Publishing a novel

[Greatshield17]

So, to cut a long story short, my An Appeal to Heaven series is now going to be both a novel and this sort of online picture story. (again, it’s a long story that I don’t have time to go into on) This leads me to think about publishing, and how expensive and difficult it could be; what is your advice on publishing? I’m personally thinking of self-publishing but again, I want to hear your thoughts and advice on the matter.

 

[Tuffsy]

This may not be exactly the same but I recently self published my music using a distributor. I was obsessed with the process for about 6 months and totally exhausted. I had to do all my own promotion and advertising and I wasn't very good at it, I'm a musician after all. This process started to get in the way of my creativity and I couldn't mix music and publishing in my daily routine. So for me it wasn't the best way to publish my music. Plus it wasn't as cheap as I thought as there were advertising costs which got too much for me to justify. I won't ever recover my costs. In terms of satisfaction, probably not as much as I wanted.

 

[maycontainthunder]

I watch with interest. I have something I'm working on that I'd like to publish.

 

[Fino]

You could self-publish on Amazon for free!

 

[Gerontius]

Been there, done that. This ain't my first rodeo.

Publishing a book is going to be a lot of work. The first time I did it, took me five years to write the book to begin with, but that's because I had no idea what I was doing.

Get a good manuscript written. A damn good manuscript. That will save you the hassle. Take it and pass it around to other people, get their input, see what they think--if you're at a college share it with the nerds in the English classes because we love that kind of stuff.

Then go through the route of trying to find a printing house that will publish it. I write literary fiction--which is already a dead genre. Hence I have poor luck with that. Ask publishers (if they are new) have they broken even as a company. Go get involved with creative people.

I'll never recover cost of attempting to publish books -- not that I paid out of pocket but that I sunk hours and hours and hours of time into the work of it. On the fun side I learnt some rudimentary graphic design, a great deal of formatting and computer stuff, and all that. On the not-so-fun side, it's still hours upon hours of work because you're doing what in normal life would provide full-time jobs for multiple people.