How to publish a book
So you have decided that you want to write a book, and you know that you don’t want to endure the pains of trying to find a Christian self publishing or regular self publishing company, you want to go the standard route of book publishing. It’s not uncommon that people decide not to self publish, but when you are deciding how to publish a book you want to make sure that you haven’t started with how to write memoirs, or how to write a book. Why is that? Well your publisher is going to either accept or reject your idea, and if you have already worked for years on writing the work of your lifetime, it’s a little bit harder to accept that you are being rejected as not having the type of materials that they want to market at this time.
What does that mean? Well, when you work through a standard publisher, you are generally selling an idea and then working from that to compose your book. If you have done any writing for magazines or similar publications, you are probably familiar with the query letter. If you have not, it’s time to do some learning, because that letter is about to become your best friend. The query letter is your sales tool for your book. This is what you will send to the literary agent in order to get the green light on your book. It’s like a one page proposal in the form of a letter that you will dispatch to several publishers before you find the one that wants to promote your story. Even then you may well have to revise your story to fit their current needs. You see, when you go the self publishing route, you will write the book that you want, pay to publish it, and hope it sells. When you are having someone publish your book for you, you will write the book that they want, they pay to publish it, and then you both hope it sells.
While operating through a publisher is not quite as fulfilling from the author’s sense, and even though your cut from a book that is produced by a full service publisher is not as large as the one that you would retain when you self publish, what you do get is the expertise of the professionals that will produce your work, and you also get the advantage of input from a company that actually deals with writers and readers in the market on a daily basis. You may think that you know what you want to write, but if you cannot sell your book, then you will not be reaping the rewards of your labor of love wither. One additional benefit, they foot the bill. You will not put in your hard earned money to see your book produced, set up for print on demand, and engaging the book marketing, and then find that you have emptied your account for a total loss. In the event that the formal publisher produces your book and the market interest is not there, they have shouldered the risk.