No, I'm not. Didn't mean to mislead. I 'm glad you answered. Any information is helpful!
I am currently working on a S&S book. I have 17 stories in different stages of completion.

I've been a ghostwriter over the decades - so far, all non-fiction. It's been high time to get my own name on my own books for a long time, but that's not happened yet unfortunately.

If you are looking into self-publishing, I highly recommend you check out Amazon Createspace. That's been a boon for several of my clients and when I get off my ass, its where I will focus first.

For how long it takes, that depends on the book and where in the process I get hired as the ghost. Usually, the author has an idea, opinions, scribbles and a chunky bank account. Sometimes, they come to me with dreadful complete drafts and other times I only show up to do final research, the final draft and the polish before it goes to someone else for layout.

That's one of my problems. I've never learned layout since I've just ghosted the content and not the full cycle.

PRO:
1) I get paid whether the book sells or not.
2) Lots of experience putting words to paper.
3) I learn lots of stuff that I would never otherwise research.

CON:
1) I have to excite myself about the topic, because if you don't have passion for the topic, the writing won't engage the reader and then you have crap. But damn, sometimes its hard to get excited about some topics.
2) My writing is on the shelves, but my name isn't.
3) Ghosts are...ghosts. We have word of mouth reputations, but since our work is confidential (usually under legal NDA style contracts) and nobody knows if we did 5% or 99% of a book, its hard to convince agents to consider your experience for the next gig.  
4) Motherfucking deadlines can be a bitch.
5) Motherfucking clients can be a nightmare.

Quote from: Monger;826598No, I'm not. Didn't mean to mislead. I 'm glad you answered. Any information is helpful!
I am currently working on a S&S book. I have 17 stories in different stages of completion.

S&S - Swords and Sorcery?

Quote from: Monger;826594I'm thinkin' the same way- If a publisher makes you pay for a "package" then there is zero risk on their part. Make sense?
I talked to the "big" publisher whom I won't name by name (Nelson) and they offered me .18 cents on the dollar IF they deemed my book worthy. It was the final straw! I worked 3 years off and on on a full length "helps" book. Some weeks I was so tired I couldn't keep my eyes open for 5 minutes to work on it! I asked them if they could defer costs until after publishing, believing "they need authors" as much as we need them. I guess I was wrong. Apparently publishing companies hold all the cards and don't need authors to make money at all!
They are always looking for the next mega-seller to make them millions on one book and in doing so turning down 90% of all new authors who can't simply can't afford $1500 for a package. Then they want to keep 70%! Balls!

I would guess there are a couple of ways I could go:
1. Amazon: direct download to the buyer but I think Amazon sticks a gun in your ribs also. I believe they want 50-60 % of your profits too.
2. My own website. I keep 100% of profits and pay an unknown but talented illustrator to draw for each of my stories. I heard buyers are reluctant to  purchase without pictures to see. But as was mentioned earlier, I then run the risk of embarrassing myself with bad grammar (though I have Spellcheck).

Are there any traditional publishers out there who value the writer enough to postpone payment or simply take payments??

It's extremely frustrating!

Welcome to the real world.

If you have finished the stories and want to self-publish, then there are a number of sites that are OK. I have heard good things about Lulu, for example. You will need to format the document as an Adobe PDF, need to get illustrations, if you need them and probably need a good cover page.

You could also create an e-book and sell that through Amazon, but probably don't need much in the way of artwork for that. At least the free books that I have read on my Kindle don't have artwork.

But, the publisher/website will take a large portion of the money:

• Website cut
• Publisher cut
• Production Cost
• Distribution Cost
• Advertising Cost

The rest is yours, but you would also have to pay the illustrator.

You probably need an editor and a proofreader, as well. They will take care of grammar and how the book reads.

Probably most of the people here who have experiences with publishing do so from a RPG point of view. That is a completely different market to selling short stories, or selling works of fiction. We have a small but captive audience, which guarantees a small number of books sold.

Yes, Sword and sorcery. I would prefer not to self publish. The benefits one gets from traditional publishing are enormous, specifically advertising and distribution. (tho I don't think the big boys advertise books much any more). Still, my book(s) would be right there on their website and picked up and forwarded to other sites such as Amazon etc...

I guess the real problem is cash. Perhaps the old saying is true: you gotta have money to make money.

Monger, you should absolutely try the traditional publishing route, but be ready for rejection and accept that possibility as okay.

