Alternatives to publishing your book

When you are a novice writer, the chances that you will find a publishing house that takes on your work are slim; of course, it is possible to get such breaks, but they are not as common as mass media books and movies portray. Yet, there are alternatives for a novice writer to being able to publish his or her work.

Shared publishing

Some houses like to try out new writers, but they are still a business that needs to have a secure gain to continue trying with new writers and at the same time being able to pay their employees. Therefore, they will publish your work just as long as you agree to cover half of the publishing expenses; you will have the endorsement of the publishing company and all the connections, you will just have to pay your half.

Author’s promotion

This means that the publishing house will agree to print your book, BUT you will have the sole responsibility to sell it nationwide. To achieve this, mostly you will have to visit libraries and other book stores and ask them to sell your book on commission, that is, if they sell any books, they will pay you minus their commission and they will return to you all the books that were not sold.

Publish online

There are many websites that will accept any and all works and present them to visitors, they will in turn participate on a voting poll and those writers whose books have the highest votes will be real-world published.

Submitting work for publishing

One of the most important things a writer can do is to submit his or her work to a publishing company. Getting published is one of the strongest achievements that a writer can obtain when he or she has completed a work, regardless if it is a book or a magazine article and without consideration on the type of text that he or she has written.

If you are a novice writer, you will certainly be tempted to send the whole work to each and every possible publisher, but there is no need to do that. It will suffice if you make a summary or even a condensation of the work that you have and submit this short compilation to the prospective publisher.

Keep in mind that it has to be short, but not that short that it will diminish the quality and impact of your complete work. That is, if your book is 300 pages, a 15-30 page summary will suffice.

But the most important thing is for you not to submit anything if you haven’t got your author’s registry yet. Once you have finished your work, make sure to make the short overall overview and submit that one too for author’s registry. As soon as you’ve got the registry for both of them then you are good to go.