For writers only. This is a long read, but it will be worth it.

Writers, Writers, Writers.  Before you read the information below let me pass on a few tips of caution. Yes I know you have worked very hard creating the next great novel. Haven't we all? My first and most important rule, "Don't get emotional about your masterpiece." Sure you should love it and want to work even harder to promote it, but that leaves you seceptable to bad guys lurking out there that pray on people who do. One of the worst offenders out there are the 'Nice People' who sell books on how to 'Self Publish'. I know they give you a path to follow at the start, but they also give you advice on how to promote your book. Take the book Seller that tells you to send out 150 or 200 books to every reviewer you can find. They usually give you a few dozen names to start with. Many of the addresses are incorrect or the contact person is no longer with the company. Let me tell you what will happen to about 99 and 3/4 percent of your review books. They will be opened be some high-school kid and stacked in a pile without ever having a reviewer look at the contentions. They will be boxed up and sent to a 'local book store' who will give the reviewer about $5.00 dollars on a $26.95 retail novel. The 'book store' will offer the book either on-line or in the store at half price, about $13.50. Before your beloved novel has a chance to 'catch on' they have cheapened the value of your book and took away one of your future customers. And you paid for it to the tone of about $6.00 to $8.00 shipping included. How does that make you feel about your first born written creation. It doesn't matter how good your book is. We have all read enough trash in your day that has sold tens of thousands of copies and wondered why does this book sell so well? They got lucky or their aunt owns a publishing company. If no one reads your book how can it sell? No matter how good it is. It is as simple as that. So what do you do? Give the whole project to a publisher and let them worry about the details. Oh, they will, as soon as you pay the $12,000 to $18,000 bill up front. When all the smoke and mirrors clears that comes to somewhere between $15,000.00 and $25,000.00 depending on the book and how gullible you are. Lets say you went for the whole package. The printing, binding, editing, and marketing exposure. 'Marking Exposure' that's a nice name for; "We will put you on the web along with a few hundred other books we sell. We will expose you to our extensive client list, I think its up to 5000 possible buyers now. And lastly we will give you a hundred books  that you can sell or give to your friends as an ego trip."  OK, you took the hook. Here is what you will most likely receive for your hard earned cash.

1) About 800 to 2000 printings ( these may not actually be printed until the book sells). 
2) Marketing exposure. 
3) Cover design. 
4) Binding  
5) Editing
6) A few hundred copies to sell or give away. 
7) About 6% royalty on the cost of the book not the retail price. Say it cost $13.00 to produce that's $0.78 folks. You have to sell a lot of your books to pay yourself back $20,000.00. By my calculations about 25,641 books and you have just broke even. If you sell that many books I want your autograph.   One more thing about the good guy publishers, they get 50% of all subsides. If your book amazingly sells 25,000 books, a television producer or Hollywood mogul my come a knocking at your door. The publisher gets 50% of what they offer you. Nice. The publisher also may keep the rights to your book for 2 years or more. Let me repeat 'two years or more'. Your book your blood sweat and tears and they own it until it has little or no salability left. This is the boiler plate package I got when I went to two dozen known publishers. The same attorney must have written all of the contracts.

So that in mind we are back where we started. Self publishing. For somewhere between $6,000.00 and $12,000.00 you can have a book printed and ready for sale if you do all the work like I did. I started by writing 'Deep Quest The Entry' in MS Word and had two retired school-teacher Nuns edit the book. Good thing they watched a lot of prime time television. They were only a little shocked. They asked questions like "What does this mean?". Then I asked eight people I admire to please read my book and pleaded for honest feed back. Boy, some friends are really honest. I did my first rewrite. I asked another 6 friends to read the book. If this review didn't fly I was running out of friends. I did another rewrite. Next I laid out the book in Adobe PageMaker so it would be presentable to a printer and the last of the people I knew who could read. After another year and four more rewrites I felt had I moved up to a much higher level of confidence. I was now at 47% confident. I took a single frame from a HI 8 video tape that I shot of a Russian Destroyer sitting at a depth of 100 feet underwater. I cranked up my Adobe Illustrator and made my cover.
Wow, learning all that software was harder than writing the book.

