Sometimes people ask me about writing a book. It’s easier to get a book published than you might think. Basically, there are three approaches. You can go with a vanity publisher (not a good idea, in my opinion), you can go with one of the big publishing houses (tough to do, and I’ve found this doesn’t work very well for reasons I’ll explain below), or you can self-publish through Amazon.com or any of several other publishing outfits (this it not vanity publishing, and the self-publishing approach offers several advantages).
Vanity Publishing
The idea of a vanity publisher is that you pay a company to publish your book. You have to do all the marketing, and you have to print a minimum number of copies, so this gets expensive fast. I’ve never done this and everything I’ve heard about these outfits is strongly negative. My advice would be to not go this route. Yeah, doing so will allow you to say that you wrote a book and had it published, but that little bit of bragging rights will probably cost you $10,000 and it’s not likely you’ll ever recover it. I’ve never taken this approach, and I’ve heard from others that it doesn’t work out economically for the author. You will have a lot of copies of your book, most likely taking up space in your garage.
A Traditional Publishing House
You can market your concept to a publishing house and have them publish and market it and pay you a royalty on copies sold. This has been the traditional publishing route for more than a couple of centuries in the US. The first several books I wrote went this route.
The traditional publishing route is okay and if you play your cards right (which is to say, you are a skilled negotiator), you can secure a healthy advance against royalties. But it’s an approach with disadvantages that far outweigh the advantages:
I’ve written 15 books, and I went the traditional route with established publishing houses on the first 9. I’d never go this way again. My good buddy Simon Gandolfi put it best when I asked him about publishers and, in particular, using an agent to promote your work. “Most publishers are incompetent crooks,” he said, and then he added “and most literary agents are competent crooks.”
Self-Publishing
About 10 years ago I was on a press junket promoting Lake Tahoe as a motorcycle destination (good buddy J Brandon was one of the organizers). I rode up there on my KLR 650 Kawasaki. It was a good time and good riding (the roads in the Sierra Nevadas around Tahoe are some of the best in the world, and I got a couple of magazine stories out of the deal), but the thing that really made the trip worthwhile for me was meeting Carla King (that’s Carla in the photo at the top of this blog). Carla rode a KLR 650, so I knew she was a smart person. I had read Carla King’s book about her Ural ride around America (American Borders), and this was the first time I actually met her.
Our Tahoe group stopped for lunch on one of the organized rides at Walker Burger (it’s on Highway 395), and Carla and I talked shop. I told her the story about Wiley and how terrible their marketing department was, and she told me I was wasting my time if I wasn’t self-publishing.
I never heard of self-publishing until I met Carla, so I took one of her classes and I never looked back. My next seven books I self-published through Amazon using the tools Carla shared with me, and I made more money with them than I have on any of the other books I previously wrote.
Self-publishing has a lot of advantages:
Carla offers self-publishing training and has written extensively on the topic (see www.CarlaKing.com and www.selfpubbootcamp.com). I attended one of her seminars several years ago and it was a very worthwhile experience for me. If you have thoughts about writing a book, you might consider doing the same.
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