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Getting Published

© Richard Loeffler

So you've written a book and now you want to get it published? You are a new author, you don't have an agent, you don't have a publisher. Where do you go? What do you do to get published? The easiest and fastest way to do it is to do it on the web. There are several ways to go about it.

You can do it yourself. If you have a web page, you can put sample chapters on your web page and offer to deliver part of your book free to anyone who is interested in the hopes that they will become enthralled enough with your story and characters that they will order the whole book from you. This is the easiest and least expensive way to sell your book. It takes some promotion. You will have to buy ads on web sites and in e-zines but you would have to do that anyway if you really want to sell your book. One of the drawbacks is copyright infringement. Once you sell a copy of your book to someone, you have little control over what happens to it next in terms of other people getting to read it without paying for it. The real difficulty here is that the better the book is, the more likely it will get "passed around", either in electronic or printed format. This where the electronic publisher comes into the picture. There are several forms of publishing on the web. You can use the straight text file as we just discussed or convert your book to OeB (open ebook standard), used by Rocket e-book Reader, or Adobe Acrobat PDF files. Some publishers supply all three, some only one. The difference is that OeB is only readable on the Rocket e-book Reader and is not transferable to any other device, and is not printable. Your book is more secure than if it was printed on paper. It can still be read by a third party but only if the first person lends his reader to the third party. It cannot be photocopied or reproduced in any way. Adobe Acrobat PDF files are formatted so they are easily readable on your computer. They are printable and can be shared. It was announced this week that Adobe has come up with a method of making their files secure. It works like this: the customer downloads the book from the web and when it is paid for he gets a "key" that "opens" the book. The "key" is only good on that machine, making the transfer of the file useless. It should be available in the new year.

The copyright of the article Getting Published in E-Books is owned by Richard Loeffler. Permission to republish Getting Published in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.