So you want to publish your book?

Writing and getting published is fun but not so easy. So you want to know how to publish your book? I can help you decide how. Whether you opt for the traditional route or decide to self -publish it’s a minefield especially for novices. There are so many middle men feeding on creators like writers. Their hands are out to get a bit of the $$ action. Many are bottom feeders out to trick us into parting with our money for promised rewards like sales and reviews. We all need to stay safe online. Authors trying to market their books are targeted as easy prey. After all we are writers not marketing or IT experts.

But let’s focus first on the happy side of writing. It’s why we write.

I love writing. It’s pure escapism. You can create an imaginary world in any time or place. You can play casting manager and fill it with people, real or imagined. Most of my crazy characters hearing there’s a book happening, invite themselves in and set up their sub plots. It’s been a blast. Henri, the eccentric bookstore owner in The Last Hotel and Lisbette the French beauty of Mont Saint Michel in Postcard to Picardy came uninvited into my novels and enriched them by their arrival. Characters come to me through dreams or are subtle recreations of people who have caught my interest. I am a pretty fast writer it seems. My average is to do a book all done and dusted in five months. It is my late-in-life hobby, following a scientific career. Quite strange and totally unexpected for a math/science nerd girl. I became an accidental author. It’s a crazy story in itself. 

Not all Fun

I love to write, but publishing is not all fun and I hate the long wait to release the book into the world. Let’s face it when you are older, time matters. Even worse, I hate the long, drawn-out publishing process and especially hate the marketing process. Quite often I wonder why I even bother!

Being an author is sure not the ‘all fun’ experience I thought it would be. There are no lunches with the editor like in the movies! Releasing books during COVID also meant no book signings, no talks at libraries, not even a book launch. I know I’m not alone in this disappointment. We were all alone with nowhere to shout about our books except online.

Other authors on Facebook bemoaned this, and their books didn’t quite sell as well as expected either. One disillusioned woman was brave enough to confess after two years on Amazon that she had sold not a single book. I feel for her shattered dream. Publishers should be honest with writers, but they want the money, they need to survive like everyone else and new writers are fresh meat.

Publishing, it’s a jungle out there

Start googling about publishing and see how quickly the vultures descend. They know it is hard to know how to publish your book. Amazon publishing is free, but to get your book up there many writers pay for publishing services such as editing and formatting. Then, of course, you need a cover that fits the page number and content of your book. A few millimeters out and it won’t fit. Not everyone can do this themselves. I recommend Go Onwrite.com for covers. The very friendly and creative James will help you.

If you are not in a rush, you can send your manuscript to various publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts. Unsolicited means you come alone without the chaperone of a literary agent. If you want their help you need to pay quite a lot and how do you even know which ones are good or can be trusted. I think you need to know someone who knows someone sort of thing. I never had one but I did approach the 30 free to approach publishers in Australia and had an offer from one of them for my first book. This was briefly exciting.

Firstly, getting published by a traditional publisher is very affirming, as it would have been years ago. Someone thinks I can write. Wow! They may give you an upfront amount, but then the royalty will be minimal, like 5%. Unless the book performs well in the market you may never make more than coffee money.

I started this way with a local trade publisher, who offered nothing but 4% with Australia only rights and six free books. I thought it was my only chance. Pretty good for a math/science teacher who’d accidentally written a novel.

If you go this way, you have to be patient after submitting to publishers. They take many months to read and usually reject your work as unsuitable for their publishing house. You have to be tough and humble to survive the continual rejections.

Publishing in the time of Covid

As I said my first book came out in early Covid times so it had no launch or fanfare. Its emergence was a big non event. Then I became very ill and paralysed down my right arm and hand plus Covid set in and well my days of being an author seemed over just as they had begun. I was stuck in Europe lockdown early 2020. Another story in itself that accidentally led to another book.

Then I discovered Tellwell publishing. They are great and published this second book for me. Tellwell are hybrid publishers who offer all the help self-publishers need at a small price tag compared to other self-publishing sharks. You can trust them to produce a lovely high-quality book and to support your author journey. I used them for my fifth book as well.

I’ve found a great cover designer in Spain, GoOnwrite.com and a helpful media person in Sydney. Chat GPT is most helpful for IT issues.

I am now self-sufficient. I probably will never sell many books but at least I am in control. I can now churn out books as quickly as I can write them, hopefully one a year. They won’t be sitting for months in a queue, or holding pattern, waiting for attention. They won’t suffer strange, long, drawn-out editing and someone else’s idea of a good cover. Hopefully, too, I will live long enough to see them eventually prosper. At least I leave some of myself behind when I am no longer here alive!

Vanity Publishers

In the quest to find out how to publish your book you will encounter many who want to do it for you at a cost of course. There is a lot of anger and snobbery about self publishing. Traditionally published authors call it vanity publishing. However, anyone who tries to get published can be said to have vanity. If you had no self-confidence, you would be too timid to try. Is it vain to try, whether you pay for editing or not? When you first enter the minefield of publishing, it is very scary. You doubt your own editing, so you think you need an editor.

Anyway, whether I was being vain or not, who cares, I accepted a hybrid deal with Tellwell.  My novel was written with just one wonky hand because of my medical drama so needed editing big time. Over the long 18 months of publication, I frequently wondered whether the original traditional deal may have fared better. Perhaps, being small, the local publisher could have actually helped market me. Certainly, no other one since, despite their grand promises, has made much effort. It’s sort of goodbye at the terminus station on publication day. Thanks for the ride.

