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The fact that you’ve opened this little book and started to read probably means that you consider yourself to be one of those unfortunates described on the cover as “disillusioned writers”.
There are so many of us! All over the world people who think they’ve got something interesting to say are busy scribbling with whatever materials they have to hand, be it on paper, making marks in the sand with a stick, chalk on slate or chiselling the letters on a slab of rock. All such methods have been used at one time or the other and now the computer with a word processing program is the most common medium. Whatever method you employ, dear reader, finally, one day, you’ll have reached the end of your literary labours and begin to look around in the hope that some publishing company somewhere will take enough interest in your work to display it to an eagerly awaiting world as a book to be read and enjoyed. Fat chance! It is at this point in your writing career that the first inklings of the hideous realities of 21st century publishing practice begin to take root in your hitherto innocent mind. Nobody wants to know! You can’t understand it! You’ll probably be the first to admit that your precious novel (or whatever it is) may not be the ultimate in literary genius but it’s a lot better than much of the stuff you read in many of the books from your local library. The storyline hangs together OK; it’s got a strong beginning and a more than satisfactory conclusion but still it gets rejected every time you send it off to a potential publisher. What have you done wrong? Nothing, as far as you can tell: after all, you’ve followed all the recommendations given in the “How to get published” books and at your local writers’ group meetings, chosen a publisher that allegedly produces the sort of book you’ve written, composed an irresistible covering letter and synopsis, prepared samples that are double-spaced on one side of the paper, enclosed a stamped, self-addressed envelope for an answer, posted the whole proposal off then started the long, agonising waiting period that will last until the publisher condescends to contact you - that’s if they bother to do so at all, in which case you’re left hanging; not that they could care less, of course; they’re never short of trash to publish. It can help enormously if you just happen to know, or are able to get acquainted with, someone in a position of enough stature in a publishing concern, in which case you could easily get off to a flying start just like so many well-known authors (and especially authoresses) have done ever since the publishing industry was born If you’re very lucky, one fine day your return envelope might pop through the letterbox. The first time this happens you’ll probably experience a flutter of excitement, until, that is, you open the envelope and discover it’s not an immediate acceptance; just your samples back together with a nicely-worded stock letter on headed paper carefully designed to let you down as lightly as possible. It’s a rejection, of course; one of very many you’ll get in the battle to attract the favourable attention of a bona fide publisher. There’s only one certain way to do this these days, however and that’s to either become famous or to be a “celebrity” from the TV or music scene. Publishers are in the business to sell as many books as possible and a well-known person like a politician, television “personality” or footballer will always have enough followers and fans eager to purchase the purported “inside story” to make it worth the publisher’s while running up a few hundred (or thousand) copies. The fact that the vast majority of these books probably aren’t actually written by the person concerned and have a large volume of fiction included to fill the gaps between the bits of verifiable fact is deemed irrelevant : enough copies will probably be sold to cover the cost of production and a bit (sometimes a lot) over for profit. So much for literary worth! As if this wasn’t bad enough, the burgeoning, artificially-manufactured “celebrity” culture of the early 21st century takes up a great deal of the publisher’s capacity that should (in the eyes of many) be devoted to something worth reading. Their trivial, tawdry, ghost-written babble may be of absorbing fascination to a certain section of the book-buying public but it’s of no account whatsoever to any serious reader who likes a good, well-told story. Publishers generally pick these efforts out of the slush pile first because they know they’ll sell plenty of copies and hopefully keep them in business long enough to occasionally print work that deserves to be printed - and you can’t really blame them for that. What this means in practice is that your story, along with hundreds of others, will be left until a suitable time when there may be a slot in the publishing process which can be filled with other work like yours. This is pretty much a chuck-and-chance-it business and the odds are that your story, with all the other potential rejections, will simply go into the system, most ending up being sent back to the hopeful writers like yourself. The foregoing applies to all the major national publishers (mostly based in the London area) but you may have slightly more of a chance with one of the smaller regional ones, many of which are heavily subsidise by the appropriate regional arts councils to favour writers living in or writing books about their region. Other target groups to aim for are those publishers that only print and distribute work of a particular racial, gender or religious slant in unquestioned defiance of all today’s “equality” and “discrimination” legislation. It does