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Do you want your book to open doors, or do you just want to hold your own words, bound and printed? How you publish affects your income, reputation, and your leverage.

Let’s look at three options:

1. Publish With a Traditional Publisher

You’ll gain prestige, credibility, and a nice advance-and they pick up all the publishing costs.

But the odds are slim. Traditional publishers reject hundreds of submissions for each they accept. They take years to publish. And they pay authors pennies on the dollar. Still, if you have a magnificent book AND a magnificent author platform/marketing plan, it’s often the best choice.

2. Use a Subsidy Publisher

It’s easy, fast, and cheap-but often a mistake. You pay upfront, use the publisher’s ISBN, and print books as you need them. Typically, the cover and interior design will be very generic, and the publisher won’t edit.

Subsidy publishing only makes sense in certain situations. Because the industry ignores these books, and because most subsidy prices and policies are completely out of step with industry norms, most of these tens of thousands of books die a quiet death; very few sell even 100 copies. The New York Times reports that out of 17,000 titles subsidy published by iUniverse, only 86 sold 500 or more in their first year.

But subsidy publishing may be a good choice if you completely control your own distribution and skip bookstores entirely (for example, selling at your own presentations, through affiliates, and through your own website) and you can price the book high enough to cover the outrageous per-unit printing charges (typically more than double the cost of using your own print-quantity-needed printer). It’s also the best solution in many cases for a book with a very small audience, such as a personal/family history, a book created by school children for a class, an arcane textbook on a very obscure subject.

Notes on this option:

• You’ll often hear subsidy publishing referred to as “self-publishing” or “print-on-demand publishing.” But subsidy is not self-publishing. The ISBN supplier is the publisher-and true self-publishing gets more respect than subsidy. And any publisher can do POD printing.
• There have been a very few subsidy success stories: a few books were resold to major publishers, made into movies (“Legally Blonde,” for instance), achieved bestseller status, etc. You’ll hear about those triumphs-but not about the other 30,000 or so per year who didn’t even recoup their setup costs.
• Many of these companies offer “marketing packages.” Having been hired to rewrite some of their press releases, I think you’d be better off seeking outside marketing assistance.
• This industry has its share of scam artists. Get product samples and full pricing information-and check references! Also check scam-complaint websites.

3. Self-Publish

True self-publishing can be very inexpensive, and very quick-if you just want sell books at your events and to your own networks. But to compete in the retail marketplace, you need to either acquire or outsource a vast array of skills and tasks. You have to:

• Buy your ISBN block
• Get the book written…edited…designed…proofread…indexed (for nonfiction)…and printed
• Develop and carry out your marketing plan
• Determine your print run, technology (digital or offset), and how you’ll distribute and sell
• Get your Library of Congress and Books In Print registrations, barcode, and more

Overwhelmed? Wait until you start grappling with foreign and subsidiary rights, bookstore return policies, and so on.

If you want to self-publish, find an experienced guide to steer you through the process. The expert helps you select quality, affordable vendors, navigate the various minefields, develop a custom marketing plan, and emerge with a book that does you proud, and that could succeed in the market. In my own consulting, I’ve worked with people who just wanted an hour or two of advice-and created finished books from raw manuscripts (saving back approximately half my fees in lower vendor costs).

Once you’ve sold 10,000 or more, you could sell your book to a traditional publisher. Major-market books that were originally self published include Eragon, Mutant Message Down Under, The Christmas Box, and many others.