Lesson 3 Study Notes: Publishing Options
- Now, publishing options. There are three writing styles, and I know some of you have done dissertations or whatever. The APA, the MLLA, and the Chicago style. Now the Chicago style is the style that traditional publishing houses use. So if you're trying to do a work that will be picked up by a major publisher, you need to start from the beginning, focusing on how they do things, what their expectations are.
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You don't want to write a book and then have to rewrite a book to be picked up by a publisher and some of them, if it's already published, they're not going to accept it anyway. And if you're unfamiliar with that writing style, you can add the Chicago Manual of Style by the University of Chicago Press staff to your library, or the Kate L. Turabian, her book is really, really good on
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writing styles and formatting and all of that. Now, traditional publishers, there are three different types of publishing. You have the traditional publishing, you have the hybrid publishing, and you also have, I don't know what happened there, you also have the self-publishing. So the traditional publishing is prestigious, oh, Random House took my book, oh, yeah, oh, really?
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And a lot of people still into well, who published it? Back in the day, if you weren't published by a traditional publishing house, they, no one took you seriously. It was like there was a time when online education was a joke. Now, every university has the option of online studies.
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Publishing houses, traditional publishing houses still are prestigious, but not as much as they used to be. Yes, you get an advance, but the disadvantage to the advance is that you have to work hard at selling your own book and marketing it, and you will get no royalties until you have paid them back the advance. The advantage of the editing, the copywriting, the legal aspects, everything.
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They take care of all of that. They provide the team. They take care of the copywriting and such. There's a lack of creative license. You have to change what they tell you to speak in, and you rewrite as much as they tell you to rewrite.
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The main thing for me about the traditional publishing house is that something that I can self-publish once I'm done, it can be on the market in three days, may take three years with them. Yeah, it may take three years and they take all your money. They are looking for people who are famous or who have large, huge audiences that they can benefit from your name recognition. The only way that you can get into
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a publishing house is that you have a literary agent. There's a big hustle there on the part of the traditional publishing houses. It's glamorous in appearance, but financially, you may not do so well. Again, if you're a Colin Powell, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama,
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John Maxwell, then yeah, fine. You'll do well. But if you're not up in millions of followers, hundreds of thousands of followers, they may not even look at you, much less print your work.
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Why? Because you don't have the wherewithal in their thinking to make them money. Bishop, how much more time do I have? I'm over time. I need only about five more minutes.
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Five more minutes is good.
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Okay. Thank you. Because we do want to leave it. I do want to have at least a 10-minute Q&A for questions that the students have.
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Okay. I'll rush through this because then they may have the questions about it. Thank you. The hybrid publishing, less prestigious, but it's a blend between self-publishing and traditional publishing. Basically, it provides you, if you want, with the staff and the team to get everything done for you,
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and you just give them the book, the manuscript, and they may design the cover for you. Or if you want to pay more and turn things over to them completely, then they will do that for you. The thing that I find with the hybrids is that you need to be careful because you may get tangled up in some copyright issues. I'm struggling now with a company because I want to take a book off of Amazon,
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but because they put it there as the hybrid publisher was part of the package that they gave me. Amazon will only release it if they release it. They've had such a turnover in agents and all of that. I'm having problems getting to someone who can say, oh, yeah, sure, we'll pull that.
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Traditional publishing, less prestige, but that's not so much an issue now. Flexible publishing time, you don't get in advance, you build your own team. There are no copyright issues, total creative license, and maximum royalties. And you can go to Amazon Publish for free, and they charge you for printing if you want
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to do bulk, get a box of books for yourself, just little or nothing. And the luxury that I like with Amazon is they only charge you printing and the cost of shipping, and you can charge the client whatever you want for the book, and that's where your money comes in. If they charge me $250 to publish a journal and then charge me $250 to ship it, that's five bucks, but I can charge 25 bucks for the book.
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Okay.
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So, don't get afraid to self-publish because you can build a team, you're not alone. And part of what you need to consider is a writing or book coach who can say, no, you need to do this, you need to do that. Okay, your next thing is this. A proofreader, and some people just have a good eye, but a proofreader is different than an editor.
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An editor is going to deal with your sentence structure and the cleanness and conciseness of your writing and the order of things and formatting all of that. You need a graphic artist if you want to self-publish to really create a magnificent cover for you. A marketing and branding consultant would be good, how to launch the book and how to keep going with pitching it and marketing it. Or publishing consultant who will guide you through the process with decisions to make,
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should you try to get it ready for should you try to get it ready for traditional publishing house or what have you.