RomanceEverAfter

The Writing Craft/Business Issues for Writers/Are You A Candidate for e-Publishing?

E-Book Formats

E-publishers make your book available (sell it) in a variety of electronic formats, such as HTML, Microsoft Reader™, Adobe E-book reader, Open E-book format, Palm Reader format, Hiebook format, Mobipocket format, and others. Your e-book will (normally) be available through your publisher’s web site and through on-line bookstores such as Amazon.com and others. People read your book on their computers, on their PDAs (such as Palm or its competitor the Handspring Visor), on hand held computers (HP Jornada, Compaq, and many others), or on dedicated e-book readers such as the Hiebook, Franklin ebookman, or Rocket E-book.

Before the tech stock implosion (also known as the dot.com crash) e-books were ridiculously over-hyped as poised to—at any moment—replace print books. Immediately after the crash, e-books and e-publishing were declared dead. Notice of their demise, however, was clearly premature. Now e-books and e-publishing are small markets (about 2% of all US book sales; a quarter-million dedicated e-book reading machines sold in the US; thousands of e-books downloaded each day) but growing daily and steadily.

Your First Sale

The first sale of your manuscript will not be to an interested reader. It will be to an agent or to a publisher or to her acquisition editor. Like most sellers, you will ask many if they are interested and a few—perhaps only one— will eventually say yes. In the traditional publishing model, the query-partial-full-manuscript-review-acceptance process can often take years, plus even more years for a publisher to bring the work to market. For authors who opt for e-publishing, this time line from query to published is often shortened to months.

So What Makes You a Candidate?

The below traits are not all-inclusive and not all required. In fact, you’ll see some of them are contradictory. With the exception of a couple which are mandatory, you don’t need to meet all the points listed below, and some of these points apply equally to seeking publication with more traditional houses.

You may be a candidate for e-publishing if:

Point#1:  You Have a Completed Manuscript

This is a non-negotiable step one. If you don’t have a completed manuscript, stop. Read no further. Go back to your computer and get to work. Resume reading only after you have outlined and drafted and revised and edited and polished and re-thought and put it away and thought about it and re-worked and read it aloud, and then revised and edited the thing again until you’re almost sick of it. Then proof it again.

I’ll wait.

All done? Great! There are millions of unfinished books out there. You’ve already made a big first step by finishing yours.

Submission Process

The submission process for many e-publishers is much the same as for most traditional print publishers (or agents). The author submits a query. If the response is favorable, the author fires off several chapters for review. If that gets a good response, then you send off the complete manuscript. 

This process can take many long months—sometimes even years—with traditional publishers and agents. Of course, you should have a completed manuscript when submitting to agents and traditional publishers. However, some writers know how long the process takes and use that time to finish their work: revising, editing, and so on. It’s not unheard of for some writers to have only the first three chapters done and then start sending out queries and synopses. By the time some one does request the full manuscript, it’s done!

Things are much different in the e-publishing world. It’s not unusual for a publisher to tell you to submit the entire work. Why not? An electronic file containing a complete work is just as easy to handle as a file containing a partial. If the publisher’s acquisition editor likes what she sees, she may want to read more on the spot. Even if the publisher has only asked for (and you’ve only sent) the first three chapters or thirty pages or whatever, a quick email and in your inbox you have a request for the completed work. Most e-publishers specify that you have a completed manuscript prior to submitting. If you don’t really have that manuscript ready to attach to the message when you hit "reply," you’ve just lost all credibility.

You’ll need a query letter and synopsis too, but don’t even think about cutting and pasting those into an email directed at some address that begins with "submissions@…" until your work is done. Your manuscript must be finished and polished; it must be your best work, painstakingly proofread and in some commonly used word processor format.

Are You A Candidate for e-Publishing - 3 >>>