Getting a Book Published...Your Way

By: Jason Fox
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:42:59
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With the big Greyhound hitting every pothole in the road possible, my old lap top rattled around on my lap like a whistling tea kettle, but never before had my finger landed on a key so smoothly. It was the letter “T” and the last word was “forget.” The book was finally finished.

Like any college student, it was hard for me to find time to finish writing what had matriculated into a short novel, but there turned out to be no better time to finish writing my book than during the 8 hour bus ride from Syracuse to Pittsburgh during winter break of my freshman year, 2004 to visit some of my best friends from high school.

I figured the easy part was over. I liked to write, I finally had a big bulk of time to get my thoughts together on paper and organize the gibber jabber, so the next step was what to do with the 50+ typed pages I had of my baseball story. None of my friends had anything published, and neither did anyone else I knew, so I did what any other college kid looking to get a book published would do: I looked up “book publishing” on the internet. Sure enough, I came across Publish America.

It seemed too good to be true at first as I read through what Publish America was all about. All I needed to do was send them an e-mail with a short abstract, explaining what my book was about, and attach the book as a document. Although I figured it was too easy to actually amount to anything, I had a spec of hope, so I followed the directions and sent away the e-mail, still feeling empty and unsure with what to do with my writing.

To my surprise, only a few days later, I received an e-mail from a very helpful woman on the editing team that said something to the effect that Publish America wanted to give my book a shot and that they would need my mailing address so I could fill out all the necessary information to send the book over to be published. I immediately wrote back, telling her how excited I was and asking her if there were any “catches” or “loop holes.” Her timely response told me to look over their terms on their website. They were a one of a kind publishing company, and they want to expose authors that otherwise cannot be exposed due to financial restraints or other reasons. All I needed to see were the following bullets on the FAQ page of the website, and I was sold:

* PublishAmerica adheres to the traditional publishing concept: we assume all financial risks and all expenses, we earn our income by selling books, and books only.

* The author pays no fees of any kind, at any time. We want your book, not your money.

The process was virtually painless and surprisingly quick as I received the necessary paperwork a week later and took the time to fill it all out. After they received the paperwork back from me, I was then responsible for editing my book before it would be sent to editing one final time before publication. I was very pleased with how easy the process was, as one of the people I worked with at Publish America wrote in one of our e-mails, “At Publish America, the author has really only one obligation: to provide us with the completed final-version manuscript. We’ll take it from there.”

In only a matter of 4 months, I received my first copy of my own Published book, “The Game of a Lifetime,” and had my own link to purchase the book directly off line at Publish America:
http://www.publishamerica.com/shopping/shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes.

A few months later, I received notice that the book was then available on BarnesAndNoble.com, Borders.com, as well as Amazon.com. I was ecstatic, and quickly spread the word by telling all of my friends and exposing the respective links on blogs, profiles, anything I could find. The book is selling still today from anywhere from $9.99-$12.99, and I make 10% of each book that is sold, and that percentage goes up once the total number of books sold reaches a certain number. I get royalty checks twice a year, and am proud to say that I am a published author. If you are a writer and have some ideas in mind, or even have something written from years ago that you had dreamt of getting published, send it over to Publish America. What do you have to lose?

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