There are lots of folks who are turning to publishing their own books using independent publishers like Harmon Press. It is much more simple to be published by such a publisher than to spend endless time waiting and hoping to find a traditional publisher who not only likes their work but actually publishes their genre. Before Print on Demand, this approach was often seen as a final desperate attempt to get into print. But, as rock star Bob Dylan said in the ‘60s, “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” With the continued rise of the entrepreneurial spirit, aspiring authors have rightly turned to independent publishers where they take on more of the risks but have more control over their publishing future.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…,” so says Charles Dickens in the first line of A Tale of Two Cities. When you look around as an aspiring author, when things look bleak, that is usually the best time for you to invest in yourself and find a way to have your works published. It’s time to push your publishing project to the top of the list, finish that manuscript, and get it published. Harmon Press is perfectly suited to help you reach your publishing goal.

Here are four helpful hints for you to consider.

Potential Income Creation. Go out to purchase almost anything that is consumable and the end result is that you take your hard earned money out of your bank account instead of putting some funds back into your bank account. Wanna spend or invest? What part of your income will it take to get your manuscript into print? If you spend money on getting your book published, that is an investment for you. At Harmon Press, we have made it easy to get published with only two upfront costs, buying 50 books at 50% off the Suggested Retail Price (SRP), which is set by Harmon Press according to the final page count of your book, and having your book proofread because you don’t want to look bad in print. It is always the right economic climate to invest in yourself.

New Opportunities Come With Change. If your book project helps the reader, then why not make the investment to do so. Books are written for many different reasons. But, if your book can help your readers find harmony for their lives, even for a brief moment, or reduce their stress level and provide them with a future hope, then set up to the plate and get it published. You probably know stuff that some tribe somewhere needs and wants to know. So provide it for them.

If It’s Too Good To Be True, It Probably Isn’t! This old adage is a handy tool to remember as you wonder through the pages of publisher sites who are proposing multiple packages for their wares. So be on guard as you survey the publishing world to get yourself into print.

Create Space to Write. Lots of folks dream of going off to a writing retreat where they can clear their mind of the mundane and feel free to create their own masterpiece. That can be a costly experience, and while it could be fun, it might not produce the results that you had hoped for. So, what to do? Find a suitable place in your home and turn that into your special “space to write.” Make it fit your personality. I once read a small sign and it now hangs on the door to may office, it says, “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” Well that fits me, but it might not fit you. So, make your writing space fit what allows you to be most creative. Then sit down, or stand up, and write.

Remember, the right time to publish is now, not later.

Where in the world can you find most all the information that you need for marketing your book successfully? The answer is both where and who. The who is John Kremer and the where is 1001 Ways to Market Your Book. In his book, you will find hundreds of applicable tips to help you move your book out the door. Check out his web site at www.bookmarket.com. You can find lots of goodies like author resources, email tip of the week, and marketing reports. It’s Gold!

You may want to learn some of the following:

• How to sell your book through retail outlets
• How to utilize tele-seminars and marketing seminars
• How to create a compelling website on a budge

Don’t be overwhelmed by all the information on Kremer’s site. Just take your time and focus on what you need answers for. I know, I know, it’s like being a kid in a candy shop when you first arrive. So go ahead and grab a handful of his tasty treats, but remember, that if you are patient to go shopping through his whole domain with intention, it will be very profitable to you. It’s a virtual DIY heaven.

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of his book 1001 Ways to Market Your Book either here or on his site.

If you are lucky enough to have found a subject you feel passionately about and have already managed to write a book about it, your job is almost done. However, not all of us are that lucky. While we may enjoy writing once in awhile, posting occasionally on blogs or online forums, writing for a book requires not merely a different kind of writing talent; you also need to determine what you are going to write about. So if you have already written your book, you don’t need to read any further, but if you haven’t written or finished writing, you might find some important information to help you along your journey.

How do you find a marketable subject and content for the book you would like to write?

When the idea of writing a book strikes you, your first instinct is to begin writing at once. In fact, most budding writers are told that they need to write down whatever comes to their mind even if there are major revisions later. Perhaps, in some sense that is a good idea, but not always true. As you begin to write, you need the seed of an idea for a book. As the idea begins to grow, your books will take more and more shape. Here is where you have to get more selective; i.e., to decide what you want to write about and to whom you are aiming the book, i.e., who is your audience.

If you would like your book to be well received, you need to realize that your book will need to be well-written. Then you will need to learn how to market your book beyond your friends and family. Harmon Press will provide you with tips to make you a success in this area, but you have to do the hard work. The larger the number of people buying your book, the more successful your book will be. Therefore even if you have some idea of what you would like to write about, you need to see how receptive the current reading community is to your subject. For example, on almost any day, how to lose weight or how to develop a healthy lifestyle are really hot topics. But, there are thousands of these kinds of books. On the other hand, some books start off in absolutely uncharted waters and yet become huge successes. Take The Shack for example. Determining what subject to write about, especially one that guarantees a fairly large readership, is not going to be easy. However, by following some techniques that we mention below, you can make a genuine attempt at finding topics that can sell.

