Types of Publishing

I ran into two people this week with an issue of subsidy publishing, so am ready to give my soapbox speech about it again. I'm seriously thinking of just making a recording and playing it back any time someone asks me about this, because it keeps popping up.

Quick review: there are three kinds of publishing: traditional, self, and subsidy. Traditional publishing is what lay-people normally think of for publishing: you find an agent, sell your manuscript to a company like Random House or Thomas Nelson, and then see your book appear 18 months later in bookstores and so forth. You the writer are paid an advance for the manuscript, and once that money is paid off through book sales, you receive royalties, or a certain percentage of the selling price for each book sold. This is a good way to go, but extremely difficult to make the cut in the first place. Since the traditional publisher is paying all the costs to produce your book, it wants to make very sure you have a good book for them to produce.

The second way to publish is self-publishing. With this method you the author do all the work: edit to a fare-thee-well, make a cover, typeset the text, acquire an ISBN, produce the PDF files for the printer, and contract for the books to be printed and sold through amazon or out of the trunk of your car. You the author take all the risk, and keep all the reward. It's not a bad way to go provided you know what you're doing and why you're doing it. I've self published two books myself. There are many tasks to do but it's not hard, just that you have to keep up with things. The biggest problem I find is marketing: getting the word out about the book. There are many marketing-type materials available (books, internet courses, and so forth) but I haven't gone into these that much. I hate facebook and twitter, sigh.

The third type of publishing is subsidy publishing. Since this blog entry is already long and I have much to say about this, I'll carry this discussion over until Friday.