Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Flibble
Thanks for your responses guys and good luck with your own books.
I tried a few agents but most didn't want to know because the only publishing past I had was in a scientific journal. and none of them gave me a reason why. I did pay a known fantasy author to review the work so I knew it was not a load of crap. It had also been written and produced as a play before it was a book and was quite popular when it was put on.
As for publishers I had another book which was a review of Disney animated movies and that was with a publisher who basically held it for about a year and pissed me about because they kept prioritising other titles. then I was told the owner fell ill and they were just not moving forward with it. So I waited until the contract expired before publishing it myself here: http://www.lulu.com/gb/en/shop/phili...-22579245.html
I initially published that one through Publish Nation but when I discovered they were doing it through Lulu and that I could do it all myself for nothing I self published this new one.
I'm trying to market it by emailing bookshops like Waterstones but mostly independent ones. I may try emailing some schools but I'm not sure how fruitful that will be.
I wanted to turn both into ebooks but they keep getting rejected due to formatting. The Disney one I don't think I can do. Lulu offer a service to do it for you for $799 which converts to just over £600. Well I doubt I'd shift enough copies to justify that expenditure.
In short there is little money to be made from writing books these days, It can only really be done if you like writing. |
I have some templates for uploading to Amazon as a kindle formatted ebook. I know some things can be a nightmare getting the dimentions, fonts and page breaks right. I'll dig out the files and stick them in a dropbox link if you want them (just need to remember what hard drive I have them on!). Definitely don't go through Lulu for a conversion...worst case scenario have a look on Fiverr.com and you would get someone who could format it for probably $50 at most. Fiverr is one of the best places anyone doing indie stuff can look (in any branch of work). The cover of this book of mine (
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grim-Reapin.../dp/B009T6VFSW) was done by someone on Fiverr for around £75 - before that I was getting quotes of £400+ for similar (and it is a full A4 wraparound cover - and he also sent me all the original sketches and stuff he did).
This was the original cover (
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Grim-Reapin...=UTF8&qid=&sr=)
On Fiverr, you just have to find the right people but you can literally get anything (I do puppet promotion videos on there and a couple of voice overs - I used to do transcript work for a while when I needed the money and before my other ventures kicked in properly)
Just as another thing, check out someone like Feedaread.com for print books, or if you want to cut out another middle-man go to someone like Lightning Source (who are part of Ingrams who do IngramSpark as another option), but for Lightning Source you are effectively the publisher yourself so you buy ISBN numbers and they simply print your book (and when you go through someone like Lulu they effectively just pass your book to someone like Lightning Source to print - which is why you usually pay more). I know IngramSpark wasn't around when I last published, so I'm not sure how they compare to others, but Feedaread was pretty cheap to publish an on demand paperback.