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eBook Category: Self Improvement/General Nonfiction
eBook Description: When you've written a book you want to see it in print. You want people to read and enjoy it. The only thing standing in your way is the publishing industry which rejects 98% of the manuscripts submitted to it. Why not skip months of collecting rejections from publishers and simply join them at their own game? Anyone can publish their own book, and the cost can be as little as zero. Stewart Ferris created the UK's first self-publishing agency in 1993 with Alastair Williams, offering authors all the services and advice they needed to convert their manuscripts into printed books and to get those books selling in the bookshops. In this easy-to-use book he explains everything you need to know to be able to publish and sell your own book, whether in printed form or on-line as an 'eBook'.

eBook Publisher: Summersdale Self Help/Summersdale Self Help
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2007

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AS AN AUTHOR you already know that it isn't easy to persuade a publisher to splash out a considerable chunk of money on editing, designing, printing and marketing your book. It can take years before you strike it lucky, and even if you finally get a contract signed it will be a reminder of who is in charge: the publisher. They will typically hang on to as much as ninety per cent of the income from sales of the book. They have to. They have to pay staff, office bills, print bills, marketing bills and the mortgage on their second home in France. That leaves you, the author, coming to terms with the reality that you won't be able to afford to give up your day job on the royalties from one book alone. Even if you had a dozen published books, assuming they had average sales rather than being bestsellers, you would have to think twice before telling your boss where to stick it and marching confidently home to your new working environment; your shed. Why not turn the whole thing on its head and put yourself in the position of publisher as well as author? That way you'll keep that ninety per cent as well as your author?s ten per cent. Deals don?t get much sweeter than that, do they? But, of course, there?s a time and a financial investment associated with publishing your own book, and with any investment comes risk. By committing your own cash to the project you have to be prepared for the possibility that you will never see that money again. It?s something that happens to all mainstream publishers too: not every title they produce will sell enough copies to earn back their investment. Publishing is about gambling. Publishers have even been referred to as ?bookies with A-levels?. Experience in the book industry is the only tool available to reduce that risk, and if you're lacking in that department then it?s reasonable to say that you'll have a better chance of making a profit by betting two months? wages on a horse than by publishing a book. Self-publishing means that you, the author, pay for and control all aspects of turning your written words into a format suitable for dissemination amongst the general public. The format could be a printed and bound book or an electronic simulation of a book, known as an eBook, which can be bought and downloaded from the Internet. Whichever format of book you create, you will be starting a publishing company. Most people do this as sole traders, with no legal formalities to worry about when starting up. Printing isn't difficult, either ? you just have to pay a printing firm to do it. So why do you need this book to help you publish your masterpiece? What you do between finishing the writing of your book and handing it over to a printer can be the difference between success and failure. Success means a profitable project that actually results in people reading your work; failure means you end up with a pallet of books that sits in your garage gathering dust until you eventually decide to use the unsold copies as firelighters. Worse still, failure means that hardly anyone reads your book. There?s no point in spending your life savings on publishing a book if no one buys it. You want people to enjoy your writing, to think of you as a bona fide author. You want to recoup your investment so that the exercise doesn't appear to your friends as folly.