Publishing g a book

wow...judging by your questions, good luck...youll need it

Neville wrote:

Have you written a book? I am just curious about the process and rewards of writing either an academic book or one on currents affairs/politics or the like.

Is it difficult to get published?

Do you typically get paid much as a lump sum, or a percentages of sales?

I wrote a book several years ago that I could never get published. It was an eye opener. Over 500,000 manuscripts are shopped to publishing houses in the U.S. each year and about 30,000 to 40,000 titles are published. Most of the 500,000 are represented by a professional agent (although what constitutes professional agent is open to question).

What an author gets paid is really a question of how profitable the publishing house thinks the book will be. As you can guess, an unpublished author is a high risk venture so they're not going to shell out a big advance unless the person is already famous (like a celebrity, politician, sports star, etc...). Since Joe Smoe writing his first novel would be ecstatic (and lucky) to even get the manuscript picked up, he's not going to be picky about the size of the advance. I think the going cut of the profit is about 10%. Also, unlike in Hemingway's day, most houses prefer to deal with agents and many won't even accept unrepresnted manuscripts.

Of course, another big factor is genre. A niche academic book probably has a much better chance of getting published (if the author has bona fide credentials) than something that aspires to be good fiction. Some great writers struggled for years trying to get published before breaking through (The original title of Catch-22 was Catch-18, but the same year Leon Uris was coming out with a book with 18 in the title so Heller's publisher demanded he change the title. Heller chose Catch-22 because 21 previous publishers had rejected his manuscript).

Lastly, if you want to write, then write. The chance of making money on writing is slim, so if that's your motivator you probably should not try. There is pretty vibrant self-publishing industry (iuniverse and others) now, so you can go that route for minimal cost. Self publishing is nice if you want to pass some books out to friends, but if you really want the book to have a chance to sell you'd have to spend a lot of money advertising it and shopping it to reviewers.

Bottom line is this: Writing a good book is hard. Getting a good book published is ten times harder.

I seem to remember the Edward Elgar website said all authors get a 50% discount from their books

I've done various editing projects and just haven't had time to try and put anything of my own together. Like others on here advise, judge this based on your book's focus and potential revenue from the publisher's eye. There are thousands of authors who write tripe but get published. You will have to contend with this and, unless you are outstanding, expect little, or nothing in return. Beyond that, you can self-publish. At a 1000 press, you can get a smaller book (8 x 10 - 200 pages) printed and bound for about a grand assuming you do the copy and formatting yourself. If you are even more ambitious and don't really care about publishing a physical copy, you can write a book in word, print it with Adobe into a PDF and sell it on a website for the cost of Distiller and website hosting fees. It really depends on what and why you are trying to publish...and what "published" means to you. If you want Random House of NYT Best Sellers List, you're probably not gonna get it. If you want to enjoy the experience of putting words in book form, most anyone with time and a PC can do it.

Step 1: Cut a hole in a box

I've written 14 textbooks over the past 20 years, some of which I've earned royalties on and some of which were flat fee works for hire. Most of these books were published through major medical publishing companies- Williams and Wilkings, Churchill Livingstone, and Mosby- all of which now is simply either Wolters-Kluwer or Reed-Elsevier. Normally, you contact an acquistions editor for information on the process of submitting a proposal; if the proposal is accepted, then you submit the book in the time they ask it to be done by. Royalty on sales is typically 10% of cover price, after recouping any costs that you've incurred. It is not a business where you makes tons of money, and for the University Press business, total sales may be around 1000, though I've sold more, about 10,000 of one book, and maybe 3000 of a couple of others. But at cover prices of $150, that still brings in decent money until you consider it took 4 years to complete some of these books. I liked the works for hire- a flat fee for getting s short text done. No worries there on sales. marketing is a major cost if you self publish- getting word out can be hard. There's a lot more to be said here but this just the very basics.

Bumpala for more than the basics, please