subject: Getting Your Novel Published May Require You Learn How To Publish Novels [print this page] Once you've written a novel, you come to the hard part: getting a novel published. You'll not be satisfied until it's published so that others can read it. It's not only important to create it, but to share it with others. For that, you may have to publish your own novel.
It's not easy to interest a regular publisher. Usually, they are only interested in looking at what an agent brings them. They rely on the agent to distinguish the commercially viable from the money losers. They seem to have outsourced the major joy of being a publisher -- finding, molding, and promoting new authors.
It's hard to get an agent interested. An agent wants a slice of the pie, so there had better be an obvious pie to take a slice of. To make a living, an agent needs to pick a good number of financial winners, and the easiest way to attempt to do that is to choose works that resemble what the public has purchased in the past, assuming they want the same thing, only different. If you're not an established author, or you do not write well for a niche in a commercial genre, you may have trouble getting the novel published.
For most people writing their first novels, the end of their effort was a manuscript in a drawer waiting to be thrown out upon their death. (These days, it's more likely to be irretrievably recorded on an obsolete medium.)
But you want to get your book out where people can read it. An agent and a regular publisher is worth a try, but if that doesn't come through, you can consider self publishing.
Self-publishing used to mean press runs of hundreds of books and costing hundreds or thousands of dollars. It could mean devoting a spare bedroom to cases of books.
With print on demand publishing, you can buy as few books as you wish, even one, and that at a modest cost. You can sell them or give them away a few at a time. You can sell them online. You can hold your printed book in your hand.
You can promote them on radio talk shows. You can make them available through bookstores. You can try to prove that there is enough demand to interest an agent. It is so easy and inexpensive to sell books online that you will be tempted to do it without doing all the work normally required. Before you try playing with the big boys, read Dan Poynter's Self-Publishing Manual.
The old constraints no longer bind you. You can self publish without fear.