Finally, I put the finished book on a CD and gave it to a 'printer of some note', who screwed up the time table for delivery by 10 weeks. First they sent the proofs to the wrong address. A neighbor sat on the proofs for 12 days while I lost more hair worrying about getting my book to market at the most favorable time. Unknown to me, my neighbor was going to run the proofs over, but just didn't get the time. Meanwhile the 'well known printer' thinking that 'all is well' went on to the next pig--- ah' writer person and forget a small service like follow up. Had I not gotten impatient and called the printer, I would still be waiting. They (the printer of some note) gave me the tracking number and said 'Sally' signed for it. I've had some strange women in my home, but I do remember their first name. I could go on but you don't have the time and I get very upset. I'll just say when all the dust cleared and I had paid another $600.00 for proof corrections and miscellaneous other charges I thought we had arrived. They shipped my books missing the target date by 10 weeks. I opened one box like a kid at Christmas only to find they gave me a book cover with two misspelled words. I don't need anyone to help me misspell words. I do enough of that myself. How did they do it? It was easy, they simply retyped my book cover and didn't check it. The first shipment of one thousand covered books had to be taken out of a three-in-a-bundle wrapping and swapped, bad covers for new. No out of pocket cost, it just took me about three hours to repackage and re-box the books.

I have gotten a lot of anger out and I feel much better thanks to you.  I know that doesn't help you publish and sell books. Right? Yes it does because the above is a small sample of what you may go through if you Self Publish, so be prepared. Read the information below, it to may help. But most important is the fact that no one will sell your book like you will. Get out there and give book signing. Make a PowerPoint presentation about your book and knock their socks off. If you can't speak in front of a crowd. Learn how, there are public speaking programs in every town and city. If all this is more than you can handle. Give it to a publisher along with a big check or credit card. Hey, you get free air miles.

One last sales pitch about my company Manta Publishing Company. Come on, you knew it was coming.  I don't publish anyone's books but my own. So I don't do all the bad things I talked about above. I will give you web exposure for only $19.95 a year. That's right, a year. I will only charge you 15% for each book I sell plus shipping and you keep the rest. Think about that for a moment that's 15% off the retail price. You make the margin between what you paid for the book and my price plus some shipping to the customer. Your advantage: If you have a $26.95 retail book to sell, less the 15% less the cost and less the shipping you make about $13.66 per book not the $0.78 cents per book a Book Publisher pays you.

Retail Price of book........ $26.95
Less  15% Commission...  $4.04 to Manta Publishing Co.
Less cost of printing.........  $7.00  price depends on quantity and shipping to you
Less Shipping ....................$2.25 to customer
Total your net profit......  $ 13.66 per book, not $0.78 cents

And you have the customer name and address for future book sales, not the publisher. I have a simple agreement the $19.95 per year for web space and 15% per book we sell. You receive the name and address of the customer within 24 hours and a check in a week. You send out the book within 48 hours and the customer has their book in about ten days. If they write me complaining that you didn't send the book I'll e-mail you for a follow up for the customer. If we don't sell at least two books the first year (your break-even point) I'll give you your $19.95 back. And my condolences. Simple and easy to remember for both of us. I like it that way.

Manta Publishing Co . grew out of a need to showcase  the beginning writers of fiction or fact. The company solicits short stories, articles or novels with a "Sea" or water born adventure theme. This site will have free information on getting connected to other writers and tips on pathways to selling your writings. 

Thanks to Sensible Solutions for the following information.

How To Get Happily Published - Finding a Publisher

Imagine that two book publishers have offered you a contract. You get to choose between Simon & Schuster, which has done a few books like yours, and the Seal Press, which does lots of books that fit in with the one you have to sell, and it always has. Until very recently, most writers wouldn't have hesitated for a minute. S&S would have been a shoo-in. Even today, you might think the choice is clear, but those who've compared and contrasted large and small houses will tell you that smaller publishers, especially "niche" publishers, are increasingly attractive. This is true for several reasons.

What smaller publishers have to offer

        Smaller publishers usually pay more attention to authors. One publisher even sends a present to each author it signs on, in addition to asking for -- and listening to -- each author's opinions and suggestions all through the publishing process. Smaller publishers usually give writers better access to the right readers. The aforementioned Seal Press, for example, sells Getting Free:

You Can End Abuse and Take Back Your Life 

by Ginny McCarthy not just through bookstores but also to shelters for battered women, YWCAs, clinics and other places where the people who need it most can find it and spread the word about it. As a result, Seal has sold more than 150,000 copies. In the hands of a large publisher that focused exclusively on bookstores, sales figures for Getting Free would probably have been much lower. Smaller publishers usually keep books selling. Thanks to continual  promotion, sales curves for titles from small houses often head upward over time, sometimes rising to impressive heights. At hundreds of small publishing companies, going back to print is the norm. At the largest firms, one printing is all that many books get, and even that one often fails to sell out.

When big may be better.   