With traditional publishing you wait as long as a coffee takes, no, just joking, a little longer, like one to two years. You lose the rights to the book. It is no longer your property. You get a few copies of your book and that’s it. You’re on your own, to somehow promote yourself, a forlorn little nobody in the world of online sales in a supersaturated market.

Going it alone

To totally self-publish without help of these so-called vanity publishers, you need a few techno skills and the ability to edit and format your own work. Very time consuming indeed. Then you take your completed manuscript in word or as a pdf over to Amazon KDP and follow the instructions. See you in about a week. This gets your book onto Amazon.com. You become a victim of their non helpful algorithms competing with the millions.

If you want to be elsewhere than Amazon or ‘wide’ then you have to go this process again with Ingram Sparks or Draft to Digital. Ingram is a very difficult website and process to navigate and support though they offer it is slow to come. D to D, the second option is much easier, and they create both the e-book and the paperback plus the covers for you. All free which is lovely in this $$$ world. As a novice go this way first.

Self-publishing with Amazon KDP self-publishing enables you to totally own your work, so you can promote by going on Kindle Select, Manybooks.net and Hellobooks.com and set your own price.

Marketing, the Hardest Bit

But then once you have a book whether an e book or print version, there’s the marketing. Groan. I hate this bit. I hate self-promoting. As if anyone is even interested in a photo of my book cover when the Internet is bursting with them. And I can’t do any of those fancy posts, nor am I young and glamorous enough to prance around on Tik Tok. Sigh. All I can do is flash my little book-babies covers a few times a week and hope for the best. Publishing a book gives you a voice, but it is like whispering at a rock concert. Can anyone hear me?

I often witness a new author’s excitement at being an Amazon author, but as a published author, I stay silent. Their bubble will burst soon enough. Let them enjoy the thrill while it lasts. I am an optimist and try to apply this to the book market. After all, their books may make it big time. Some books do, I don’t have access to the statistics and publishers sure won’t tell you.

If you want to write for the mainstream, write crime, erotic romance, romantsy or self-help. If you have the right contacts, it seems you can do very well. It certainly helps if you are famous, a celebrity of some sort, or have contact on a high-profile television program, or are already in the publishing business.

Getting Noticed in a Super-saturated Market

In the most competitive market in the world, it’s all about getting noticed. There’s heavy competition for sure. Though the same can be said of any market you try to break into. Being already up there in the public eye gives you a definite advantage. But if you are a nobody and write what you personally like, it is much harder to get noticed.

There are just so many books in the world, because now anyone with an inkling, not just ink, can get published and be up there on Amazon with trillions of others. Libraries are online, bookstores and book clubs are online. So, you have to also be online on social media, where the readers are, to crack it to the top ratings.

So Many Books

A reader can’t see the wood for the trees. They can’t even trust the online reviews, because many are of those are also paid for. As soon as you pop your book up online, the reviewers swarm in like a cloud of locusts, charging upwards from $20 to write good things about your book that they never actually read. I tried this trick a few times. It is obvious the person, often in India, has not even purchased the ebook, as the review is just a rehash of the back cover with a few ‘amazing’ adjectives thrown in.

The original old fashioned way

In the old days, before this horrible online world took over our lives, the only way to write a book was by painstaking quill and ink by candlelight. Imagine crossing out and starting again with blobs of ink and candle wax as your editing companions. Plus, the eye strain and all that before getting published. Yet many of the classics were written this way. However, I still need to work out what makes a classic. I read somewhere that it is high standards for quality, appeal, influence and longevity. Yet many people made huge money on ‘penny dreadfuls’.

Then later, with the advent of electric lighting and keyboards, you could write by typewriter. This was much easier, but still required either Tippex white eraser application, or a restart every time you made an error, or changed your mind. It is so much easier today with delete, backspace buttons and inbuilt spell and grammar checks. All you need is an idea and off you go.

No Rejections Now for Getting Published

Getting published this way before the Internet, meant submitting a paper manuscript by mail or footing it to a publishing house. You waited months, got rejected and repeated the process if you still had any confidence. JK Rowling, Stephen King, even best-selling Agatha Christie had to go through this agonizing, crushing experience. How many great authors missed out under this system? Not everyone can take knockback after knockback, though JK Rowling was turned down by thirteen publishers. Look at her now, a multi-millionaire.

Now anyone can be an author. No one gets knocked back. Just write and upload. It’s instant, like everything in this world, except sadly, coffee, which has become very complicated and time-consuming if you want to drink ‘real coffee’. However, because anyone can be an author, and anyone can publish a book, the world is overflowing with them. Many of them are substandard, because there is no scrutiny by Amazon or self-publishing companies. Publishers just want your money. In other words, you are merely a commodity.

Just keep writing!

But I persist, because of my love of writing, my love of escapism from this crazy world we somehow created, when it was fine how it was. I have now tried traditional publishing, hybrid publishing and self-publishing. Now up to my fifth book, I have been on a journey of experimentation. Each type of publishing seems to have its pluses and minuses.

But life is not all about money anyway. It’s the writing I love. That is why in between books, like now, I’m busy blogging about history and famous women. This post on publishing is probably a one-off rant but I hope it helps someone get a reality check on this confusing business. I hope it helps you stay in control of your precious book and your money.

Everyone has a story to tell. Keep writing, keep using your voice but be careful out there. No one cares about your book and its message like you do.

Photo Source

Joni Scott is an Australian author with seven published novels: see details and her blog at website; https://joniscottauthor.com.