What is Book Publishing and Publishing Books.Learn more about Book Publishers

Writing and book publishing your own book is one of the most rewarding activities imaginable. Having written your book learning how to publish your own book is a walk in the park.

Financing the Publication

First you should establish what book you are going to write and/or publish and you should know at a very early stage if you have a good chance of getting sponsorship. Many sportsmen and women for example are very interested in having their biographies put into print but they themselves cannot write their own material and they need people like you - ghostwriters. Many businesses including banks and financial institutions like to be associated with celebrity sportsmen and may be quite willing to give very substantial sponsorship for such a book. Being associated with the celebrity sportsman is good publicity for them. I know of a number of such sportsmen who were able to get in excess of $150,000 in sponsorship. The money is payable to you the publisher and you pay half to the sportsman. The other half is used for the publication costs - printing etc. I got very generous sponsorship for one of my first books from a Distillery. The subject matter of the book was the Wexford Gentry and early on in my researches I discovered that the family of the founder of the company was from Wexford. Because the management of the company did not know much about their founder they were very keen to be associated with the project and paid me substantial monies before the book was written.

Finding a distributor

In conjunction with finding sponsorship it is all important to establish a relationship with a reputable nationwide distributor. Contact someone of importance in the distribution company - possibly one of the buyers. The buyer will soon be able to tell you if your project is viable. Distributors work on the basis of volume. They don't want to handle books that will sell only 1000 copies. They want books that will sell more than 50,000 copies.

The Price of your Book

Pricing your book must be done at an early stage too. The first thing to do is to decide on the quantities of hardback or paperback books. When consulting the distributor you could tease out that matter. Then you get a quote from the printer when you are dealing with him. In this way you can work out the cost per volume. When consulting the distributors you will have already found out what margins they expect. In many cases today the margin is around 50%. So for argument sake if your cost from the printer is $10 per copy you would need to set a retail price of about $30 to make a profit of $5 per book. Remember too that if you are merely publishing the book the author will be entitled to royalties which is usually 10% of the net profits.