ALTERNATIVE SOLUTIONS

( self-publishing , co-publishing and e-publishing )

 

Alright, now you've tried really hard, spent ages and a fortune, to locate a publisher or a literary agent, and nobody seems to care. But you still do. Care, I mean. You believe your book is definitely publishable and that your MS has just fallen through the cracks in the system. What do you do? Just file away your MS, pack up your dream and get on with the rest of your life? You could do that, I suppose. Or like some others (Mark Twain is a notable example), you could try something else : you could do it yourself. Just give it one last shot. And you have the possibility of some publisher actually liking it and taking over your novel. At the worst, you could get yourself a calling card, that can serve to place your second novel.

SELF PUBLISHING

You may have heard the term vanity publishing, to denote that the author, to satisfy his own vanity of seeing himself in print, prints on his own, a couple of hundred copies of his book and distributes them to his family and friends. Believe me, there's nothing vain about wanting to see your name in print. What the hell are you writing for anyway, if not to see your work published? The term I prefer, and one that is increasingly used nowadays, is SELF PUBLISHING. Except that the objective here is not merely to distribute the book to family and friends, but to actually try and sell it, and at least cover your costs.

For this to happen, you have to be writer, financier, editor, designer, proof-reader, distributor and salesperson, rolled into one. Basically, what this involves is that you edit your manuscript, design a cover and layout for your book, choose a printer, get the books printed, make arrangements to store the printed books, push your book to local distributors and bookstores, send review copies to well known and less-well known reviewers (don't be choosy, any review will do), put up a website advertising your wares, and monitor the sales and distribution process with the bookstores / distributors (who, you can be assured, will agree to display your book, if at all, only on a return basis: i.e. they'll pay you after hammering you down on the price, only for sold books. Don't argue with them. This is standard practice). If you'd like to understand what precisely is involved in the process of self-publishing, I would refer you to MJ Rose and Angela Adair-Hoy , successful self-publishers, who've written a book called The $ecrets of Our Success, details of which can be accessed from their website - Writers Markets or Writers Weekly at which you can also subscribe to their newsletter. Also an excellent place to visit for a lot of details and tips on self-publishing is Don Poynter's Para Publishing web site

Or you could do what Colin Macpherson of Queensland, Australia did. Set up your own publishing company.

Colin Macpherson, a physicist, a teacher, an inventor, a farmer, a boat builder and also a novelist, wrote a book called THE TIDE TURNERS. Since his MS fell through the publishing industry's cracks, and also since the book transcended genres, he couldn't find a publisher. Ultimately, he decided, with the active support of his wife, Maggy, and a few of their friends, to start his own small publishing business and MOPOKE PUBLISHING was founded. The Tide Turners is sold mainly off the Internet and those of you who intend to set up your own outfit would be well advised to visit his website. And since Colin is a friend, and indeed till recently a card-carrying member of the Unpublished Authors' Fraternity, you might also be advised to order a copy of his book (available through a secure credit card server at his website ). If we can't support each other, who else will?

 

CO-PUBLISHING

If you feel you don't have the stomach to become a self-publisher or do what Colin did, consider Co-publishing, which is also referred to as Subsidy Publishing. What happens here is that your efforts are confined to writing the MS. The rest of it from designing to marketing is done by your co-publisher. You can, of course, be involved in every stage of the process, including the promotion of the book. But the catch is that you will have to pay either some part or all of the costs involved in publishing the book . In exchange, you get to keep the rights of your book (you can, under notice to your co-publisher, sell the rights of your book to any other publisher, at which point the co-publisher removes your book off his list) and you also get a higher royalty payment for each book sold (sometimes, though not always as high as between 40 and 60% of the published price of the book), the balance being the co-publisher's costs and margins). The co-publisher uses a process called print-on-demand, storing your MS on optical discs. This is basically a DTP variant and the publisher needs to print copies of the book only against firm orders without the hassle of a minimum print run, which bigger publishers have to do.

But before you consider subsidy publishing you need to be fully aware of the risks involved in the process. It is, as will be apparent, a high-risk affair and you need to have all the data you can possibly get before you decide on this route. The following sites may help.

 

E-PUBLISHING

The increasing popularity of the Internet has spawned a new generation publishing process : ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING or simply, E-PUBLISHING. Your MS is stored in a PDF (Adobe) or similar format on your e-publisher's server and visitors to his website are given the opportunity, on payment of a fee, to download your MS on to their computers to read it at their leisure. The e-publisher pays you for each download, based on a pre-contracted formula. It sounds very high-tech, and personally I don't know that I would find great pleasure in reading a whole book on a computer monitor. But apparently its working, going by the large number of e-publishers in the market.

If you're interested in finding out some more about e-publishing, you might want to visit the following site to get the hang of the whole thing.

The following are the sites of a few e-publishers I have come across, although I must emphasise, I have no personal knowledge / experience of them .

In India, the following sites may be useful to visit:

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