How to Publish Your Book

The internet is packed with self-publishing companies, boutique publishers, collaborative publishers, big-name publishers, traditional publishers, and a LOT of scams and not-great companies. How do you choose?

Always do your research. Check reviews and talk to other authors before making any decisions. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If a publisher’s representative is pushy and wants you to sign right away, don’t. 

There are many kinds of publishers, with new “categories” popping up all the time. No matter what type of publisher they say they are, they basically fall under one of three categories: traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing. 

The decision comes down to time, money, control, and distribution. 

Traditional Publishing

This model takes the longest but is also the cheapest, as a traditional publisher will pay you an advance in return for the publishing rights to your book, a chunk of the royalties, and control over the final product. (They secretly hope you spend your advance on book promotion.) Generally, you won’t get any royalties from book sales until the publisher has recouped that advance. Then royalties are split between you and them, as determined in your publishing contract. 

An advance can range from less than a hundred bucks to tens of thousands of dollars or more. The amount is based on how well the publisher assumes your book will sell. Obviously a first-time, no-name author can expect a lower advance than a celebrity or former bestselling author, though there are never any guarantees in the book business. A literary agent or intellectual property lawyer can help you negotiate your terms.

Traditional publishing includes the Big Five (Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) but also many others, such as university presses, regional publishers, and more. If people tell you a traditional publishing deal is unrealistic, they’re probably forgetting that the Big Five are not the only publishers who use a traditional model.

Even so, it can take months and sometimes years to secure a traditional publisher for your book. Not always, but patience is important. You will have the least control over your book in terms of title, cover design, and some (or a lot of) editing changes, though you’ll be able to discuss ideas and changes with them. You will not necessarily get much help marketing (no one really helps with that anymore), but you will get a professional product, wider distribution, and more books in brick-and-mortar stores. Sales are still never guaranteed, which is why the more you market your book, the better off you’ll be. 

To pitch or to write? Fiction and memoir authors must generally complete their entire manuscript before pitching to agents or traditional publishers. But for other nonfiction works, some traditional publishers want to guide the manuscript’s development and create a book they think their target market will read, based on your idea, which you present to them in a book proposal. If you want a professional editing team to guide your writing process, this is the step for you. In this case, researching traditional publishers and their imprints, researching agents, and creating a great book proposal are the keys for success. 

That doesn’t mean you can’t write your book ahead of time. Sometimes the more complete and better the manuscript, the more interested a publisher will be because they’ll have less work to do—and less of an investment to make. 

Either way, you can’t really go wrong with a good line edit, whether it’s for your book proposal or manuscript. I know I said line editing is optional, but the better your work “sings,” the more a publisher will be interested—provided it speaks to your readers (your target market).

Hybrid Publishing

The Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) provides a good explanation of what hybrid publishing means:

Hybrid publishing companies behave just like traditional publishing companies in all respects, except that they publish books using an author-subsidized business model, as opposed to financing all costs themselves and, in exchange, return a higher-than-industry-standard share of sales proceeds to the author. A hybrid publisher makes income from a combination of publishing services and book sales.

In other words, a hybrid publisher does not give you an advance. You pay them to publish your work. In return, you will retain more rights, control, and a greater percentage of royalties. And because they didn’t pay you an advance, you should start earning those royalties right away. 

Expect this process to take the better part of a year or more, and to cost anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 or more, depending on what they offer and what services you pay for. Some hybrid publishers have a larger distribution than others. Some also offer to help with marketing, though usually for a fee. 

Watch out: Many self-publishing companies call themselves “hybrid publishers” or some other fancy term, but if they can’t guarantee any distribution, they’re just a self-publishing company. 

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing means you have total control, retain all rights, and keep all profits. You pay for the final editing, proofreading, formatting, book design, and printing services for each desired edition of your book (digital, print, and/or audio). Marketing, sales, and distribution are all on you. This requires research. Amazon and other platforms like IngramSpark make self-publishing easier, provided you know what you’re doing. 

Self-publishing can be the fastest route to getting your book selling if you really do it all yourself, and it can be fairly “cheap” if you find service providers online, probably overseas. Still, expect to pay at least a few thousand dollars and to wait at least a month or more before your book is ready for purchase. 

A self-publishing company (or author services company) that takes care of the details will charge around $10,000 or more, and it will take a few months or more before your book is ready, depending on how busy they are and what you pay them to do. If they offer marketing and other services, expect to pay thousands more for each add-on. 

Money: Why is publishing so expensive? If your book is a standard length, it’s generally between 30,000 and 50,000 words or more. Memoirs, biographies, history books, and adult fiction can be twice as long: 60,000 to 110,000 words. These are rough estimates, and there are exceptions to every rule, but the industry denotes book length in word count, not pages. Editors, proofreaders, and formatters must go through your entire book multiple times. It’s time-consuming, tedious work that takes training and experience to do well. The costs reflect this. 

Tip: Consider blogging or writing other forms of short content online and building an audience before you write your book. This takes time, of course, but eventually you’ll have a lot of book material, and hopefully a lot of readers who will want to buy your book, which makes securing a publisher easier, especially a traditional one. The bigger your “platform,” the more book sales you can expect. 

Conclusion

There are no right or wrong answers. Only you can decide which publishing path is best for you and your book. Whatever path you choose, research is paramount. Writing is only one aspect of being an author. If looking for a traditional or hybrid publisher, ensure you make a list of those that publish the type/genre of book you’re writing. It’s a waste of time to pitch your coming-of-age memoir to a publisher/imprint that only publishes business books, for instance. 

My advice is not to be in a rush. Publishing takes time, effort, and (usually) money. Besides, this allows more time for the next step: marketing your book. 

 

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