so has anyone here actually succeeded in publishing a book? (like in stores and all that) if you have, 1 i will be surprised and 2 please give any tips and help for others! 3 if you have tried and failed, please share your experience too! thanx!
Yes, I have tried numerous times to get published. I get so excited that I found a reliable looking company, and then they mail me the letter.
Uh oh...the letter. It's not a good sign. I open the letter and I find out that they want hundreds of dollars just to publish it. Me, being cheep and not willing to pay that money, discards the letters.
So far, I have come across two publishing companies that have said they will publish my book - for a price!
Xliberis says that they will publish it. All I have to do is pay from $300-12,000 and they gladly do it. Yeah right. No one has that kind of money.
I would pick lulu.com. It is very reliable and helpful. Except one thing: it's self publishing. that means that you do everything. All they do is print it for you.
lulu is helpful because of this:
-You get to pick your own cover; either it be from a picture off of the Internet or your own.
-You get to format the book the way that you want it.
-They don't edit anything, so make sure that your book is picture perfect. I have published Field Trip on lulu.com and it turned out great.
-they only charge you to buy the book. Publishing in itself is free. The price varies depending on how many pages the book is.
...yeah, but that's self-publishing. She's probably talking about the traditional get an agent and get published sort of way.
I'm preparing the manuscript as we speak!
Ubi caritas est vera, Deus ibi est.
"The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly." ~ Richard Bach
cool! does the traditional way work better? (i would guess the editing would be better and your book would be better known but it is harder) thx for the experiences bigbad! snoink, which company are you preparing a manuscript for?
My sister and I started a novel the summer before last and are still going through the drafting process but we tried to publish it three times along the way.
The first time they said that they were interested but at that stage we were only half way through the novel and they were looking for a finished manuscript and said to get back in touch when we had more to work with.
The second time they said that it looked like an interesting novel but they were looking for romance novels that season.
And the third was a dodgy agent who said they'd prrof read it for us and such if we paid them.
Altogether very unsuccessful but we might try again later and if nothing else it was fun to write and Amy begged a copy from us so someone likes it at least. Heh.
Yeah, I'd be wary if an agent or a publishing house demanded money up front--when you publish, the general idea is to make money off your work. The agent, as far as I know, please tell me if this is false, takes a percentage of the book's earnings, so it's in their best interests to get it published as well as possible. I haven't published yet, but I'm planning to send out query letters to agents by early summer of this year. Until then, I'm just madly editing and polishing! Do let me know if you would like some of that same help on your manuscript!
"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function...We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful." ~C.S. Lewis
I've tried to publish a short story a few times. I was rejected twice, and finally accepted by the YWLJ ^_^. (The lit journal for YWS.) I also have another short story out, although I haven't received a rejection on that yet.
Honestly, I have no advice. Just send it in a lot, and be sure to follow all of the rules given by the publisher/magazine. Try hard to not fall into the slush pile as fast as you can, haha.
“It's necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good it is to live.” ― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
If you have short stories or poems, you might first try sending them to magazines or contests, you know, get an idea of how your stuff will be received, get some experience getting it out there.
I had a short story published in "Young Authors of America" which is an anthology of about two dozen stories put out by Scholastic each year. I was in fifth grade.
"My pet, I've been to the devil, and he's a very dull fellow. I won't go there again, even for you..."
I sent something to a ublisher about a year ago. Only after I sent it did I realise it was rubbish. It was boring, there was too much dialouge, nothing really happened, there was no distinct plot and I spent about an hour editing after I finished.
Needless to say, it was rejected.
Now I've finsihed the first draft of book that I hope will be a children's series, but it needs much more work. Hopefully I'll have sent it out by the end of the year.
So my advice is, don't edit straight away. And spend time editing. Don't send anything out until you don't think you can do any better. Show it to someone. Parents and friends can work, but only if they read a lot. I've sent mine out to a couple of people from this site, and hopefully will cieve helpful feedback.
Good luck with whatever you want to get published!
*Don't expect to see me around much in the next couple of weeks. School has started again, and it'll be a couple of weeks before I've settled in. If you've asked me for a critique, you will get it, but not for a little while. Sorry*
My dad's friend had to self publish a book of his - 282 pages.I don't know where though. Just saying, there's more of you out there.... me being one of them.
I realized that I said I'd be gone for only two weeks...but I was gone for much longer.I hope to stay on this time.
I've never been published, and to be honest, i don't really care about being published. If i ever am, then great, but i don't think i'm gonna go into a career of writing. It's something I do for fun. And i don't really want to be pressured into thinking of it as a job.
Anyway, here is some pretty good advice for getting published:
How do I pick a publisher to publish my book?