help if you are within one of these categories and can produce the kind if work they’re looking for; but even then don’t hold your breath! By the time you’ve got several scores of rejections papering your wall you’ll begin to wonder whether it might be better getting an agent. It won’t be long before you find that it’s at least as hard, if not harder, to find a literary agent prepared to even look at your work as it is a publisher. There’s always the chance that you might strike it lucky, though: one day instead of getting the normal rejection through the letterbox you might find that you receive an invitation to send the complete manuscript to the publisher or agent so that they can have a look at it in more detail. You’ll never get a phone call or e-mail with such an invitation despite the fact that your phone number and e-mail address were on your initial covering letter. Publishers and agents generally tend to keep potential writers as much at arm’s length as possible so that there will be no closer involvement to begin with. This could be your best opportunity yet, so you get the whole thing printed out with numbered pages, parcel it up with a covering letter and return postage then send it off to whatever publisher or agent has finally deigned to acknowledge there may (just may) be something in your work worth taking to the next step. Now is the time when something might actually happen to get your book onto the shelves, though it’s more likely you’ll get the whole lot back with a nice letter of “Thanks but no thanks”. If the publishers do decide to go ahead then you can safely leave the whole procedure in their hands. Generally speaking, they are very good at looking after their writers and will escort you gently through this mysterious process. You’ll get some free copies and one-day you’ll actually see your work displayed on the shelf in your local bookshop. You may even be asked to attend a book-signing session - a combination of an ordeal and an ego-trip. That’s the occasion you thought you’d never see and some time later it gets even better - you receive your first royalty cheque! There’s always the possibility you may be asked to do further books for the same publisher, but don’t wait for that. If you’ve got another book under construction on the slipway, get on with it and start looking about for a publisher like you did before, starting with the one that produced your first book because that publisher is the most likely to take you up if sales of your first book were satisfactory. For any other publishers or agents you try, you now have the beginnings of a CV you can include in the covering letter with your sample chapters, synopsis and SAE. Not that it’ll make the slightest difference to your chance of being noticed: you’ll still be up against the familiar block of not being famous or a “celebrity”. Still, you could be lucky once more - and yet again if the Gods are smiling upon you; but sooner or later will come a time when the barriers raised by publishers are simply too high to jump. Your disillusionment and despair will now be increasing as time passes. How do you go about breaking these barriers down? Subterfuge seems to be the only way so you start sending off your proposals under assumed names - like those of people who are in the news at that moment. Using the names of already successful writers is another ploy. When that doesn’t work either, you may try pen-names such as Mickey Mouse, Basil Brush, Wile E. Coyote or Jack Ripper. Still no interest? Disillusionment deepens. There doesn’t seem to be anything left to do to gain the attention of a publisher. By now you are convinced that if the shades of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or any of the classical old-timers sent in some of their latest work they would get treated with the same editorial contempt you’ve been experiencing. Should you now simply give the whole thing up as a waste of time and try to lead a normal life? Absolutely not! This is the worst thing you could do at this point in your literary career by permitting them to whip you into cowering submission as they’ve done to so many other talented authors. If you’ve got other things to write about get on with them and keep sending off proposals in the normal way under your own name while you get used to the way you now firmly believe most mainstream publishers seem to work. It seems to you that first they get your envelope containing your synopsis, samples of writing, stamped, self-addressed envelope and covering letter through their letterbox or in a big bag along with the same thing from another couple of hundred hopeful writers. Then the process of selection begins. First, all material from agents is probably placed in its own special pile because no “name” or “celebrity” will have any trouble finding an agent. In fact, literary agents actively seek them out with a view to getting a rake- off from their puerile ghost-written ramblings and many agents and publishers have a list of ghost- writers they can call on to do all the hard work if a likely prospect turns up. All the rest of the submissions are then quickly sifted on the off-chance something may attract the attention of whoever is doing the sifting. Those few “possibles” are then set aside for further scrutiny by another member of staff just in case something that might be worth following up has been missed. Whatever is left over either gets posted back to the waiting supplicants or consigned to the rubbish bin for more permanent recycling. In a strained attempt to be fair to agents and publishers, let us now spend a few moments reflecting on things from their point of view. Some of them get hundreds of submissions a day and it could