Have you self published before or are looking at self publishing in the future?

[Jonnie Comet]

Rule 1: Never pay to have your work published. The so-called 'publisher' will regard YOU as their customer (since you paid them) and be perfectly content to keep advertising to you (their customer) all sorts of marketing schemes to 'promote' your book whilst remaining content to not sell (nor even print) the books themselves. (This is why it's called 'vanity publishing'. And why vanity is a sin!) This will preclude Lulu, PublishAmerica and PublishBritain, WaveCloud, Dorrance and many more.

I belong to a small writers' cooperative-- we are authors, scholars, editors, instructors who edit, publish and promote each other's work. We chose CreateSpace, by Amazon (actually my idea!). This scheme automatically gets you top-choice placement in Amazon, Kindle and other programmes. It enables very simple uploading of '-.pdf' content and unlimited updates, revisions, new editions, and so on. It provides you with an author page and plenty of opportunity to create discussion boards and other promotional devices. They pay up to 35% of the list price (up to 70% on Kindle) when most big-name publishers (if you can ever even get accepted by them) pay 15%. It presents you with very good-looking hard-copy (trade paperback) product or Kindle e-texts. And it costs... nothing. Nada. Not a farthing.

The secret to the CS programme is that they (Amazon) view their vast network of customers as their customers. They need your work to sell something in order to make money. They want you to submit something, to enter all the marketing outlets, because this is what they do: sell books. And they get results.

Best of all, the CS/Amazon platform represents an excellent start in marketing, which is really the very toughest part of the whole process. You can send people your Amazon page link whenever you approach them and advertise your book. But make no mistake-- the FACT remains that, whether you are represented by an expensive and exclusive Park Avenue agent, published by a big-name publisher and stocked at Barnes & Noble or just hawking your own wares on the pavement, YOU are still responsible for about 98% of all promotion and marketing of your work. Even the big publishing houses will ignore you, even if they signed you. So why waste the time, effort and money on those other schemes if it's all down to you after all?

More to the point: I receive monthly cheques from my book-sales royalties. It's more than enough to require me to file US tax returns. I'd like to be making a little more than I am now; but, again, that's down to me-- and I'm working on it all the time. I've found that more is more-- I currently have about 60 titles listed on Kindle.

All that said, I cannot stress enough that your finished product, the book you write, has to be truly worthy of any publication. Study others' work to see good examples. Edit the whole thing to within a breath of its life. Beat yourself up over every small error in it-- and fix them all. Accept nothing from yourself but the best. Taking any effort at all to promote a poorly-prepared text is just a waste of your time-- and much else, for it will colour your name in the marketplace as a nitwit who can't write. So write well-- and prepare to do plenty of good, old-fashioned hard labour into the bargain.

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