Are you looking to get your magical words out into the world, so that they can consume what you’re offering, whether it is fiction or non-fiction? Good! Excellent. I applaud you and your efforts. It probably is your first one. But I probably got some bad and good news for you.
The bad news is, if you are seeking through the traditional publishing route, or it’s print and handled through agents and takes years at a time, you’re in for a very expensive, disheartening long road and I highly suggest you stop, right now.
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If, however, you’re open to getting your feet wet into the self-publishing side of things, then the path is a whole lot cheaper, a whole lot shorter, and a whole lot more under your control. Just to give you an idea, if you don’t have any pathway to getting published, there are some very popular fiction authors out there like Jim Butcher and I think, J. A. Konrath, who spent a decade writing fifty- to eighty-thousand word novels that just had to be shelved, and were constantly turned down over hundreds and hundreds of rejection letters and thousands of dollars and traveling all over the country.
Whereas right now, whether you smash words or Amazon KDP, or just plain-old e-junkie or gum road to put up a PDF, you are literally a couple days away from being published, going the self-publishing route. Not only that, but instead of getting the measly one-digit or low two-digit royalty that you get from traditional publishing route, you will get somewhere between thirty-five and seventy percent depending on what price you picked to publish at and where you publish it at, which is a phenomenal difference.
And a lot of people say, “Oh, well, the traditional publishing companies will advertise for me and market for me.” Bull. Bullcrap. Will they publish, or will they advertise and market and push big-time, the Neil Gaimans and the Steven Kings and the Amanda Hockings? Yes, they will. Will they do you, first-time author, no track record, no following? No. Not at all. Zero. You will disappear into the cloud. So forget that argument.
What does it cost to self-publish? If you do your own cover, you do your own formatting, and you do your own uploading to Amazon KDP for example, all it will cost you is time and a little bit of patience in understanding the process, which really, once you go through the ringer, you can even use a dummy file. Put it up there, just to get their hopes down, and then just un-publish it shortly thereafter.
It’s not a big deal at all. Or you can even pick a pin name if you want, just to do experiments on. It’s really wide open to whatever you want to do. And then when you get familiar with it, you can even use the Amazon e-cover maker that they have on the KDP side of things, which doesn’t make great covers, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing. And we’re talking zero dollars. Zero dollars, folks.
If, however, you wanna go up a notch, you can use a service like 99 Designs or even more custom at Elance.com and get a custom cover done for somewhere between a hundred and fifty to four hundred dollars, but it will be really good and really nice, because you pick whether or not you pay and what it’s going to look like and get someone else to format your book up off of your Word template or your Scrivener export. And that would probably be somewhere between thirty and sixty bucks depending on where you get it. You can get it at Elance.
And really, that’s it. I mean, you’re talking, under five hundred dollars and you’re published, with minimal amount of learning and effort. So there you go. Self-publishing, I think, is the only way to go now until the traditional publishers get their act together. And, hurry up and get published. ‘Cause you got more books to write. Good luck. See you on the shelves. The virtual shelves of infinite space and awesomeness. Have a good one. Peace out.