take a long time, as well as a big proportion of the available staff, just to sort out all that mail. All automatically-accepted submissions from the famous and celebrities then have to be taken to an editorial meeting and the decision made for each of them whether to go onto the next step - in-depth scrutiny of the content. Some of the “possibles” will also be included or rejected at this meeting, too, as well as what will be the maximum advance offer permissible in any subsequent negotiations with agents. Advances, of course, are only offered to the already famous. Your precious submission may never get this far, however. All too often such “possibles" are either shelved for a more convenient time, forgotten about, or simply lost. Even if it does get raised at an editorial meeting it could be some considerable time before anyone bothers to contact you – well over a year in some cases. Now the publisher’s hard work really starts. The manuscripts will then have to be typed out on a word-processor and copies made. One of each is then given to a professional reader, usually freelance, who has to make a report on what (if anything) needs to be done to make it readable for the general book-buying public. Editorial staff will then go through each book and correct spelling mistakes, grammar, etc. Recommendations from the reader’s report will also be taken into account at this stage in case a partial (sometimes total) re-write is deemed necessary and the whole thing returned to the writer as a “proof” for any alterations to be made. While all this is going on, other departments are busy struggling to produce a suitable cover design and lay out the book as it will eventually appear in print. When, finally, after a lot of sweat, stress and tears, the whole thing comes together, printing, publicity and distribution can then be addressed. No, it’s not easy being a publisher, as you’ll probably discover if you follow the sequence in which this little book will lead. Being an agent, of course, is a lot easier; all you have to do to be one of them is to know how to compose a suitable stock rejection letter and be pally with the right people to whom you can pass on any submissions that may look even halfway promising for publication. With all your experience of past and continuing rejection and perhaps a book or two on the shelves you may begin to think that you might as well try publishing your own work. It’s not really all that difficult if you’re reasonably competent with a computer and have a reliable professional printer and a bookbinder not too far away. You get the pages and covers printed out, take them to the bookbinder - and behold! You’ve got your books made up as professionally as any mainstream publisher can produce. Of course, it’s nowhere near as simple as it sounds - nothing worthwhile ever is. Lots of little details will have to be attended to before you can even start doing it as a hobby. Before you begin winding your computer up there are a couple of things you can’t do without; the most important being some ISBNs (International Standard Book Numbers). These are important because booksellers use them for keeping tabs on their stock and re-ordering and it’s a lot easier using numbers than trying to do it by means of the book titles, genre or author’s name: in fact, most of the bigger book-selling outlets won’t even bother to stock books that don’t have this all-important number, which is recognized and used worldwide. To obtain your ISBNs get in touch with the agency concerned with issuing them - contact details are on the last page of this book. They may allocate you a block of ten or even a hundred numbers to begin with. Next is your imprint, which is the name you’ll be trading under. Anything will do as long as you don’t try to call your little venture something like Penguin Macmillan, Transworld or Random House - that’s not very good idea, they could get extremely annoyed. Keep it short, simple and if possible slightly amusing, so it’s got half a chance of being remembered. While you’re at it, try to design a little logo to go with your imprint name. Look on the back cover, spine and on the first few pages of any book (this one, for instance) and you’ll see where and how the logo, ISBN and imprint name are used. Having got the basics organised, you’re now ready to start travelling the long, tortured road to actually seeing a book in the bookstore that you wrote, designed and produced yourself. If you haven’t already got your book on a computer using a word-processing program then type it in. If you haven’t even got a computer or don’t know how to use one then you may have a serious problem unless either you obtain one and become computer-literate or can prevail upon someone else to do the job for you. A least one word-processing program is needed, the most popular ones being Microsoft Word or Works, though there are several others just as versatile. You’ll also require a good graphics capability like Photoshop or Serif PhotoPlus and you’ll find a simple basic one like Microsoft Paint, or an equivalent, very useful. The only other program you’ll need to do desktop publishing is one that will lay your book out for you ready for printing. Both Serif PagePlus and Microsoft Publisher are ideal for this and can also double up for much of your word processing and graphics work. One last tip on the programs you’ll need - once you get really familiar with the way it works you could find that Microsoft Word is capable of producing results very suitable for desktop publishing including simple picture formatting. So let’s start from the point you have all the text of your book typed out in a word-processing program and saved on the hard disc with a backup