{"id":2083,"date":"2013-02-19T14:45:44","date_gmt":"2013-02-19T04:45:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/?p=2083"},"modified":"2023-12-28T12:44:17","modified_gmt":"2023-12-28T02:44:17","slug":"anatomy-of-a-book-the-road-to-publication-look-before-you-leap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/2013\/anatomy-of-a-book-the-road-to-publication-look-before-you-leap\/","title":{"rendered":"Anatomy of a Book\u2026 The Road to Publication\u2026 LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP"},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, so you\u2019ve written a book. Okay, so you want the book published. So what do you do? In a\u00a0recent blog post<\/a>, I mentioned that authors need to be wary of offerings by \u201cvanity\u201d publishers, and \u201cvanity\u201d publishing \u201csolutions\u201d offered by \u201cbig\u201d publishers.<\/p>\r\n

There are different roads you can take\u2026 and all of them involve an investment of your time and emotion. Some of them involve an investment of your dollars. One of the options, where an author invests dollars, is not worth the dollars spent. Nor is it worth the emotional heartbreak of the dollars spent.<\/p>\r\n

The\u00a0Australian Society of Authors<\/a>\u00a0(the ASA) has classified book publishers in three broad categories: commercial publishers, self-publishers and vanity publishers. You can read the ASA\u2019s full description of publishers\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n

A commercial publisher \u2013 either a large commercial publisher or an independent publisher \u2013 is responsible for originating the production of a book and bears the cost or the financial risk in making a book available. Basically, they take on the financial risk of publication in order (hopefully) to retrieve their costs from sales of the published book.<\/p>\r\n

With a commercial publisher, the money ALWAYS flows to the author. Large commercial publishers have larger budgets and can \u201coffer\u201d larger advances to authors than small independent publishers (like BDA Books), but the money always, ALWAYS, flows to the author, whether you get a deal from a small or large commercial publisher. I say \u201coffer\u201d in inverted commas (or typographer\u2019s quotes for the typographer geeks) because the size of the advances for first time authors (and even mid\u2013list authors) are not as large as they once were. It\u2019s really only the big name, well established authors (authors who\u2019ve been \u201cin the game\u201d for 15 or 20 years with dozens of books under their belts) or \u201creality celebrities\u201d who get the \u201cmega\u2013millions\u201d advances.<\/p>\r\n

Self-publishers (more often than not\u00a0called independent publishers these days)<\/strong>\u00a0are authors, organisations or others who have decided to take on the role of the commercial publisher themselves and take on the costs of publication and take on all responsibility for marketing and distribution. I prefer the term independent publishing: indies take on all the roles that a larger commercial publisher takes on: editing, proofing, typesetting, cover design, printing and the rest\u2026 all on a much smaller budget.<\/p>\r\n

A\u00a0vanity publisher<\/strong>\u00a0is one who takes money from someone else \u2013 usually the author \u2013 in order for a book to be published and this transfers the cost or financial risk from the publisher to the payee, i.e. the author.<\/p>\r\n

Vanity publishers EXIST on the fees paid to it by authors. They charge for editing, cover design, ISBN allocation, printing, distribution. These fees are more often than not PHENOMINALLY higher than the going rate that an author could achieve if they decided to self publish. I mean charging like a wounded bull\u2026 The \u201ccheapest\u201d packages go as low as $1,000. You can\u2019t get a decent proof read, let alone a cover design, formatting, and the rest, for that! The \u201cbest\u201d packages cost in the order of $25,000. That\u2019s right! $25,000! And authors often tend to lose out in terms of control \u2013 more often than not, the ISBN issued by a \u201cvanity\u201d publisher is in the \u201cvanity\u201d publisher\u2019s name (meaning it cannot be used with a printer other than the printer chosen by the \u201cvanity\u201d publisher) and the authors are bound by unreasonable release terms for their work (meaning the author does not get their rights back for anywhere up to seven years).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\r\n

With commercial publishing (if an author ever gets to know the cost that their commercial publisher spends) and self publishing, the costs of an editor, cover designer, printer, proof copies are not insignificant in the eyes of an author. But authors, books, and readers, get better books when a book is published when published by a major commercial publisher or an\u00a0independent publisher.<\/strong>\u00a0The author is, and their readers are, worse off going with a vanity publisher than they are if the author went with a commercial publisher or self published.<\/p>\r\n

Vanity publishing is the one option where, in my view, it is not worth the effort, both in dollar value and in emotional value.<\/strong><\/h3>\r\n\r\n
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Okay, so you\u2019ve written a book. Okay, so you want the book published. So what do you do? In a\u00a0recent blog post, I mentioned that authors need to be wary of offerings by \u201cvanity\u201d publishers, and \u201cvanity\u201d publishing \u201csolutions\u201d offered by \u201cbig\u201d publishers. There are different roads you can take\u2026 and all of them involve … Continue reading “Anatomy of a Book\u2026 The Road to Publication\u2026 LOOK BEFORE YOU LEAP”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[16],"tags":[33,129,44],"class_list":["post-2083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-publishing","tag-books","tag-publishing","tag-writing-resources"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/376404214-02.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2100,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions\/2100"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bdabooks.com.au\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}