hello! i have already written a few small books, next stage would be the professional edit for them. or designing the cover. in all of my reading over the last few days online about how to get a book to market, i have just come across too many different suggestions. by the way, I started off with mostly just wanting to get an ebook or two going, but if its not a big deal to also add "print" easily, then so be it. I recently built a personal website/blog also. at the moment, my understanding is that, I need to use Createspace if I want to publish onto amazon. (which i heard you must go on amazon) besides that, my understanding is that Smashwords would then get my book out to a few other sources. Is this a good path to follow? Is there anything you would recommend otherwise? Also, what is a good source for hiring an editor, and/or book cover designer? is elance good? Any help would be greatly appreciated....
a lot of questions, not all I can answer but I believe you need to learn to edit your own stuff and save a fortune on pro-editors. Also if you go the traditional route of print publishing, the publishing house will design the cover for you.
i can help you with cover design, as i've had 6 books of my own printed and did all the formatting and the covers myself... they're now also available as e-books... i'm also a professional editor of many years' standing... i'm only a mouse-click away, if i can be of any help... love and hugs, maia maia3maia@hotmail.com
I wouldn't suggest self-publishing - I would suggest trying to get traditionally published. Most self-published books sell very few copies. If you feel that you understand both options and their pros and cons and still want to self-publish, that's obviously your choice, but I would strongly suggest investing the time and research to make sure that you do understand both.
thank you very much....can you recommend any publishing companies that have done well for you, or others you know?
You seem to have missed ChickenFreak's point - you should go research into traditional publishing. In traditional publishing, you do not go through any "publishing companies" - you must go through an agent, who only gets paid if she manages to sell your book to a publisher. A publishing house is different to a publishing company, at least in the technical sense. Publishing houses generally do not take unsolicited manuscripts for fiction (eg. a manuscript not submitted via an agent). They will publish a book only if they think the book is of high enough quality and it would do well in the market. Publishing companies, at least when I hear the term, I think of vanity presses - eg. you pay them a certain amount of money, and they print the book for you and may include some minor forms of promotion and marketing for you as part of the package. These companies will publish anything - there's no quality filter. It's a service, that's all. The difference is, with the traditional route (via agent >> publisher) you do not pay even a dime. You pay only if and when the agent successfully lands your book a contract with a publisher, and then the agent will take commission from whatever the publisher pays you (I think about 10%-15% usually). Amongst publishers and agents, a self-published book does not count for anything unless you gain an incredible following (like millions and millions - very unlikely - it's like winning the jackpot. It does happen, but so rarely that you shouldn't bet on it). Self-pub books can actually do you more harm than good amongst publishers and agents because it still carries with it the stigma that it's of a lesser quality than books published via a real publisher, due to the quality control in place through the traditional route. Basically, if you self-publish, do it because it's truly right for you and your book. Don't do it in the hope of somehow netting a real publisher afterwards, or that somehow you think it's gonna be easy or a faster way to getting the book out there. Just make sure you're not self-pubbing because of impatience. If you get a bad piece of work out there, you could be killing your own chances of getting published for real. And if you're still adamant on self-pubbing - artists you can find on deviant art. There're many pros on there who take commissions. Editors you can probably find on editors and predators - this site tells you which ones are legit services and which are not. Canary Reviews I've heard are also good.
I believe that if you are going to self-publish paying a professional editor is definitely worth the money. They will save you a lot of embarrassment in the future. Otherwise, I'd suggest the traditional publishing method—try to find yourself an agent or publishing company. In that case, they will help with the editing and all the other hard work that comes with publishing (e.g designing the cover, releasing the novel, publicity). Good luck, I wish you well
Yes elance is good. They are a bit more expensive that some of the others, but the quality of work is better, I use them all the time. You could use them for your cover as well, or buy a pre-designed one if it matches your story well. Just make sure they state that they only sell the design once, some of the cheaper ones resell them multiple times. As long as you are using MS Word it’s easy to format your work, then create an Amazon author account and upload it. If you then want to sell a hard copy you can latter do that through Creatspace. If you use Amazon exclusively you can enrol your ebooks in KDP Select, that will allow you to promote you books for free, five days every couple of months. This is really worth it if you need a quick boost in rankings. Create a Twitter and Facebook account and use them to drive traffic to your blog, as long as there is something interesting there for people to read, then use your blog and website to market your book. Add you books to any and all of the small websites and blogs that let you, the odd sale here and there soon adds up if you promote it enough. That’s the basic information if you want some more specific details just let me know. Or you could just submit it to a publisher that your will probably never hear back from.
Same as Mamma. I'm a Graphic designer so I can help with tips if needed. Just say here or inbox my profile. I'm not on all the time but happy to help when i can
i am a professional editor as well as a full time writing mentor and i can tell you from decades of experience in the writing/publishing field that this is not at all realistic... in most cases, it'll be tossing money down the drain... no matter how well the work is edited, no editor can guarantee that the work will ever be published... and the chances of works by new writers being accepted for publication by a traditional [= paying] press are below slim to none... even if by some miracle you do snag one, a good professional editor will cost much more than you'll be able to make in royalties, unless by an even greater miracle, your book becomes a bestseller... and it's foolish to the max, for any new writer to count on being a rare exception... if you self-publish, it's a guaranteed total waste of money, since so little profit is ever made by 99.9% of self-publishing fiction writers... the only exception would be if you are an acknowledged authority in some field and have written a non-fiction book that you already have a built-in market for, among your professional colleagues/clients/etc... in that case, paying an editor to fine-tune your book before self-publishing could be worth the money... this is why i won't take on a clients who want their work edited, unless they can justify spending the money for the 'course' they'll be getting in how to edit their own work from then on, since i don't just edit, but also give feedback on why this or that needs fixing/changing/deleting... another problem is that anyone can claim to be an editor and most you'll find advertsing online aren't good enough at it to do the poor clueless fledgling writer any good... i can't tell you how many supposedly 'edited' mss i've seen that were still rife with glaring goofs after their unwary victims had paid them for what they thought would be a professional job... so, if you want to be really helpful, please don't tell people that hiring an editor to fix up their writing is 'worth the money' to save them from 'embarrassment'... love and hugs, maia [mods: can this please be made into a 'sticky' to save me having to write it all over and over again?... it's a very important issue and new writers need to be disabused of the idea that spending hundreds of dollars on an editor is a good idea, when the reality is that they need to learn how to edit their own work]