I'm an ex-literary agent, ex-agent's assistant (yes, Entourage is kinda real) and I owned my own remarkably failed, utterly disastrous literary agency right out of college back in the 1990s (holy fuck I blew that!). The best advice I can give you about the traditional publishing route is this:

You do not get rejected because you work is bad. You get rejected because that publisher does not have faith they can make money from your work.

There's an important difference there. You may be a terrible writer, or you may just have not found the right publisher, or maybe the right publisher for your work does not exist at this moment. And 99% agencies don't have the time to tell you why you are being rejected unless you were almost considered. In those cases, you may get some feedback.  

I compare it to the music industry (which scares the fuck out of me...and I worked Hollywood and Manhattan). It's easier to sell a new record when your band's sound is the popular sound, or there is a known audience for that sound, but when the sound is new and the music company has no fucking clue how to market this band, then that band has a harder time breaking in.

In many cases, those bands had to turn to self-production.

Same with writers and all other artists.

Good luck!

Just what Spinachcat said.

I would say you should try to find an agent first if you're going to go the traditional route, but in order to do that you have to master another whole creative art form which is the agent query letter.  There is plenty of information out there about it.  I'd recommend you take a look at //www.sfwa.org and read How to Land a Literary Agent and How to Write a Great Query Letter by Noah Lukeman (which you can get free online).  There are plenty of other similar books and guides that are free or very cheap but figuring out how to get an agent requires work -- and that assumes that your novel is good enough in the end to get published.  I can tell you for sure that a vast majority of what people submit is not close to good enough, which is one of the things that makes getting good material noticed so difficult.  Agents have swim through oceans of crap to find anything good.  Go to a few writing workshops put on by professional agents where you swap manuscripts and you will suddenly understand just how bad the stuff people are actually submitting is.  Strangely enough, if you have something great, this doesn't work to your advantage.  It creates an environment where agents who do accept unpublished manuscripts are poised to reject everything they see just to be able to get through their submissions pile.  It creates the haystack that your needle gets lost in.

Another very good resource is a subscription to Publisher's Marketplace and Writer's Digest

Non-traditional publishing is becoming more and more acceptable rapidly.  Take a look at the Kindle Scout program for example.

I have a finished and polished novel I have been shopping around for a year and I haven't had a single request for extra pages from an agent.  There are many authors that go a much longer time without a bite and many famous examples of writers that spent years and years trying to get someone to publish books that are classics now.  Unfortunately, just writing something excellent really doesn't get you anything.  It's not the best writers that get published, it's the best writers who are also tenacious and/or lucky.  That's the plain truth.

Also, if what you have written is really great but does not conform to the accepted formula for "commercial fantasy fiction" then all i have to say is God help you.  All you're going to hear are little truisms about having to get to an action sequence within 5 pages and the reader has to identify with the main character within 5 pages and on and on, rules that seem to make sense until you realize that not a single one of their rules applies to your favorite novel.

No matter what you've written, it's a massive, unknowable amount of work in front of you to get that first book published, writing and rewriting your novel, sculpting and perfecting agent queries, submitting and resubmitting to agents and keeping track of the process,  submitting first 50 pages, entire manuscripts, then being rejected and starting all over.

My advice: make sure you have a day job.

General rule: do not pay for anything.  Not agent reads.  Not to get published.  There are a few possible exceptions. One is professional editing (if you have that kind of money) but if you feel that you need that you might ask yourself if you really think you have the grasp of language required to do what you're trying to do.  Of course some really good writers pay for a professional line edit just to catch those few mistakes everyone makes but that is a lot of cash for something that probably isn't going to make the difference.  But you never know.  

A fun fact about self-publishing: Self-publishing your first novel can work.  You might sell some novels.  In a very few cases people have hit it big on a first novel with self publishing.  Just know this.  If you do publish and your numbers aren't good, you will have a very very hard time getting anyone in the business to touch anything of yours in the future.  Selling 500 copies of your first novel might sound good to you, but if that's all it does it's like a death sentence in the industry and you are at that point committed to small press and/or self publishing.

The great thing about self-publishing is that there are no gatekeepers preventing you from doing it.  The lousy thing about it is that there are no gatekeepers preventing you from doing it.  The result is, self publishing a book is about as common a thing as a writer can do.  My brother is a lit professor and has self-published dozens of poetry books and a couple of novels.  So have about a billion other people.  Most of those books have sold around ten copies.  You get to hold a book in your hand with your name on it.  If that's your goal, self-publishing is a no-brainer.  The problem comes when what you want to do is make a comfortable living based on your writing.  I'd be very careful about self-publishing in that case.  How many of your favorite novels are self-published?