disk in a safe place in case of accidents. Now bring up the publishing program of your choice on the screen; they nearly all work pretty much the same way and various configurations of pages are usually offered (book-fold, etc). Select which sort of publication you want to work on and transfer all the text of your book to the pages so that they will print out nicely ready for binding together whether you print them out on your own printer or take your work on a disk to a professional print shop to be done for you. Don’t forget to put in the page numbers and any other headers and footers you’d like included. You’ve got all your story text down now but you haven’t finished yet. Sorry! Now you’ve got your book nicely set out in your publishing program with pages numbered and the text in text boxes the size of the finished book (five inches wide by eight inches high is a useful book size), check the beginning of any recently published paperback (use this one if you like) and you’ll probably find there isn’t any of the main book text for quite a few pages. The collective name for these initial pages is “prelims” (short for preliminaries). Whatever order they occur in your sample book, create and add them into your own book in the following way unless you’d prefer to follow what’s done in the sample book. You’ll need to add at least four pages in front of the existing text, though you can leave two of these out if you really want to. The two you can’t leave out are the title and verso pages. The title page speaks for itself - it’s just the title of the book, written by whom and maybe the name of the publisher (your own imprint) and logo (again your own). Try to design this page so it looks good in black and white because that’s how it’ll turn out anyway when it’s printed Use whatever fonts and font sizes you like to give it an appearance you consider attractive. The verso page is always on the reverse side of the title page and usually has on it the copyright details (with year of publication) and the ISBN. Sometimes the publisher’s imprint and logo is included and occasionally details of the printer. Towards the bottom of the page is one paragraph asserting the rights of the author, sometimes another disclaiming all resemblance to people and places, and usually a third promising dire repercussions if the author’s copyright is infringed in any way. If the sections of the book have their own headings, other than just chapter numbers, etc, you may think a “contents” page would be useful to the reader. In the prelims of some books you’ll find a “dedication” page on which the author thanks people or institutions for their Assistance and support during the trauma of writing the book. This can be simple with just a line or so giving tribute to a single person or packed with all sorts to whom the author wishes to express gratitude. These are the basic prelims though in other books you may find pages with maps, diagrams or a list of other books written by the same author: this latter one, actually, is often best placed at the very end of the book text where it can sometimes be squeezed in at the bottom of the final numbered page. “Characters” or “Personae Dramatis” pages are sometimes put in just before the start of the story text; so is any Glossary though this can be put in at the end, as are any “Author’s Notes”. If your book needs an index then this is inserted last of all, but be aware that an index is a difficult thing to compile properly so you may need to enlist the services of a professional indexer. Along with all this you might find the occasional blank page that doesn’t seem to be there for any particular reason. There is, however a very valid reason for the inclusion of these and we’ll come to that later on. The next thing you really must do now is design a nice cover for your book and you should be able to do this on a separate file in whatever desktop publishing or graphics program you intend using. Unless a bookshop displays your book with the front cover facing any potential purchaser, the only thing they’ll see is the spine, so as well as designing a striking font cover the spine has to stand out in a row of other books to attract initial attention. Use your imagination, any pictures you have and suitable fonts to lay out your cover, which consists of three main sections - the front and back covers with spine sandwiched between them. On the front cover you’ll need the book title with any sub-titles, the author’s name and any appropriate background. The back cover can be somewhat more complicated: check out some of the recently published book covers in your local library and you’ll see the diversity. One thing is a must, though: on paperbacks most of the back cover space will be taken up with the “blurb” and this is what most buyers tend to glance at first to get an idea of what the book’s all about. Basically, it’s nothing more than a very short synopsis of a hundred words or so about what’s inside the book. This is obviously very important so take a great deal of care over this to get it right. Sometimes the back cover will have a small picture of the author, usually at the top, with a potted biography of about 50/60 words nearby in a small font. Below the blurb you’ll often find the publisher’s logo and imprint then, at the bottom, will be the price, the genre of the book (crime, S/F, romance, etc), its ISBN and a barcode. Nowadays the barcode is quite important as a lot of the larger booksellers won’t stock any titles without one because the code is used at the cash point and recorded to assist in stock control and reordering. Unless you’re a computer whiz you may have a bit of a problem creating your own barcodes so take the ISBN along to