Advice for Writing, Editing, Reading, and Life.
New posts on Mondays (for non-fiction) or Fridays (for fiction)
Publishing Pathways: Non-Traditional Publishing
At its best, non-traditional publishing fills a niche and provides a useful set of services to aspiring authors. Rather than selling the rights to your work in order to have a professional team polish and distribute your work, with non-traditional publishing, you pay a fee to have a professional team polish and distribute your work in order to keep your rights.
Publishing Pathways: Traditional Publishing
There are a lot of nitty gritty details about what different publishing deals can look like with different traditional publishing firms, but it boils down to this: the firm pays the author to purchase the rights to the work, and the author and publisher negotiate a rate of royalty that the author will be paid for each book sold.
Publishing Pathways: True Self-Publishing
With true self-publishing, if you don’t already know what you’re doing, it falls on you to figure it out. Thankfully, there are a lot of resources online you can lean on to help you cure your own ignorance, but this pathway has good and bad elements that you should be prepared for.
Fear Itself
I rarely feel like I can conquer my fears; often the best I can manage is to coexist with them under a tenuous cease-fire. So what do I do?
The Paradox of Platform
If you already have a built in fan-base from another venture, such as internet videos or a television show, your book will be a much easier sell than someone with no web presence, regardless of how good or bad either book actually is. As a person with virtually no platform, I know how that sounds—envious and a little bitter. To some extent it probably is, I confess, but it’s also just the reality of producing art for profit.