Hi, I'm new on here. I'm not sure if it has been 14 days yet so this may have to get parked. I visited a few years ago and lurked. Work and family commitments pulled me away from the internet entirely ( I used to object to owning a smartphone and my internet access was all pc based) Could some successfully published members help with something. I am looking to piece together the journey from starting to write, to being a paid, published author. Preferably of novels but I imagine magazines and so on form part of the journey. I don't know if I would go down that route. I am trying to use this resource to write and vanity publish a couple of illustrated children's books. (I am struggling to create meaningful gifts) The journey seems so opaque. So many people seem to get lost. There is so much detail around agents and publishing. I am asking for a brief summary, bullet points or short paragraphs. If such a thing is already stickied maybe you could direct me to it. I would like to say I have read passionately since I was a child. I have already read some short stories and vignettes here which are better than many published and some commercially successful stories I have bought and read in my life.
I wrote a version of this at https://www.writingforums.org/threads/so-you-wrote-a-novel-and-want-to-get-it-published.148510/, but it's more focused on what to do once the novel's written. I don't really have insight into vanity publishing or children's books... but... are you SURE you want to vanity publish? That term is usually used to reflect something that's a pretty bad idea. I'm wondering if you mean self-publish?
I may mean self publish. I understood vanity publishing to mean you pay someone to turn your work into a book for your self. Not to be marketed. I understood self publish to be you put your badly spelt manuscript online. The point of above would be for a story I create to exist as a physical medium on my boys bookshelf. Thank you for the link I'm heading into it now.
Vanity presses generally lie to authors (appeal to their vanity) and go through a pretend "selection" process and make promises there's no way they can keep. They charge thousands of dollars and writers hardly ever see even a fraction of return for that investment. If you just want a book for the bookshelf, you're probably looking for a POD (Print on Demand) service. You upload files (the website can help with a variety of formatting elements, but you may want to provide your own cover) and then order a copy of the book and they print it for you and send it in the mail. Createspace is probably the biggest POD company, but they've recently been taken over by Amazon, so it'd probably be easiest to upload your files to Amazon and go through that process. I've never done this for a book I didn't want in the Amazon catalogue, but if that's what you're looking for (like, if you don't want your book available for sale) I imagine you could probably just upload the files and follow their directions and then never hit the "publish" button?
Thank you. I don't feel at the moment that I would have the confidence to write a manuscript in all honesty. Not a true attempt. Your advice on print on demand is very helpful. I get the impression I'm making too much of a distinction between this and self publishing. If the two are so interwined I may as well have it on a marketplace. Your linked thread should be a sticky.
And, unless I'm mistaken, they also get some of the rights to the book, right? So you're paying someone to take some of your rights away from you.