a printer and see if someone can do it for you and put it on a disk so you can load it into your computer and transfer to the back cover as a picture. There will probably be a small charge for this service, but it’s worth it! You should now have all your text, prelims and a nice cover filed in your computer so join together the text, prelims and any other pages you want to appear in the finished book in a program like Microsoft Word or Publisher, copy it onto a disk and take it to a local printer to see what can be done with it. You can also take along the cover on the same disk but if you’ve got a decent colour printer print out a sample and decide whether to print your own covers - it’s cheaper! When you’ve got the pages printed out in the correct order and a few covers made up, the last job you could do is take them along to a bookbinder who will produce maybe a few experimental copies of the finished book for you It’s a very special feeling when you hold in your hands a book that you’ve created yourself (with a little professional assistance) and well worth all the effort you’ve put into your first self-publishing project. Assuming that the experimental books have worked out to your satisfaction, you can now think about having many more books produced with a view to selling them to an eagerly-awaiting public. Now’s the time to look back over the text and cover files on your computer and correct any mistakes you’ve made. At the same time, decide (and alter on the cover, if necessary) the final retail price you want to sell it at and also what will be the publication date. Inform the ISBN Agency of these and the other details about the book by filling in their form (you can now do this on-line if you want) and take the revised disk(s) back to the printer and have as many sets of texts and covers run off as you think you’ll be able to sell. One more visit to the bookbinder and you’ll have a bunch of nice new books ready to show the world. Now what do you do? Before doing any actual selling you have to send a copy of the book to the British Library and another to each of the five copyright libraries. As a publisher of any sort you are required to do this. The five copyright books can be sent to a single agency that will distribute them for you but you’ll have to send the one to the British Library direct. Addresses, etc, for both of these are at the end of this book. That’s six of your precious books gone already and you haven’t made a penny yet! You won’t make anything on those you give away to family and friends, either, though a subtle mention of how much it cost you to produce each book may at least partially reduce the losses on some of your stock. There are several other things you can do to unload another chunk of your stock and it will help if you have some practical experience of selling. With a bit of luck your local library can arrange a book-signing session for you as a local author and will inform you how to go about doing it. After all the help your library has probably given you in the lead-up to self-publishing your first book, the least you can do then is donate a copy to grace their shelves. That’s another one gone for no gain but when the big day arrives for your signing you go along with a bag full of books and a pen to do what so many better-known authors are obliged to do - and often dread! It’s no big problem really; simply ask what the eager recipient wants written inside the front cover or on the title page, write it down, sign and date it - then collect the cash! Even if all goes very well you may still have a lot of books to get rid of and despite achieving a bit of local notoriety you’ll find it gets more difficult from then on. Don’t expect to get the cash up front whatever outlet you use to sell your books; all book sales these days are done on a sale-or-return basis. So what are the outlets? For a start, you can try contacting your regional Arts Council. Several of them are keen to support local writers and may operate a book distribution service for authors living in or books about and based in the region. It’ll still probably be a sale-or-return arrangement but find out how many copies they’d like to start with, get the books to them with a proper delivery note and invoice then sit back and hope for the best. On second thoughts, maybe you shouldn’t just let things slide once the local Arts Council has some of your books in the pipeline - there are other avenues to explore. Remember when you got your numbers from the ISBN agency? Well, that agency is part of an organisation known as Nielsen Book, which also operates a book distribution service. Details of how to contact them for information can be found at the back of this book. If you register with them as a publisher they’ll e-mail you any orders they get and you can then send off the books directly. Touring the local bookshops with a bag of books can also get rid of some more but be prepared to negotiate the trade price and cash collection arrangements - a 35-40% discount off the cover retail price is a good starting point. Although Arts Councils, Nielsen Book and some book stores have their own web sites, it wouldn’t hurt to rig up your own and you don’t necessarily have to pay anyone else to do it or you if you’re reasonably computer-literate. Most modern computers come with a web-building program of some sort and it’s not really all that difficult to build your own web if you have enough time and patience (and don’t panic easily). This exercise could come in quite useful as you expand your range of books. Useful people to facilitate getting your web onto the internet with our own domain name are at the end of this book together with contact details. You’re now