The best way to find the publisher who will be right for you is to find the books that you read that are most like the one you have written (in genre, in style, in tone) and see who publishes them. If they bought books like yours, the odds are vastly improved that they will buy yours, too.
Don't waste time sending off your book to those "publishers" who advertise in the backs of magazines. (Not even the ones who advertise in the back of Writer's Digest.) They'll accept your manuscript. I almost guarantee it. They'll also charge you for the privilege of being "published." This is not the way the business works.
Never send a manuscript to a publisher because you "noticed that you don't have any romance novels out there---my book will fill a hole in your list." Your book will fill an out-slot in the publisher's mailbox. A key rule in publishing lists is "same, but different." If the publisher does romance novels, then your romance novel with a new twist on a favorite theme will be right on target. Your shoot-em-up western, however, will stand out like a drunken gunslinger at a debutante ball, and will be kicked out the door just as fast. Fantasy publishers publish fantasy. Religious publishers publish spiritual tomes. Literary publishers want The Great American Novel. No publisher wants a manuscript that is completely different from anything else it has ever put out there---and there aren't exceptions to this rule, either.
So the key to success here is to know what you write, find out who is already putting books out there like it, and from that list, pick the publisher or publishers whose books you like best to query first.
How much do I pay a publisher to publish my book?
Nothing. Not a dime, not half the expenses, not "a modest sum," not anything. Not ever. You don't pay to have your book published. The reason you don't pay to have your book published is as follows: If you're a writer, then writing is your job. People get paid to do their jobs---nurses get paid to nurse, ditchdiggers get paid to dig ditches, and writers get paid to write.
(For more on this, also see WriterBeware [offsite, opens new window])
How much should I charge a publisher to publish my book?
I love this question. It is the flip side of "how much should I pay to have my book published?" The droll answer is "you should be so lucky..."
Again, this is not the way the business works. You want to have an agent represent you in the negotiation of how much you're going to get for your book (and how many rights you'll keep and how many you'll sell), but how much the publisher pays for the book is, in the end, entirely up to the publisher. Don't expect a fortune. Don't expect, in fact, to make more than you would have made from flipping burgers part-time for the same number of hours of work for your first novel. $250,000 first-novel advances like the one my previous agent, Russ Galen, got for Terry Goodkind are rare indeed. Much more typical is the $5000 I got for my first book, back before I had an agent.
What are rights? Which ones do I sell?
Rights are what you hang onto with insane, frothing-at-the-mouth determination.
Okay. I'll be a little more specific. Rights are what publishers, movie-makers, book clubs, and so on, buy (actually lease) from you on your book. When you sell your book, you are not actually selling the book. You are selling to the publisher his right to publish that book in a limited format for a limited amount of time, and the more you can control the limits, the better off you'll be. Standard rights sales for books permit the publisher to print the book in your country, or perhaps in the region that speaks the same language as you wrote it in. Foreign language rights are separate, and a good agent will help you hang on to them. Movie rights are separate, and again, a good agent will help you keep them. Internet publication rights, compilation rights, book club rights, all of these are rights that BELONG TO YOU from the second that you write the book. They are YOURS, they are WORTH MONEY, and there are unscrupulous publishers out there who would just love to grab them all up in one neat little "World rights, all formats, for all time" clause that essentially robs you of ever being able to resell them, while telling you that the sale of world rights is standard. It isn't. It isn't even close to standard.
Worse, there are publishers out there who will claim that their publication of your book under their copyright is a standard business practice. These people are thieves. Never sell your copyright on an original work. Never. Your copyright says that you wrote the book. If you sell that, and the publisher (or agent) puts his copyright on the book, then he in effect wrote the book. It's his, and will be his forever after. You can never get anything from that book again, you cannot fix this, you cannot get reparations for it. Legally the publisher can buy copyright, and legally you can sell it, but you'd be insane to do so.
You may at times write books for which you do not own the copyright---for these (movie novelizations, media tie-ins, series books packaged by a packager, etc.) make sure that your agent sees that you are well-compensated up-front, and that you are going to get lots of royalties, because you will never see a dime in subrights sales, and for a writer, that is a Bad Thing.
Also, just thought i'd say, it's almost impossible these days to get published without an agent. So if you're thinking of trying to get published, if you're really serious about it, do your best to find an agent first.
I was just reading that article last night, Kadie. It was very helpful.
“We’re still here,” he says, his voice cold, his hands shaking. “We know how to be invisible, how to play dead. But at the end of the day, we are still here.” ~Dax
Teacher: "What do we do with adjectives in Spanish?"
S: "We eat them!"
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