Thank you all for your replies of wisdom. Lots to mull over.
What do you think about starting my own website to sell my book(s)?
What about Amazon?

Quote from: Monger;827536What do you think about starting my own website to sell my book(s)?

This is madness.  It would be like starting your own website to sell your used Honda instead of going to CarMax. You need to start reading.  Almost every major agent in New York has published at least one book on how to get published.  You need to read some of it to have any idea about where to start.

Amazon can work but there's agents and publishers on Amazon and there's self-publishing on Amazon.  And again, there's like 1300 books about how to publish on Amazon.  You need to up your IQ before you can even figure out the questions you need to be asking.  "What about Amazon" isn't a real question.  Read a book or two on Amazon publishing and then ask some questions based on what you've learned.

Quote from: Ghost;827481Agents have swim through oceans of crap to find anything good.

Too true. Way too true.

I'm having flashbacks just thinking about it...the horror, the horror...

Damn it Ghost, you're gonna have me wake up in a hotel in Saigon!
 

Quote from: Ghost;827481Selling 500 copies of your first novel might sound good to you, but if that's all it does it's like a death sentence in the industry and you are at that point committed to small press and/or self publishing.

I don't know if this is going to be true in 5-10 years. But hey, that's what nom de plumes are for. But even if your ebook crashes, its not rocket science to effectively make it vanish.
 
BTW, our agency pimped plenty of "first time new authors" who had a couple of failed books under their belts. More than once I sent out author photos that were 10 years younger than the author.

Quote from: Ghost;827481How many of your favorite novels are self-published?

I believe this is going to change remarkably in 5-10 years as traditional channels continue to break down.

Quote from: Monger;827536What do you think about starting my own website to sell my book(s)?

You really enjoyed that Hobbit weed on 4/20 didn't you!!

Once your book is published, you will use the web for marketing, but even if you self-publish, its doubtful that your own website is your best bet for sales.
 

Quote from: Monger;827536What about Amazon?

It's a river in South America.

That said, I am big fan of Amazon's CreateSpace and I believe Kindle Worlds has great potential.

Quote from: Ghost;827573Read a book or two on Amazon publishing and then ask some questions based on what you've learned.

Ghost makes a great point here that most authors ignore. If you want to be a published writer, you must learn how to WRITE and how to PUBLISH. You must master both fields. It's not enough to know how to write. These days, you have to understand the business of selling books to readers and the business of selling books to publishers.

Quote from: Spinachcat;829740I believe this is going to change remarkably in 5-10 years as traditional channels continue to break down.

I really hope you are right about this because dealing with the NY system especially for someone with no publishing record is just as much a nightmare as reading through an endless slushpile of garbage written by delusional lunatics -- okay, maybe not that bad but pretty freaking bad.  The whole system seems to be staggering along, supported by nothing but a combination of forward inertia and some misguided fear of the anarchy that will follow the collapse of the system.

The garbage writing isn't the painful part. As a reader, you can carve in 10 pages* and know whether it goes in Pile A, Pile B or the Circular File. The painful stuff is pile B where its almost good enough and you don't have the time to encourage each author to redo, rewrite, fix, research or whatever so you just reject - especially because Pile A isn't "stuff that sells", but "stuff that might sell" and that's where we put the work.

The whole publishing system is Dead Man Walking, and that's a good thing. What comes next is going to be smarter and I believe (maybe foolishly) better for authors. But damn, the transition isn't going to be pretty.

I'm an author of six published full-length novels.

Cthulhu Armageddon
The Rules of Supervillainy
The Games of Supervillainy
The Secrets of Supervillainy
Straight Outta Fangton
Lucifer's Star

Out of sheer curiosity, have you ever seen a foreign author apply to an American agent?

I did low level writing and self publishing way back and at least two of my customers were published novelists for TSR.

In the gaming biz the designer gets anywhere from 3-5%. A rare few get upwards of 10%. In the novel field its a little different and depending on the avenues you approach it can be really different.

Now the reason why the designer of a game gets so little. Actually that can amount to upwards of half the total profit of the sale. Why? Because theres usually alot of cost in the process of getting from design to publication. The main factor is retail cut. The publisher sells the game to the retailer for usually 50% or less. Printing fees eat up a chunk of that 50% or less. Any art is likely going to really eat into whats left.

On the novel side the costs after retailer cut are mainly printing and cover art. Plus any editing, proofing, etc-ing costs.

This sort of thread pops on occasion over on BGG too and the general answer is the same as youve gotten here from the other posters.