The very first step you will need to take in this regard is to identify the number of people who you strongly believe will be interested in the topic you are writing about. See if you can notch up a significant number of potential readers. Of course, like many new authors, you may also truly believe that there are many out there who are just waiting for a book like yours, thinking that if you write it they will read it. However, you need to be more practical and make a realistic assessment of who might be interested in your book.

Once you have a number, you need to understand what this means and what we mean by significant number of potential readers. If you are writing about the history and traditions of a very small local community or trying your hand at a new kind of fiction, for example, even a few hundred might be a significant number. On the other hand, if you think you have created an interesting detective character that will take the world of who-dunnits by storm, you may be looking at hundreds of thousands of readers. It is up to you to decide what kind of audience will be interested in your book and the number you can safely say will be interested in your book.

You will also need to carry out some kind of market research on your subject. The best place to begin is at any one of the online bookstores such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Google Books. Search for books written on a subject similar to yours. You will then know what the current interest in that subject is as well as where the present competition stands. These sites will also indicate what sales figures for those books are, which can be very indicative of what a good book on that subject can possibly bring.

If you are keen on your subject, do not be disheartened if the numbers are not encouraging. On the other hand, if you are open to suggestions or are flexible, within limits, about the choice of topic, you could consider writing on something more popular. So, before you proceed further, do some market research, identify a marketable topic, and then continue writing your book based upon your findings.

Another very important aspect of writing a book is to give the book a good title. Typically, most traditional publishers do not go with the titles originally thought up by the author. These titles tend to be too functional, and publishers are looking for titles that are not only attractive, but also appealing. While the choice of a title may not make too much difference to the success of the book, it is obvious that an intriguing title will push more people to at least look at the book than what an ordinary title would have done. The title typically tells the potential reader what the book aims to do and the subtitle gives readers a compelling reason to buy it. For example, the title Eating Your Way to Weight Loss is an interesting title for a book about weight loss and the subtitle, Lose weight by eating healthy, not less tells the reader why they should buy it. Further, it is not the readers alone on whom the book has to make an impression but also on bookstore managers who like stocking books that have catchy or distinctive titles. Therefore, once the book is completed, take some time researching on what an appropriate title for the book would be. Look at other similar books and see what kind of titles and /or subtitles are being used. Do they use any idioms or clichés suitably modified to reflect the content or do they perhaps use some wordplay? You could also just go with the kind of feeling your book evokes while choosing the title. At Harmon Press we will help you determine an appropriate title.

Note that a writer does not usually provide a novel with a subtitle—instead what is known as a “tag line” is very commonly used. Very often, this is just a clever marketing tactic and does not really appear on the cover of the novel. But the role of a catchy tag line in luring prospective readers is often underestimated.

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Consider Print on Demand and a valuable alternative to becoming your own publisher.

Ask any author—even the most successful one, and he or she will tell you that the process of getting a book accepted by any mainstream traditional publishing house is a slow, frustrating process. Very often you wait with great anticipation for a response from the publisher only to be told that your book has been rejected. This can really test your patience and worse still, dampen the enthusiasm you feel for your book.

It has been reported by “The New York Times” that “According to a recent survey, 81% of people feel that they have a book in them…and should write it.” If you do the math, that represents over 200 million people in the U.S. who want to write a book in their lifetime! No wonder self-publishing is thriving as never before! That’s a lot of books for traditional publishers to publish.

In that sense, self-publishing removes the need for someone else to like what you have written. But, as we suggested in an earlier post, that may be an expensive road to follow. More often than not, even if the editor in charge of your book loves the motivation behind the writing of the book, loves the ideas and simply loves the way it is written, it does not prove sufficient enough to merit publication. The decision about whether or not your book should be published will depend on a number of other factors over which you have no control like what kind of a market will the book cater to, what has been the success rate of similar books in similar markets, what is the budget of the publishing company, and what the management thinks about the saleability of your book.

Self-publishing will certainly allow you to drastically reduce the time between finishing the final version of your book and bringing it into bookstores, sometimes up to two years for new authors. This also means that you may make more profits than as an author being paid royalty. Instead of having to be satisfied with the ten or fifteen percent of the income generated from sales, you can pocket the entire income made by selling your book. Sounds good huh? What’s the catch? The finances to start your own publishing company or to purchase 1500 copies of your books and pay for the shipping and then find a safe, dry place to store them. Not to mention how you will get companies like Amazon.com to put it on their website.

If you are seriously considering turning into a self-publisher, you must be warned that you can start earning profit only after you have made enough to cover the costs of designing, typesetting, printing and marketing. If, unfortunately, your book does not do well, you may barely earn enough to cover these costs, in which case, you would have been better off taking the royalty money offered by a a Print on Demand publishing company like Harmon Press. There have been cases of self-publishing where the author has lost all the money invested.

