The point is, I thought I had reached the Mother Land! Everything is downhill now, right? The book has been written, now it's off to the printing press and the amazing word of mouth the book will receive will create sales from the ether! My part in this is done. Let the publishers market it and manage the rest while I get back to the fun part, the creation phase. I guess, subconsciously, I knew there was at least a little more 'post production' work I would have to do, but I did consider, in my wide eyed and child-like innocence, that most of the work was done. Wrong! So here's my experience of the post work that comes after the super fun creation work.
The novel is finished. Well, as much as it can be, because let's face it, we, as novelists, could carry on forever revising and editing, making it just a little better. But we have committed to letting it go, to letting our need for perpetual revising to just end. I submitted my work to many different publishing companies. What a short sentence that was to describe the angst involved it that! It wasn't dealing with rejections that authors seemed to be plagued with. I kept the attitude that submitting my work was half the battle. I even planned on framing my first rejection letter as proof of the effort. The hard part about submitting my work to different publishing houses was the formatting requirements. Each publishing house wants specific guidelines followed for your submitted work and it is vastly varied.
From margins to headers, to page numbers to title pages, here's what I ran into: publishing company "A" wants a header with your last name and email address at the top of each page of your manuscript. Publishing company "B" wants no page numbers and only wants the title of your manuscript at the top of each page. You phone number and email address must be on the title page. Publishing company "C" only accepts manuscripts with one inch margins and your last name should appear on the top of the page, left justified, but only at the beginning of each chapter, etc...the specification went on and on. Because of it, I found myself spending massive amounts of time before each submission reading though the requirements of each house and formatting my manuscript to their specs. After all, I didn't want my book slush piled(can I use those words as verbs?) just because I didn't follow the requisite formatting guidelines for that particular publishing house, right? So I trudged through it, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting, reading the guidelines, formatting, submitting...oh! And not to mention the time spent before all that finding a publishing house that accepts the genre I write in. No sense in sending a publisher of romance novels a sci-fi, right? The process was grueling, and not fun, especially when all I wanted to do was to get back to that fun creation stage.
Eventually, two publishers wanted to publish my work. I guess they saw my magnificently formatted content and thought, "Hey, if nothing else, this guy can follow formatting guidelines!" Never mind about content! No, I'm sure(telling this to myself, now...) that the content was the driving factor for acceptance. So I was emailed a contract to peruse.
Upon reading the contract, I was simply not impressed. I would make less than a dollar a book sale. I would be required to purchase a minimum of forty books, and I would have to market it on my own. Is this what publishing houses are doing nowadays? So I took a step back for a moment. Here it was, the coveted book contract, the pinnacle of what I was after, and now the feeling was simply flat. It took the air out of my sails, that's for sure! I weighed the options and decided that I would explore the idea of self publishing.
The main thing I was after when I decided to sell my book wasn't money or fame or really any of that. It was a simple thing really. It was simply the confirmation that I was a good enough writer to have my book published one day, at some point, to call myself an author. So after the mad formatting and submittal dash, after I received the contract to simply sign and send back, I realized that the contract itself was confirmation enough. A publisher saw my work and decided that I was good enough to publish. I understand and acknowledge that publishers are taking a huge risk on a new author and spend little of their budget on marketing for first time novelists. I wasn't offended at all, just surprised that that's how it worked.
I decided, after some research, that if I were going to self publish, I would still be responsible for marketing and trying to sell my book. No advantage to having a publisher there. I would make more money on each sale. No advantage to having a publisher there. The only advantage I saw was the professional name behind my book, and the professional formatting service they would provide to make my book look as professional as possible. Unfortunately for them, the process of submitting my work made me an expert at book formatting! I decided to self publish and see how it went.
So four months after I finished my book, I had still not published, and decided to self publish. I mistakenly thought the majority of time to publish a book was the writing! Not true at all! That's the fun part. The next part in the process is what everyone in the self publishing world calls 'discoverability.' The journey was just beginning. I will expound on this process and what I experienced in my next blog. Hopefully, this blog will serve to demystify the publishing and querying process. I hope it will help anyone on a publishing mission to understand the process as I have come to understand it. Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss the process of discoverability. In many blogs of this type, people never tell you the hard sales numbers. As I work through the process, I will be transparent with this.
Buy My Book Here!
Buy My Book Here!
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