There are many steps involved in publishing a book whether a major publisher is the one in charge or you’re a self-publisher making the decisions and doing the work. But it’s not rocket science. Today’s technology makes it fairly simple for anyone who has written a book, and who is somewhat computer savvy, to also self-publish it.

How To Be A Self-Published Author: A Step-by-Step Guide provides the steps to self-publish your book whether you use a subsidy publishing house or you do everything yourself. I’ve tried to cut out extraneous information and give information that will allow you to actually have your published book in your bookcase as well as for sale through Amazon.com, other online retailers, and perhaps even brick & mortar booksellers without going broke in the process.

My name is Pat Gaudette and I am the author of seven published books (they’re shown in the left sidebar). The first, How To Survive Your Husband’s Midlife Crisis, was published in 2003 by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The next six I self-published. Several more books are in process and will also be self-published.

If my first book was published by a major publishing house, why would I self-publish the rest? The truth is, I presented the idea for my next book to my literary agent and editor but neither was interested. I didn’t take their lack of interest personally because I know very few books presented to major publishers are accepted. Rather than spend the time shopping my book around to other publishers, I decided to self-publish.

My first efforts weren’t without problems but everything has a learning curve and I kept going until I figured out how to successfully self-publish that book and the ones that followed. I self-published five of those books in the same length of time it took for the midlife book to be published.

The number of manuscripts accepted for publication by major publishing houses continues to dwindle as the number of book authors increases and as the big publishers face economic hard times. With stockholders to please and bottom lines to meet, profit is the goal and always has been.

Rarely do major publishers take chances on unknown authors or unique topics, focusing instead on the guaranteed profit that a proven best-selling author or someone famous or notorious should bring in.

So what do the rest of us do? We have a completed manuscript but now what? Do we send it out to publishers and collect reject slips in the hope that one will see its merit, pay us a big advance, publish hundreds of thousands of copies, and send us on an all expenses paid major media blitz? That rarely, if ever, happens.

Even if a publisher is accepting manuscripts for review, they’ll usually want them submitted by a literary agent. Most successful literary agents don’t care to represent an unknown or unpublished author. They also are looking for the guaranteed return for their efforts since they get paid a percentage of whatever their published author earns.

If you’re one of the lucky ones who is able to find a literary agent willing to represent you, your work isn’t over. Your agent will submit your manuscript to potential publishers but there are different submission requirements for fiction and non-fiction.

Fiction is easier to submit since an author can provide a few chapters for the publisher to read to see plot and character development and writing technique. Non-fiction authors must write a book proposal to show how the book will make the publisher money. The book proposal will explain the topic, provide reader demographics and why they need this book, list competing books in print, provide marketing strategies, and include one or two chapters from the manuscript.

Exhausted from trying to get a publisher or agent to see the value in what you’ve written? Ready to do whatever it takes to see your book in print? Now is the time to put on a self-publishing hat and publish it yourself.

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