Friday, 9 November 2018

Important Things To Know About Working With Independent Book Publishing Services

By Helen Fisher


Aspiring writers should know that the publishing industry has grown increasingly smaller over the years. Apart from a handful of struggling, little literary publishers, there is a very limited number of actual publishing houses. Consolidation has left this industry without a ton of competition. This is one of many reasons why people are opting to work with independent book publishing services instead.

Commonly called print-on demand services, companies like these can print copies of titles according to the level of market demand that they are generating. This eliminates the potential for wasted copies and money when sales are slow. Authors can place new orders for additional copies whenever sales start to rise again and new readers begin expressing interest.

From an author's perspective, this is an excellent way to get a title in print when there are no publishing houses or agents that have expressed interest in this work. It is usually the case that agents and printers only focus on well-known authors who have already established a track record for impressive sales. Breaking into this industry as an unknown author is becoming increasingly difficult.

When hiring these entities, you must note that they are not going top offer the exact same range of services that can be found through a more traditional service. As an example, marketing is something that you are going to have to handle by yourself. A lot of these companies do not offer this support for free.

Service options might exist that provide added marketing support for a charge. These are usually available at reasonable prices. When using this support, you may be given access to a vast network of contacts for setting up readings, promotional events and other sales efforts.

An additional form of support that may not be available to you as an independent author is cover design. In order to truly promote and sale your book well, you need to have cover art that captures the attention of your targeted audience. This means hiring graphic artists or other artists to do this work for you. It additionally entails establishing a reasonable plan for paying the artist, whether through royalty sharing or upfront.

Find out how much a publisher is going to charge before deciding to work with this entity. There are a number of publishers that will do this work for a single upfront cost. Others will want to take a percentage of your sales. If this number is reasonable enough, however, the available services and support may prove worthwhile.

See whether digital formatting is available in conjunction with physical printing solutions. This is certainly important to do if your audience is in large part committed to using e-readers for their books. For an added costs, many service providers will handle this formatting and can even distribute the resulting work across a variety of appropriate platforms.

It is always a good idea to find out what other authors are saying about these companies before using them. This will help you determine the quality of the results supplied and the ability to generate profits from the resulting works. When authors are extremely happy or dissatisfied with these services, they often leave a lot of very candid feedback online.




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