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    Paths to Publishing: Common Sense Writing and Publishing
    Paths to Publishing: Common Sense Writing and Publishing
    Paths to Publishing: Common Sense Writing and Publishing
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    Paths to Publishing: Common Sense Writing and Publishing

    By Jana S. Brown

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Updated for 2023!

     

    You finished writing a manuscript! Congratulations!

     

    Now what are you going to do?

     

    Contact an agent? Send it to a publisher? Self-publish? Find a company to help?

     

    What does all of this mean?

     

    How do you choose what comes next?

     

    Author and editor Jana S. Brown invites you to take a seat at her virtual table to discuss these questions and a lot more. In this book she'll talk about:

     

    Traditional Publishing
    Self-Publishing
    Hybrid Publishing
    And all the fuzzy stuff in between.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpal Kingdom Press
    Release dateOct 23, 2020
    ISBN9781952415029
    Paths to Publishing: Common Sense Writing and Publishing
    Author

    Jana S. Brown

    Jana has long been in love with writing, entertaining folks with stories whenever the chance occurred. These days her writing happens in the mountain valleys of Utah, while taking care of a busy family of loving husband, three amazing kids, and one crazy cat. She enjoys making everyone’s day surreal, good books and good food.

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      Book preview

      Paths to Publishing - Jana S. Brown

      Paths to Publishing 2023

      Jana S. Brown

      Opal Kingdom Press

      Copyright 2023 Jana S. Brown

      ISBN- 978-1-952415-01-2

      All rights reserved

      Cover Design by: Melissa McShane

      Cover credits: Download e-book @ grgroupstock

      Cross roads horizon @lightsource

      No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any way whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      First Printing

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      To Authors Old and New seeking their own paths to publishing.

      Contents

      1.Introduction and Notes from the Author

      2.Traditional Publishing

      3.Steps of Traditional Publishing

      4.Pros of Traditional Publishing

      5.Cons of Traditional Publishing

      6.Independent/Self-Publishing

      7.Steps to Self-Publishing

      8.Pros of Self-publishing

      9.Cons of Self-publishing

      10.Hybrid Publishing

      11.Pros of Hybrid Publishing

      12.Cons of Hybrid Publishing

      13.The Other Hybrid Publishing

      14.Vanity Presses

      15.Choosing Where to Start and What to do When It’s Not Working

      16.With a Little Help from My Friends

      17.A Word about Artificial Intelligence (AI)

      18.In Conclusion

      19.Definitions for Publishing Terms and Abbreviations

      20.Average Word Count Information

      21.Resources and Quick Links

      About the Author

      Acknowledgements

      Introduction and Notes from the Author

      Who am I?

      My name is Jana S. Brown. I’m an author, editor, presenter, and book marketer. I’ve been involved in writing and publishing for nearly 30 years and have seen a lot of changes in the industry in that time. After many years working for various companies as a writer, editor, and slush reader and pursuing traditional publishing, I self-published my first novel in 2017. These days I continue to put out books under three pennames run a household full of people and pets, cook and craft up a storm, and help with editing, coaching, and marketing for authors in many stages of their career.

      Why this book?

      Because it’s an amazing accomplishment to complete a manuscript, but it’s often as much work to figure out what to do with one as it is to write it in the first place. I spend a lot of time talking with authors as an editor, a coach, and a peer. Over and over again I see, and answer, questions about which path to publishing is the right one for this book, and how do you know what you need to do and where to start?

      There are a lot of books floating around that answer these questions, or at least aspects of them. I suppose I could just create a list of those to share every time the questions come up, but in the long run I’m a writer, and writers…well…we write. So, I’m going to do my best to answer these questions by breaking the processes down and defining the common publishing options (and the pros and cons of each) in language that is as simple and straightforward as possible.

      The truth is there isn’t one right path to publishing, but there are definitely some really good places to start, and the more you know, the easier your choice will be. As it was once said on a children’s cartoon, knowing is half the battle.

      In this book I’ll cover:

      Traditional publishing

      Self-publishing

      Hybrid publishing

      And most of the fuzzy stuff in between

      All of the information in this book will be as correct as I can make it as of the beginning of 2023. I’ll update as often as it makes sense to.

      As well, there is a glossary of publishing terms and definitions at the end of the book, so you have a fast reference for anything you don’t remember.

      That said, pull up a virtual seat at my table, drinks are in the fridge and cookies on the counter, and let’s get down to business.

      Traditional Publishing

      It might be an amusing exercise to dig into the long history of publishing and printing houses, but it wouldn’t be particularly useful for our discussion, so I’ll refrain. You can go down that rabbit hole on your own thanks to the internet, but it’s enough to say traditional publishing is called traditional, sometimes legacy, because it’s been around for a long time.

