cover designs for every book that they publish, but that is not to say that they won”t have generalized templates for certain genres. Mysteries and romances are subjects that respond well to the template form as this makes it easier for genre aficionado to pick out the books they want to read from a shelf full of assorted titles. People don”t seem to be put off by the fact that some publishing houses do work with book publishing templates so long as their work is out in the public domain.

While templates used to be something that only regular publishers and self publishing companies worked with, there is now a plethora of websites offering downloadable book publishing templates. If you are self publishing then there are now websites aimed specifically at the self publisher; these sites provide a huge choice of cover designs and it is relatively easy to find something that suits your particular genre or niche – a major consideration when you are publishing something you hope will be popular.

Most book publishing templates are designed to work with manuscripts that have already been converted to PDF format, although it is possible to load your template and then send the whole thing to PDF. There is an increasing tendency for authors who may have had their manuscript rejected by mainstream publishing houses to go the self-publishing route.

Self publishing offers writers specially not very famous ones; such as myself a chance to get their work published by using their own money, which in essence comes down to somebody paying a publisher to publish his or her book. This creating a situation in which the publisher is left with little if any choice weather or not to publish the books they are paid to do so regardless of their quality of perhaps lack of which. All of this being in sharp contrast to before where, it was the publisher who decided which books got published or not and not always based on any real criteria, other then personal taste or just a premonition of which books would or perhaps would not sell.

Of course publishing a book, is for the most part very expensive, as it requires or at least it used to; typesetting and for several thousands of copies of the book in question to be printed with absolutely no guarantee that any were going to sell. This because the cost of printing was so high that it really did not pay to print any less then a certain number, as the cost of printing for instance one hundred copies was almost the same as printing 2000.