a proper publisher - in practice, if not exactly in profession. You’ve published one of your own books correctly and there’s nothing now to stop you doing another if you’ve got one on the slipway ready and waiting to be launched. You can then add that one onto your website if you’ve got one yet. Once you’ve published your second book you should be familiar with the procedure and, unless you’ve already thought of it, with your ISBNs, imprint and logo, you’re now in a position to do the same for any other aspiring authors who haven’t been able to get anywhere with the mainstream publisher because, like you, they’re not famous (or notorious) enough to be worth bothering with. There’s always the chance you may be able to assist another struggling writer along the tortured road to some sort of literary recognition and if that happens it’s something you can be justly proud of.< Spread the word! Any way you can. A useful start would be with any local writers’ circles or literary groups. When you’ve gained a modicum of success and managed to put a few books on the shelves you may start thinking about how to expand your marketing options by looking for other modern mediums in which both to sell the printed titles you’ve already done and any that might come along in the future. A few years ago, when CDs replaced floppy disks for feeding information into a computer (now succeeded in their turn by DVDS), several publishers thought it would be a good idea to put books onto a CD (floppies didn’t have the storage capacity) so that the purchaser could bring up the book on their computer monitor and either read it directly on the screen or print it out on their own printer to read later. The idea seemed good at the time - the results turned out to be disappointing, to say the least, despite some “Reader” programs which allowed the book to be read out loud in a preset mellifluous voice so they could be listened to on the computer, a CD player at home or when outdoors by a battery-powered portable - a boon to those with poor eyesight. Although this medium has now fallen out of favour and into disuse due to so many other clever (and often useless) electronic gadgets available to woo gullible punters away from the written and spoken word, there’s no valid reason to suppose that books on a CD or DVD won’t enjoy a resurgence of popularity one day and you’ll be in an ideal position to enter that market. You’ll have to expend another of your precious ISBNs for each title though because of the different medium it’s being published in - that’s the rule! Strangely enough, the latest way of selling books, although not so very different from a CD or DVD, is also electronic and involves the use of a computer or possibly a CD player and is increasing in popularity as time goes by. The result is just the same as off a CD or DVD but the purchaser doesn’t have to go and actually buy one over the counter. What is it? E-books, that’s what. If you haven’t come across any yet, here’s how they work; all you need to do is go on the internet, do a search for E-books and log on to a few of what turns up to see what’s involved. There’s not much to it; simply check out one of the titles on offer and follow the sequence through up to paying for the E-book with your debit or credit card. You’ll notice that this sort of book is a lot cheaper than its equivalent title in printed hard- or paper-back form - but it would be, wouldn’t it? What with no design or printing costs, discounts to retail outlets, far fewer staff to pay and minimal distribution costs; the cost of production goes way down and this is reflected in the purchase price. If you’re tempted by what’s on offer maybe you’d like to pay for, download and read through one of the titles that takes your fancy and you’ll then find out what is acceptable as an E-book as well as seeing how it’s laid out. As far as production costs are concerned, E-books have at least one enormous advantage over the printed variety; if any of those you may have so laboriously produced up to now needed colour photographs, diagrams or maps interspersed among the pages of text, you may have received a bit of a shock at how much it cost to get them printed out. Compared with plain text, colour printed can be very expensive and this is where an E-book has a very definite benefit when it comes to presentation - you can put in as much colour wherever you want at no extra cost. Colour photographs necessary in some sorts of book can now be used instead of plain grey-scale photos and the same goes for drawings, etc. You can lay the E-book out just like a printed one and put a colour cover on the first page followed by the prelims and so on with even the back cover on the last page if you want. Not only that, you can also spice up the text and prelims by using coloured fonts for chapter headings, paragraphs, captions and sentences of special significance as well as use colour backgrounds on appropriate pages. These extras will inevitably increase the size of the file stored in your computer memory but it’s going to be distributed electronically just like an e-mail so your only limitation may be the size of the file to be sent. The author of the E-book gets a small royalty out of it, of course, but think on these lines: suppose you were the author and distributor of an E-book through your own web site, who would benefit most? Any income received would be 100% yours, wouldn't it? Well, yes and no (or is it the other way round?). Like everything else to do with publishing and the Internet, things are never anywhere near that simple. You’ll probably be able to set up the E-book very nicely ready for a purchaser to download onto a computer - you’ve already got it all on