Antidote: Let Harmon Press be your Print on Demand publisher.

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So you wanna know about Print on Demand publishing. Keep reading!

If you are an author, you know how difficult it is to convince a traditional publisher to invest money in your book towards editing and designing, printing, publicity and eventually, selling the book. It may take years before any traditional publishing house agrees to publish your book and even then, the main party making any kind of income from the sale of books will be the traditional publishing company. From the income generated by the sale of your book, the traditional publishing house typically gets to keep about ninety percent! Of course, they will justify this by saying that they will need to cover the expenses involved in publishing the book, like staff expenses, cost of printing, publicity and marketing, office bills, and so on. This is when the hard reality of the traditional publishing world hits you. Unless you churn out a huge bestseller, the money you make as royalty is not going to be good enough for you to be able to do the one thing you have been dreaming of—saying goodbye to your day job to continue writing. Well, even if you use Print on Demand, you may not get to do that.

Which brings us to the topic of our discussion. What if you were told that there was a way in which you could act not only as an author but also as a publisher? By self-publishing, you will get to keep the entire income from the sales of your book to yourself! What could be sweeter than that? Nothing, if you have a bit of experience in publishing like typesetting, cover design, getting books printed, distribution, and so on.

In the self-publishing business you, as the author, have to invest the money and also manage all aspects of the publishing process from editing to actual sales. You can decide what form your written word has to take. You may choose to go in for a traditional form of the printed and bound variety or the more recent, non-traditional form of ebooks that can be bought and then easily downloaded through your website.

Whatever form you choose to publish your book in, you will need to first start a publishing company. If you start as a sole proprietor, you may not have to worry too much about complex legal formalities or tax issues. But, being a publisher is not a risk-free business. Similarly, getting your book printed is also not too difficult – you merely need to contact a local printing firm to do that. You may then feel compelled to ask—if self-publishing is so easy, why don’t I just do it?

Writing a book is not difficult—writing one with content attractive enough to make thousands want to read it is difficult. Even assuming you have written on a topic of great current interest, and many people have already expressed a desire to read it, marketing and then selling your book so that there is more visibility and more people buy your book takes some doing. You will, therefore, need to know what to write about so that people will want to read your book, how to give it a catchy title, get a good cover designed, and finally how to run a successful marketing campaign. Print on Demand publishing takes some of the pressure off.

As a Print on Demand publisher, Harmon Press does not run marketing campaigns like a traditional publishing house. You get to market and sell your own book. After all, it is your book and you are probably going to be the best person to sell it. We do, however, offer all authors some tips on marketing their book.

Please be warned that becoming your own publisher will require you to invest your time and money. And since there is risk associated with any financial investment, there can be some risk associated with the business of publishing. While you could be immensely successful and make tremendous financial gains, you could also end up losing what you have invested.

So why not let Harmon Press take the risk. You only have to invest in 50 books at 50 percent off the suggested retail price and pay for your manuscript to be proofread. We take take the risk of making our money on the selling of your book. You don’t have any overhead. We use print on demand technology to print your book one at a time or a thousand at a time.

Bev wrote a book, should she self publish using Print on Demand? Read on!

Bev had worked as an executive assistant at a local software company for the last 15 years. Both her children had received scholarships to good colleges, and Bev knew that she could now take a break from work. However, she did not want to take a complete break and thought it would be a good idea to work from home as a Virtual Assistant. Bev was very successful in getting clients who knew her from their previous interactions with her, but soon found that working from home was not as easy and smooth going as she had thought. Gradually, Bev worked out methods and techniques to get work done at home without distractions and without missing deadlines. She was so successful that she slowly expanded her business and hired people to work as Virtual Assistants. Her success made many of Bev’s friends and family members suggest to her that she should write down her experiences as a How To guide for those who wanted to start their own Virtual Assistant business.

Bev thought that was a great idea and since she had kept a journal through all those days of setting up the business, she could easily write about the challenges she had faced and mention with pride the solutions she had found. Very soon, she had her book ready. She titled it: Finding Success in the Virtual World: Guide To Becoming a Virtual Assistant. She sent it to a great many publishers and was not surprised when she received rejection letters from all of them! Bev did not lose heart. She kept trying to sell her book to various publishers, but the rejection letters kept coming in. Finally, some of her friends suggested that she try the option of Print on Demand publishing.

Initially, Bev thought that they were merely pulling her leg. However, when her friends explained to her how she could find a publishing company, just like Harmon Press, and write and publish not just this one book but also many more, Bev was intrigued. She knew that it would not be easy but then that had never stopped her before. Slowly, she became excited at the thought of publishing her book and decided to take it up in full earnest.

If like Bev, you think you have written a bestseller but are disappointed at the lack of interest shown by various traditional publishing houses or if you think you have a talent for writing and fear of rejection is stopping you from writing, Print on Demand publishing could be the ideal avenue for you.

Harmon Press is a full service print on demand publisher, created for people just like Bev, and possibly you.

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