      But what does that mean for an author? When we talk about traditional publishing, what do we really mean?

      Traditional publishing is a process of publishing based on publishing/printing houses who acquire a specific license to produce and sell an author’s manuscript (intellectual property) in a specific format, to a certain geographic location, for a specific amount of time. These licenses can be as broad as all rights across the world forever, or as specific as only e-book, to Timbuktu, for 30 days (That last is an exaggeration, the first…not so much. There are presses that will seek license to a maximum number of rights forever, and they should be avoided like the plague). The publishing house shoulders most, if not all, of the upfront costs of the production of the physical or digital product, and a certain level of contracted marketing expense in exchange for retaining a percentage (often a very large percentage) of the royalties created from the sales of the completed product(s).

      Traditional publishing houses are usually grouped by size (meaning how many books they produce in a year and how wide their distribution arm is) and referred to as large, medium, small, or boutique presses or houses. Some people also group magazines and newspapers into traditional publishing, though instead of being called publishing houses those are referred to as media outlets. They generally contract for very short pieces or articles for a shorter period of time than is typical at a book publishing house.

      Large publishing houses are called that simply because they are large. They have many authors they put on contract, and they put out many books in any given year with a wide distribution. These houses tend to have the best contacts with large physical bookstores, and the cash and clout to place thousands of copies of the books they produce all over the world. On the top of the traditional publisher heap in fiction are a set of trade publishers we often refer to as the Big Five which are: Penguin Random House, Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, and Simon & Schuster. (In 2022, there was a buyout going on to make these the Big Four. That effort was halted by the Department of Justice, but it would not surprise me to see more consolidation happen in the future.) Many popular, and even fairly large, presses are gathered under the umbrella of each of these five publishers. Over the years, there have been mergers and splits and other things, so the number of top publishers has changed before, and probably will again, but it’s usually under ten.

      Education publishers have their own publishing houses and some of these are bigger than the top trade publishers. The Big Five in educational publishers are: McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Pearson Education, Scholastic, and Cengage Learning.

      Within large presses you often have smaller presses, or imprints, which are a focused branch of the business that will acquire manuscripts only in specific genres, languages, etc. For example: Tor Books is a large imprint under Macmillan, where they publish primarily science fiction and fantasy. Under Tor Books are other imprints like Starscape which publishes science fiction and fantasy for readers aged 10 and up, and Tor Teen for readers over 13. The Forge imprint is for thrillers and historical. Employees of Tor may work for Tor in general, or on a specific smaller imprint.

      So, you can see how the branches work from a top publishing house, down to each imprint publishing house and imprints of the imprint to cover the most publishable categories.

      Medium presses are, again, much what they sound like. These are presses that do the same general job as the large publishing houses, but they work with fewer authors and books over the course of any given year, and usually have smaller marketing and distribution budgets and fewer contacts. Many medium presses are specialty presses who focus on distribution in a certain part of the country or world, or work with specific genres only. Authors published by medium presses are often required to take on most of their marketing, as well as creation of cover blurbs and other production tasks that are fully covered at larger houses.

      Small presses and boutique publishers are the tiny publishing houses of the world. They work with a much smaller stable of authors and may only put out a book a month, or even a book a year or a quarter. These publishers may be staffed with as few as one or two people or up to ten. A small press often has very little budget for marketing and physical distribution, and most of those efforts will rest on the authors. As electronic distribution options have increased, small presses have been able to reach out more than ever before, and some authors with a small press are able to make a very solid living. Some of these smaller presses refer to themselves as Independent presses, which is different from an author who is independently publishing, which we’ll get into a bit later.

      A myth I want to kill right now is the idea that traditional publishing means an author doesn’t have to market or know anything about marketing. That’s utterly false. If you have a contract with a large publishing house there is a possibility that they will be willing to put money into a marketing campaign for you, but it’s only a possibility. They have a certain marketing budget, and the biggest part of that budget goes into titles and authors who are already making them money, or books by celebrity authors where they know there is a name-recognition market. If you’re hoping to get a contract with a Big Five publisher and then just ride on your laurels, you’re setting yourself up for failure. While some of the biggest names in publishing are contracted with these houses, most of them work very hard to connect with their readerships and remain relevant on top of producing fantastic books.

      Traditional publishing casts a wide net for debut authors because no one knows the secret for what makes a break-away hit. By signing contracts with a lot of authors they increase their chances to find a J. K. Rowling or a Nora Roberts, but if your sales numbers on your first contracts don’t bring in enough money there are no guarantees that any other

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