joint publishing

hello, soit..

self publishing is great if you have a family memoir or some personal account you want kept in your family forever, hardbound and on a shelf. my woman's family has had it done to show lineage and tales. jen and i will do so ourselves one day for our family..

but for a novel or book, i'd say be very wary of giving your work away. very few self published books go anywhere. off hand, i think of The Celestine Prophecy and HoL. other than that, it seems very much less than one in a million. a self pub'd book that i've been championing for years, The Extinction of Rhinos in Mexico

http://www.amazon.com/Extinction-Rhinos-Mexico-Stephen-Blackburn/dp/0738...

has some fantastic stories and writing but has still not gone anywhere. and he mfa'd from a prestigious school. since then, he hasnt gotten a single novel sold, either. he's a struggling artist in LA last i heard. brilliant guy and his work will get out there someday, but i dont know if he was or was not better off with the vanity press.

another shake of the head for me when it comes to van pressing, there is no editor for one's work to filter and better through. opposed to a publishing house, you can have poor grammar and terrible spelling, no structure. the publishing house cares about the little things like that. a van press wont care at all so long as payment is rendered.

and here's a tough but often missed during strong consideration:
the books, if sold on amazon or in some way made available for purchase, there are no discounts and it usually takes two to six weeks to ship.

so, in brief why i have no faith in self publishing:

no editor, high costs, no return, hard to order. basically, you get nothing but the privilege to give your money away on a hope.

as for reasons..
so you have a book youve written. and your thinking about just putting it out there. have you tried submitting it? if youve been rejected a few times, you might try a more aggressive approach and here is one for example:

okay, so you finish your book and you revise it thoroughly for stupid mistakes, and txpos, dangling modifiers, abusive adverbs and whatnot. you really feel this is a good book. all you have to go on for outside observational opinion, though, is praise from friends and family. is that enough is not a real question because often it is not in the very competitive world of publishing. one thing you can do is find a journalist, or some other educated professional in the world of writing who can offer powerfully objective insight. locate one of those professionals and offer that person one or two hundred bucks to read you book and write some opinions for you afterward. i mean, dont be a dick and expect a line by line critical edit, because when all is said and done and the book is sold, you'll have an editor to work with til exhaustion, but instead just ask for a page or two of thoughts. take those thoughts to heart. rewrite your book. query for an agent and definitely let that agent know you hired a professional journalist to read your ms (manuscript) before your last revision. that will gather more interest from an agent and you get an agent excited about a book, that agent will get an editor excited about that book will get you a publisher and a contract.

good luck, anyway you go
-kabol

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