      Large publishing operations may still offer advantages, of course,  especially for prose that's directed to a very sizable general audience. Since everybody's heard of them, their imprint on a book tends to confer prestige. Also, they often pay higher advances than small firms (but remember, in many cases a good small firm will net you more over the course of a book's life), and they sometimes have more clout with major booksellers (which they may exercise on behalf of your book, although then again they may not). On the other hand, big firms may offer you little or nothing in the way of marketing unless you're a celebrity or about to become one. Furthermore,  large companies are often--although by no means always--impersonal, and  they have an irritating habit of getting tangled up in routines and red tape. Where periodicals are concerned, big is more likely to be better. The pay's usually higher and the exposure is broader. But smaller may still be preferable, especially if you're interested in getting to certain sorts of readers. Pieces will work in Horseplay or Aviation Consumer or Tactical Knives or Homesick Texan or Modern Dad that the mass-market magazines couldn't and wouldn't offer their audiences.

      Fledgling writers are frequently advised to start with small companies and work their way up to big ones, but it's smart to remember that effective marketing of your work has less to do with picking between big and little than with finding the particular publishers who are going to want the particular manuscript you're trying to place right now.

Resources

      AAR-online AAR is the organization of professional agents. Their new Web site features a list of members along with information about agents' standards and practices. Children's Literature Web Guide If you write for children, you'll want to access this wealth of information.

      Freelance Rates & Standard Practice by Alexander Kopelman, 1995; published by National Writers Union, 873 Broadway, Suite 203, New York, NY 10003.

      Here's knowledge you can use when you're making deals with publishers of newspapers and/or magazines and/or books.

Midwest Book Review

      Thanks to MBR's Jim Cox, there's this easy way to learn about lots of smaller publishers and what they're up to.

      The Portable Writer's Conference: Your Guide to Getting and Staying Published, edited by Stephen Blake Mettee; published by Quill Driver Books, 8386 North Madsen, Clovis, CA 93611. Whether or not you go to a real live writer's conference, you'll benefit from the rich array of advice right here.

      WritePro and FictionMaster Created by Sol Stein, these programs are designed to help fiction writers hone their craft. Stein, a successful novelist himself, has also worked on the other side of the desk as an editor and a publisher. His book Stein on Writing is helpful too. Plus, it's wise; it's fun to read, and it covers both fiction and nonfiction.

      The US All Media Jumpstation A good place to target print media and access their Web sites. You'll find an extensive list, categorized by subject, of more than 3,000 magazines, professional journals, trade and consumer publications.

      Writer's Guide to Book Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents 1999-2000: Who They Are! What They Want! And How to Win Them Over! by Jeff Herman, 1998 edition; published by Prima Publishing, 3875 Atherton Road, Rocklin. CA 95765. Jeff Herman shares what he knows about editor after editor, and also offers annotated listings of selected agents.

      Handbook for Academic Authors by Beth Luey, third edition, 1995; published by Cambridge University Press, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211. A comprehensive, comprehensible guide for anyone working on articles for scholarly journals or on textbooks and other books for the academic market.

      Inkspot. Well-organized information on the nuts and bolts of writing, with links to a multitude of related resources, discussion forums for writers, and a free, bimonthly e-mail newsletter.

      Poets & Writers, Inc., 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012; phone, 212-226-3586.  The people at Poets & Writers have figured out lots of ways to improve the quality of a writer's life. The group's publications are designed especially for writers of fiction and poetry but they're helpful to writers of all sorts. Among them are Poets & Writers Magazine and the Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. Send for the informational brochure, and if you write fiction or poetry ask to be listed in the next edition of the directory.

       Pushcart's Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections: A History of Insult, a Solace to Writers, edited by Bill Henderson and André Bernard, 1998; published by Pushcart Press, P.O. Box 380, Wainscott, NY 11975.

      A great pick-me-up for those times when turndowns get you down, The Rotten Rejections entries show you what editors said as they spurned The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and a host of other titles they must have gone on to kick themselves about.

      Samir Husni's Guide to New Consumer Magazines, published annually by Oxbridge Communications; e-mail, info@oxbridge.com. Organized by subject category. It's well worth checking out the latest version because magazines are usually hungrier for material when they're new than they are after they've become known.

      Writing and Publishing Books for Children in the 1990s: The Inside Story from the Editor's Desk by Olga Litowinsky, 1992; published by Walker & Company, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014. This particular editor's desk was situated variously at Delacorte, Scribners, Viking Penguin and Macmillan. Her advice covers books for young people at all age levels and she offers interesting observations about trends that were running when she wrote the title above.

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Last modified: 03/23/08