file, anyway. So far, so good: but what about collecting the cash? That’s where it can get tricky. You’ll have to have a current account of some sort into which the cash can be paid directly from a debit or credit card. In order to make this easy for the payer you’ll also need a few special pages on your web site that allow the money to be transferred electronically into your current account. It’s likely you’ve used this type of arrangement yourself when paying for goods ordered on the Internet - but how do you go about doing it through your own little web site? Luckily there are a few companies providing this service so you’d better do a search on the Internet to find one that will arrange things for you, starting perhaps with one called “Pay-Pal”. It works well enough for others but you’ll have to set it up yourself because that’s as far as this little book can advise you on this particular subject - sorry! Assuming you’ve got a copy of either the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook or the Writer’s Handbook from the time you were so desperately struggling to find a mainstream publisher flexible enough to take even a cursory interest in your work, you must have come across a few entries from “vanity” or “subsidy” publishers without quite realising at the time what they were angling for. Mainstream publishers realised a very long time ago that there was a lot of cash to be made from aspiring writers whose work they couldn’t ordinarily be bothered with and some began publishing books with much of the cost of production being paid for by the author and getting the thing out on the shelves in their normal way. Well, that was OK; it suited both sides of the arrangement and there’s nothing wrong with that. Such is subsidy publishing. Unfortunately the success of this spawned a host of new enterprises which, not to mince words, are nothing less than a scam in the majority of cases – the vanity publisher reared its vulpine head from the pit. Take bit of advice and stay very well clear of the vanity variety: if you make the mistake of sending them the usual samples, etc, you’ll almost certainly get back a reply lauding your work to the heavens as the best thing since beer was invented and insisting upon seeing the full manuscript immediately. This is the “suck-in” point and you’d get the same response if you sent them a selection of your old shopping lists (it’s been tried - and proven). Another word of caution: never send your samples by e- mail, even if they say they accept such submissions, or you’ll be pestered relentlessly from then on with messages begging to see more of your “wonderful” work. Those unwary enough to get sucked in at the first try will be led through an intricate and expensive process to produce the book and then be expected to pay for a minimum number of copies to be printed (typically 500). The nearly impoverished hopeful writer will then be advised to sit back and wait for the royalties to roll in. If you, dear reader, are gulled by this part of the system you’ll probably have to wait longer than you expect to live, so your best bet is to write the whole thing off (no pun intended) as a valuable learning experience and never fall for it again. “Subsidy” publishers, on the other hand, are a much better bet. In their case, they will at least produce the book without trying to flannel you about its literary worth though sometimes you may have to pay up front for some aspects of the process before it goes to print - editing, cover design, layout, etc). From then on the process can take different directions; for instance you may be asked to pay for a certain number of the books to be printed (again typically 500 copies) or agree to pay for and accept a minimum number of copies, maybe a hundred or so, that you’ll have to sell by yourself. In the meantime, the subsidy publisher will at least also be trying to sell your book via their own web-site and through their usual distribution outlets, which is a lot more than any vanity publisher will bother to do and you’ll also be paid the agreed royalties for these in the same way as a mainstream publisher would. It’ll still cost you to get your book out for the enlightenment of an avid reading public but it’s an infinitely better deal than you’ll ever get from a vanity publisher. Is that all you can do to extend your publishing venture? Is it all over? By no means! Now that you’ve produced printed books by yourself the hard way, tried out the E-book market and maybe even dabbled at the fringes of digital books on a CD or DVD, perhaps it’s now time to consider the newest (and arguably the most successful) form of do-it-yourself publishing. Known as Print-on Demand (POD for short) it has already proven itself to be a safe haven for writers whether they’re new to the game and wary or uncertain of getting their work on the shelves any other way as well as for experienced authors who’ve been through the mill already and wish to be independent of the mainstream publishing rat-race and haven’t got any long-term contracts to fulfil with any of the outlets for their primary work. In fact, POD is what many subsidy publishers use to produce books for their clients. Why shouldn’t they? The customer picks up the bill for the books, expenses, etc and the subsidy publishers simply add on a little extra for themselves for setting the whole thing up. Everybody’s happy - the writer has the books, they’re being sold though the publisher’s usual outlets and with a bit of luck the writer might actually get back a bit of his/her financial outlay. If it’s good enough for subsidy publishers to make some sort of a living out of it there’s no reason why you can’t do the same, thereby cutting out a “middle-man” and