How to Publish a Book.  How often has this question been asked by aspiring authors?

According to Google, about 33,000 times every month.  There is a pretty good chance that it isn’t the same person or even people every month.  This is some small indication that there might be few people who have written a book and would like to share it with the wider community.

The answer isn’t as simple as it might seem.  Publishing your book can take years.  In that time you will have to send your manuscript off to hundreds of publishers or publishers agents and get lots of ‘rejection slips’, but not your manuscript, back from most of them.

Lets begin by determining what a rejection slip really is.  What it is is the publisher rejecting themselves.  They are telling you that, good or bad, your book doesn’t fit their criteria for their editors.  Or they are telling you that they are just so overwhelmed by other manuscripts that they don’t have the time to read one more to even decide if they want to publish it.

What it isn’t is a rejection of your book. It certainly isn’t a rejection of you either as an author or as a person.  Stay confident that there is a publisher or agent out there who will publish your book, all you have to do is find them.

When you do find a publisher it can still take another year to get your book polished, printed and in the book stores.  At this stage though you no longer have control of your baby.  The publisher will probably ask you to re-write it several times before they are satisfied.  Then they’ll commission a graphic artist to do the cover, you may be asked your opinion but not your decision.

Once your book is finally on the shelves the real work begins.  Yep, you’ll have to do promotional work.  Radio and television appearances, book signings, book shows, telephone and face-to-face interviews and anything else they decide will help sell your book.  But they are generous, they might give you an advance to keep you happy and the end result in your bank account is about 6 – 10% of the sale price.

Here’s a great post on the realities of a New York Times best seller.  And the follow up post with the 6 month update is more on the realities of a New York Times best seller.  When you look at the profit for the publisher and the fact that the agent makes more than the author you are probably wondering why you would do that.

But what’s the alternative?  There is always self publishing.

Self publishing has become more popular with the advent of POD, Print on Demand, companies.  The idea is that when you are ready to publish you send the POD people (sounds like some alien life form) your manuscript as a PDF and the graphics you want for the cover and a deposit to cover some of the costs of your print run.  This is virtually the same as traditional self publishing except the print runs are a lot smaller and the amount of money you need to stump up first a lot less for POD.

Then you do all the promotion.  Yep, everything.  You arrange the radio and television interviews.  You send out press releases and do the interviews.  In addition you also have to find distribution companies who will add your book to their catalog and carry stocks for the retailers.  You will also have to make sure you have enough cash reserves to take any returns if you do get into a retailer.

There is one other method of self publishing which is rapidly gaining in popularity.  That is self publishing on the Internet.  There is an unlimited number of potential readers, you can control all aspects of your new book from cover (actually just the graphic of the cover) to where you will put your marketing efforts.

There are downsides to this as well, you will have to learn the language of the web to find a web host, create your web site, set up the security, set up some way of getting paid, delivering the book.  Then you need to learn about how to drive eager buyers to your site and write the blurbs which will entice them to buy.

While there are fabulously well paid authors in all areas of publishing you will get to keep so much more of each sale if you self publish on the Internet.

Since you are a writer and probably don’t want to learn how to set up and maintain an eCommerce website Bearly Books has done that for you.  Bearly Books is totally dedicate to teaching you how to find buyers, how to self publish your book, how to write a book and help you in all aspects of going from idea to published author.

And you can do all of that at no cost to you.

Join Bearly Books today and learn how to publish a book.