Tom Graves - How To Publish Your Book: The Simple ABCs of Traditional Hard Copy Publishing and the New Ebook Market

HOW TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK

The Simple ABCs of Traditional Hard Copy Publishing and the New Ebook Market

by Tom Graves

ISBN: 978-1-61842-204-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Also By Tom Graves

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*winner of the Keeping the Blues Alive Award, Literature, 2010

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Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson

Copyright 2011 by Tom Graves

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without permission of the publisher. All photographs that appear in this book are also Copyright 2011 by Tom Graves.

Rhythm Oil Publications

2197 Cowden Avenue

Memphis, Tennessee 38104

For that one hungry student in every Creative Writing

class who really wants to write

Intro

This brief guide on the simple ABCs of how to publish a book was not written by an author with a shelf full of books who has made it to the top ranks of The New York Times bestseller list and has an extensive readership devoted to every word Ive written. No, it was written by a writer, me, who has struggled with the written word my whole adult life, been rejected by every major publisher more than once, and only twice have had real books published by real publishers, and minor publishers at that. Ive been signed by several top literary agents for numerous projects and not one of them has ever sold one of my books. Nope, I sold them myself, literally within weeks of being dropped by the agent representing me.

Im writing this guide because Ive been there in fact, I still am there suffering the slings and arrows, the misdeeds, the misdirections, and the ups and downs of a very strange, elusive business that has been turned upside down in the past few years by a series of events: the introduction of the ebook, Amazon.coms dominance of the hard copy trade as well as their thriving market in used books, the oversaturation of big chain bookstores that were never founded on a sustainable business model, and several other factors.

If you are trying to publish (and perhaps even write) your first book, you need a GPS of sorts to get you there without detours and side treks. The real nitty gritty. This book is it. So, without further ado

Lets Get To It

A week ago, while I was grading papers in my office at the college where I teach, I got a phone call. As happens several times a year, someone, probably another professor on campus, referred a wannabe author to me. Im the go-to guy for anything to do with writing and publishing at my school. The caller wasnt a student, but knew someone on campus who knew someone else who knew to go to me.

These conversations invariably start out with the wannabe (notice how I keep using that word) author telling me he or she has written or wants to write a book and wants me to give them a crash course over the phone on how to publish this book. The first thing I ask, before we ever get into the details, is if the caller has previously published any of his or her writing.

Why do I ask this question? Because it tells me everything I need to know about the writer, what level of expertise he or she has and if they have a clue what theyve gotten themselves into. Most of the time, they dont; they dont speak the language of publishing or writing and dont have the foggiest notion of how to go about preparing their manuscript for publication or what is involved once the book is ready to be marketed. They dont know the first thing about literary agents, small presses, those big boys up in New York at the major publishing houses, what the deal is with the new ebook market such as Amazon.coms Kindle, royalty rates, contracts you get the idea.

If a wannabe (yes wannabe because most people who get in touch with me havent published a word and barely even know what good writing is, much less professional writing) has no previous publishing experience, I gently but firmly tell them theyve got a lot of homework to do before they get to the point where they can publish a book. I then give them a run-down of some things they strongly need to consider before moving forward. Then I send them on their merry way.

In this mini-guide, I hope to give you a simple but effective primer on how to move forward with your book. If you are unpublished and in the same predicament as those callers I just described, dont worry my advice here is just as good for the rank beginner, the novice, as it is for well-published writers who want some good advice and tips for navigating the shark-infested waters of book publishing.

Yes, I may tell a few anecdotes here that I think will help you better understand the world of publishing you have entered, but I plan to keep this mini-book short and sweet and get right down to brass tacks. There are quite a few highly successful writers who can populate a shelf with their fleet of books and have bank accounts big enough that they actually have to fret over their taxes. But there are many thousands more who are like me those with a few notable successes, a few books with our names on the cover, and years of struggle and failure that go along with every achievement.

This guide is meant to give you an overview without any sales pitch and the truth of precisely what is expected of you to publish a book. No more, no less. It is the kind of to-the-point guide I wish I would have had myself as a beginning writer.

Because this book is written for you, the writer who wants help navigating those twisty roads and byways of the publishing highway, I would like to know if I have succeeded in helping you. I invite you to email me at pullers2004@yahoo.com to tell me what you think. If there is something you needed or wanted in this guide that wasnt provided, I want to hear about it. I want to improve this little book until it becomes the indispensable text for those ready to take their initial plunge. If you like this book, think it gives you bang for the buck you spent for it, then tell others. Please, please, please, if you are a fan, write a blurb with a big bunch of stars with it to places like Amazon.com. Good reviews are the best publicity I can get. If you have a problem with the book, write me and tell me personally please. I will do everything I can to make this the best mini-guide available anywhere. I promise.

Okay, About That Book Of Yours

A Note for the Novice

(and You Published Writers Too)

All right Mr. or Ms. Novice Writer, either you have actually accomplished the unthinkable you actually sat down and wrote an entire book or you are contemplating doing the same, either by yourself or enlisting the aid of a co-author or ghostwriter to help you with a book.

Let me take care of the latter first thing in this chapter. If you have an idea for a book, but youve never published anything and know that your writing skills are, shall we say, limited, you are going to have to be brutally honest with yourself about the chances of any financial or critical success with your book idea. They are practically