getting the book out exactly to your own requirements. This may be seen by some as a last resort. Not so! If you’ve already been through much of the sequence described earlier on in this little book like so many other new writers have done, it means that having hopefully been a publisher yourself you not only know what layout is required to make up a printed book but you’ll almost certainly have nearly all the necessary text, etc already on file in your computer - and on at least one backup disk, remember! You can now go ahead and get some POD books made up for one of the titles you’ve already got on the shelves if you need some more: on the other hand, you may prefer to do a POD on a new book you’ve already written and get some copies run off whenever you feel like it if you can’t get a mainstream publisher to take any interest (as usual). That’s another benefit of POD - you can get as many nice new POD books as you think you’re able to sell whether the number you order is just a few dozen or a few hundred (or more). All you need to pay for is the actual number of books you want and you’ll soon discover that the price per book isn’t far off what you had to fork out when you were doing the whole thing yourself - printing, covers, binding, etc. If you take into account all the running around and everything else you had to do when making up your own books then each book works out a good bit cheaper - and someone else is doing a lot of the work for you. Of course, you’ll still have a lot to keep you busy besides actually writing the book. The first thing to do is get in touch with one of the organisations producing books in this way. You should be able to find a few by a search on the Internet for contact details: a couple of them are at the end of this book. Another way of getting a POD arrangement is to enlist the aid and services of an “enabling” organisation that will assist you every step of the way right up to the time your books are delivered. These Samaritans, unfortunately, are fewer in number but at least one of them is included in the “Useful Contacts” section at the end of this book. Whatever way you choose to get your POD off the ground, whether it’s directly with a provider or an enabler, you’ll often have to supply the same things each time and will usually have a choice of uploading them via your email or posting them off on a disk. Both methods, you may have noticed, employ electronic means, which can make the process a lot easier for you to deal with. A cover design and a proper text layout are two of the things you have to supply and sometimes the prelims though you may be able to add these in before the book text quite satisfactorily. All are usually put on templates that you will be able to download from whoever you’re dealing with. You may be asked if you want the provider or enabler to supply an ISBN but if you’ve already tried publishing your books the hard way you won’t need this service, will you? Depending upon your computer prowess and the sort of graphics programs you have on your faithful, overworked machine, you may or may not have any problems doing a nice job of everything and e-mailing the result off to whoever you’re dealing with. If you have any trouble, don’t hesitate to phone up and ask for advice, though there is another way of avoiding any unnecessary stress and that is to engage the professional services of your provider or enabler. They will be only too happy to pass your problem over to designers and other specialists they have on call for just such eventualities, solve the problems for you and get the whole thing ready to send off to the printer for however many copies you want - and the sooner the better! As you were already expecting to shell out a dollop of your hard-earned to get the books, you won’t be surprised to learn that these setting-up services will come as a cost to compensate for whatever you haven’t been able to do for yourself. If this comes as a bit of a shock, think of it this way – for what is involved, the charges aren’t normally particularly exorbitant and just think of the time, frustration and stress you’ll save by getting someone else to do all the difficult bits. While all this is going on you can put your saved time to good use by either getting on with finishing off your next book or asking around all the computer whiz-kids you know to find out if there is some way you can crack any of the design difficulties you’ve come up against when trying to get the whole thing ready for printing by yourself. In the fullness of time you’ll get your books delivered and then you can dispose of them in the same way as when you were producing your own books – via your web sit, any distributors you’ve got to know, direct sales, or any other method you’ve come up with; that’s always assuming you haven’t skipped that phase in your publishing career, of course. The POD company will almost certainly have its own arrangements for distribution, too, and you should make full use of this. With a little luck, depending on how many books you’ve ordered and paid for, you may come out of it without making too much of a loss. Even a little profit is not beyond the frontier of possibility! Now that you’ve got all the bits and pieces necessary to lay out a POD at your fingertips, you are faced with a choice of paths that will allow you to progress further. If you think about it for long enough over a gargle of alcoholic brain-food and a packet of stress-relieving fags (if you can find a pub that permits civilised behaviour) you might come up with a minimum of three directions to take. Taking these choices in order of possible future fulfilment, you could decide to . . .
Salvation!
Good luck for the future.