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.

Photo by FreeDigitalNet