Dear Maggie,

I am ready to publish my first book, and I’ve got several prospective publishers on my list. I’ve done all the research and gathered all the details, and the only things that seem to be different between them all are the prices. I’ve seen them for as little as $599, and as much as $1,600. Of course, they all charge extra for things like editing, and embossing on the cover, and advertising. Which extras should I pay for? Which ones are worth the money? And which company would you go with? I can hardly wait to get my book out there!

Best,

Hopeful Author

Dear Hopeful,

Well, you haven’t done all the research or you’d have learned that’s not the way commercial publishing works. I was lucking that early on, a fairly famous author told me to repeat the following mantra to myself in the mirror until I knew it by heart. “I do not pay people to publish my stories. They pay me.”

There are several types of publishing. Self publishing, in which the author pays a company to print her work into book form. In this publishing, the author gets full responsibility for selling those books, they never see a bookstore shelf unless the author personally puts them there, (if the bookseller will allow it) and the author keeps all the money from the sales of her books. The average self published book sells about 100 copies. Most of those to the author. A “best-selling” self published book is one that sells 500 copies. Those are facts.

There is also vanity publishing, which differs from self publishing only slightly. In this one, it works the same way, but the company offers more help (everything for a price, though) and also offers help in selling the books (which does not work.) In this publishing the author pays for everything and the publisher keeps part of the money from the sale of the books. And there are many companies that blend bits from each of these types together, so the lines are blurring.