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/lit/ - Literature

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4569642 No.4569642[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

How hard is it to publish a book? Has anyone here done it? Like to get it in national circulation and stocked at popular places like Barnes and Noble or Amazon. How much money does it cost to do that?

>> No.4569694

It's not hard at all to get a distribution deal with amazon. You could do it for free through a self-publishing service like Lulu. To print a book that isn't print on demand (like lulu), and is printed in high-quality, you can use an offset printing service but you'll probably have to order at least 500 - 1000 books. It will probably cost more or less than 1k dollars. It might cost a lot more, but a dollar a book seems like it makes sense, idk. If you know how to market a book, or already have a decent following, you can make a lot of money by selling the books at 10 dollars each. I know some people that have printed their books through Thomson-Shore. The books looked great, and they're good at helping their customers through the process.

If you've written a great book that fits into a certain aesthetic, you have a better chance at getting published by a small printing press. They would handle all of the distribution and promotional services, and pay you a percentage of your sales for your work. Most small presses don't care much about making a profit, so as long as they consider your book worth publishing, they'll publish it. Look into certain small presses that you like and familiarize yourself with their work. It would be stupid just submitting your work to any small press you come across. Make sure you really know what they're after.

I have no idea how someone would go about getting published by a big publishing house without already a decent following, or having a good agent.

>> No.4569697

Also, you wouldn't have to pay Barnes & Noble to sell your work. You would form a deal giving them a percentage of your books that they sell. I don't know how getting a deal like this works with them, but it's probably very easy with Amazon.

>> No.4569794

The people here that are published are for the most part self published.

>> No.4570059

>>4569794
Except Tao Lin.

>> No.4571635

>>4569697
just google around a bit

http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?topic=200260520

http://mashable.com/2009/03/01/publish-book/

>> No.4571700

My mum's a published author. She had her breakthrough when I was quite young, but I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge.

Her first book was published in the mid-90s. I believe she'd been sending printed copies of her books to publishers for 4 or 5 years before one of them decided that they liked her work. From there she worked with the same publishers for 4-5 more years, getting another 4 books published. Around 2000, publishers stopped accepting manuscripts from authors, and everything had to go through an agent. She went through a string of agents but all of them were fairly useless and didn't really do a good job of shopping her work around. She tried to break into writing books for adults (previously she wrote fiction for ages 8-14) but couldn't get anyone interested in her murder mystery (To be fair, I read it and it wasn't that great, her strengths were definitely as a children's author)

Nowadays she self-publishes children's stories on her website. She also sells 2 or 3 short stories a month to magazines read by old women. Bland, generic, shitty stuff, but she gets paid £100 - £200 each for a one-page story

>> No.4572296
File: 58 KB, 286x400, Michael Ende.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4572296

>>4571700
It's actually pretty hard to break from YA or children's books into "grown up" books. If your breakthrough book was a children's book you are for some reason forever branded as a children's book author.
Michael Ende (rightfully) complained about that quite a lot.
Look at Rowling now, everyone seems to think it's unheard of or that she's breaking some kind of taboo or being a pioneer for writing a crime-mystery book. That was probably the reason why she published it under a pseudonym
So yeah, sadly if you want to be taken serious, never publish a children's book, doesn't matter how good it is (in case of Ende, his books were absolutely brilliant).