Hi, just curious what is the process to publication? Like as long you pay, you can get it published or you must meet certain requirements in order to even find a publisher that will accept to publish your work? What is the cost - You have to pay, and it goes per page, per certain amount of words, or what? Who is doing all the marketing, you yourself? Or they will place your book in bookstore or online ebook available for search? Thanks
If someone asks you to pay them to publish your work, run. There's bound to be a thread already on the subject I'll link in a second, but needed to say that before anything else happened lol.
Traditional publication means that a publishing company is PURCHASING the rights to your intellectual property. What you've described here is a scam. If you do this, you might see a print copy, but don't count on it. I've read horror stories about people who fell into this trap. I will second what @Chained said. If you're being asked to pay to have your work published, run.
The process is typically you write the book. You write a query letter and send it to agents. You land an agent. The agent then sells your work to an editor at a publishing house. The money should alway be going back to the writer and not the other way around (unless you are self publishing). Agents do typically get between 15 and 20 percent. But they don't get paid anything until you do.
With traditional publishing the author either submits their work to a publisher, or they submit it to an agent who will submit it to publishers. The type of work that's considered publishable, the format for submitting it, etc., etc., etc. is stuff that the author would need to learn. If the work gets accepted, the publisher is in charge of the publishing process, and they pay for it. Making the book available, etc., is also their problem, though the author is often expected to help promote it. The majority of the price of each book sold goes to the publisher, the author gets a portion in royalties, and if the author has an agent, the agent gets a portion of the portion that the author got. The author shouldn't pay a penny toward the publishing process. With self publishing, which I'm generally opposed to, the author does the work, though they may hire out parts of it--an artist to do the cover, an editor to work on editing the manuscript, someone to print actual paper copies or someone to make a saleable digital file, etc. The author has complete and total control, and is responsible for paying all the costs. With vanity publishing, the publisher has the control and the author pays the costs. (Whee!) That's what makes it a scam.
I'm really not sure anyone's sticking to this anymore. "Trade" has its own set of issues, like it doesn't traditionally include specialty publishers or academic presses and is only sometimes considered to include smaller independent publishers. It's really no more precise than "traditional", despite the insistence of people at some Water Coolers.
I only recently found out about the trade thing after 2 years of thinking it was a weird shorthand some people used for traditional. I felt stupid that I didn't know but I'm not about to start referring to it as trade, since editors and agents don't.
THIS^^^^^ My publishing split is roughly 60/40 in favor of my publisher, but they've provided AT NO COST professional editing services, cover art, ebook creation/hard copy printing, marketing (sending ARCs, giveaways, social media promotion) and sales/fulfillment on multiple sales platforms. I get a quarterly royalty statements and checks, and a 1099 at the end of the year for tax purposes. They've more than earned their chunk of the profits IMO, but I'm not out of pocket by a single cent.