When you first look for a publisher, the choices can seem daunting. You need to consider so many different aspects that many give up at this point and another potential famous author could be lost forever.
We started in the same way, the hard way, and we learnt which cobbles we needed to lay to pave our way to publication. Cordelia had a book to publish, in fact she has a whole series of books. But for the first book, to get it out into the real world, we looked for a publisher, we found many established publishers that would be happy to take our money, but with no certainty that we would ever see a return. Reluctant to part with our hard earned money on such a vague promise we decided to go it alone. This blog is our experience and why we decided to offer our services to others.
First, we had a book to publish. From the multiple ways to do so, we decided to follow the E-Book approach: modern world, modern ways, move with your time. One essential initial step is to find out if the book is any good. It is a hard thing to do to show your labour of love to critical eyes and accept feedback, but it is a must because we all learn by our mistakes. So we showed portions of the book to a few friends and got a thumbs up .
The next step is to get a book professionally proof read. At that point, we seemed to be back in the realm of having to pay out substantial sums of money for little more than someone saying its OK and correct so few. However we were lucky to find someone that had an enthusiasm in reading books and a willingness to provide a valuable contribution on minor changes and corrections, so we had found one of our proof readers.
Now for the book cover/the graphics: if you are a whiz with Photoshop or similar professional quality software then you could do it yourself, otherwise you will have to find a professional graphics artist that can give your book cover a special quality. Again luck played a lot in this and we were fortunate to find someone that had a special flair for graphics design which gave us that edge. Cordelia, being artistic, drew what she wanted, and the graphic designer put the flesh on her bone structures.
Then comes the publishing. There are very few large E-Book publishers that are not US based. Therefore, one small matter is to get the right documentation from the IRS to avoid losing a big chunk of your income as tax. This alone took one member of the team nearly 2 months to get it sorted out, and only after forming a local company to support our application. The final steps are to get the E-Book in the right format be that Kindle, or EBook etc. and then publishing it for the world to enjoy. The most important matter is coordinating everything. Our first book took us a year from start to publication, our second 6 weeks. We now have the cycle refined down to a coordinated process, involving most of the people we found at the start.
Our journey started with one writer wanting to publish her book, and we learnt from scratch how to do it, step by step. It was neither easy nor simple, Yet it was demanding and exciting, so much so that we created a company to help every budding writer out there to get their words printed. Be an Author, grab our hand and let us help you get published.