How to Get a Book Published

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by EZPowell

So is there a magical and all encompassing answer to the question of How to Get a Book Published?

NO!

But there are some things you can do:

Find a literary agent. They know who to talk to at publishers and are the gate keepers. You try and get past your boss’ secretary.
Fiction (creative writing) or non-fiction (truth).
If fiction? Do you have a trust fund? If not, prepared to be poor, probably permanently.
If non-fiction you will unlikely make a fortune but you just might make a very meagre living. Non-fiction such as computer books have small, niche markets but they are definite sales. The sales figures are just not astronomical.
… and so on …

Ultimately there might be four primary ingredients to getting a book published:

Total, complete, unshakeable and of course completely foolish belief in yourself.
Years and years of persistence.
The ability to live on very little.
Lots and lots of time.
Some talent might help you to get over the final hurdles towards making a living.

The same applies to music. And like music, writing is tough and sometimes grueling but also very rewarding. And there is money in it – at least so I am told

The other solutoin is one I have not tried yet and that is that of doing the printing myself (paying a printer to print and bind a book for me). That’s expensive and “Maybe someday”. There is much to be said for vetting book ideas through a literary agent and publishers. They know what sells. Not much point in paying thousands to have a book printed, which doesn’t sell zip! Self publishing and print on demand are commonly known in the publishing world as vanity publishing. Vanity publishing works on a numbers game of lots and lots of authors paying the publishers. It’s not in the interest of the publisher to sell lots of books, but rather to print lots of books from lots of paying authors. It should make sense that there is something twisted there. So and print on demand publishers don’t care too much about sales but they want as many authors as possible. Real publishers on the other hand pay their authors and they have to make money, which equates to a small number of titles (authors) and lots and lots of sales. Hopefully anyway.