I can't seem to figure out the best approach.
There's self publishing, trade publishing, and vanity publishing.
Trade publishing is where a company pays you an advance and royalties on your sales, and publishes your book for you AT NO COST TO YOU. Your publisher edits your book, designs it, gets it into bookshops and online retailers, and markets your book. All at no cost to you. It's called trade publishing because these publishers publish books for the book trade.
Self publishing is where you do all the things a trade publishers would do. You can hire people to do things like edit your book and produce your jacket design, but you control everything, and do everything. It is a lot of work, and many writers find their sales are minimal, although some do well. It's very hard to get self published books into bookshops so most self publishers focus on digital editions.
Vanity publishing is where you pay someone to publish you; these companies make most of their money from the authors they publish rather than from selling books, so this is not often a good way to proceed. It is usually more expensive than self publishing, and it usually results in poor sales.
Not just Electronic or Print, I'm almost sure just to go with print for a bit.
If you're self publishing you'd probably be better off concentrating on electronic, or digital editions first. It's far easier to sell your books this way, usually.
It is the companies... It seems like one has to sign a contract just to see the offer. The 'A Company' has the most exposure and the most rules and gives you 70-80% of unknown numbers.
Most self publishing companies are actually vanity publishers in disguise. Be very careful. Don't sign anything without checking them out here.
If you're looking at any specific companies list their names here, and I'll see if we have any information on them at AbsoluteWrite which might help you.
Sure maybe easy, but I wasn't born yesterday, a percentage of unknown amounts means what ever the dealer deals. Alike not knowing how many decks are being used while paying black jack ! And I've been escorted out of casinos for counting cards. How does this all work?
You're right to be wary.
Trade publishers pay their authors royalties, which are a percentage of the income received from sales. So yep, it's a percentage of an unknown amount. But they pay an advance against those royalties upfront, which is based on the number of copies they think the book will sell, so the author knows the minimum they'll earn.
Self publishers also earn royalties when they list their books for sale on Amazon etc: these are, again, a percentage from each book sold. It's impossible to know how much you'll earn if you take this route: you'll earn a higher percentage per book than you would from a trade publishing deal, but you'll have to do a lot more work to earn it.
Vanity publishers also pay a royalty per sale and again, it's impossible to know how many copies you'll sell so it's impossible to know how much you'll end up making. The problem here is you'll almost certainly have high upfront costs, so you'll almost certainly lose money on the deal.
I keep searching and can't seem to run across where ya'll are talking about the subject.
If you ask a few specific questions I'll tell you which room you're best off going to for answers.
If you want to find out about specific publishers, go to our Bewares, Recommendations and Background Checks room.
The electricity from above seems like the best place so far, they have POD world wide so shipping should be almost the same as across the continental USA , no? At least with Little blank blank or the other just mentioned they tell you how much the printing costs are.
I don't understand what you're asking here, or which companies you're referring to. Please clarify.
So if it is $10 a book with shipping and one charges $20 one know one makes $10 per book , right ?
Wrong.
That's the amount the book costs to print and ship. But you also have to consider how much you've spent on editing, cover design, and so on. Those costs can be considerable. If you only sell a handful of copies, you'll end up losing a lot of money.
Where are these type of conversations going on? Ebooks seem great, but one thing at a time.
Those conversations are going on all over AW. As I said, if you ask clear, specific questions, we can give you a bit of help finding what you want but your prose is rather confusing, so it's difficult to know what you're asking, I'm afraid.
Tangible means more to my subject matter when the lights go out.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
