My Journey to Becoming an Author 10

Publishing your work

Online publishing

I have mentioned before now that I start with online publishing, it is easy and cheap. There are many online bookstores and platforms that will readily accept your manuscript even in a bad state. Yes, some will want to assist you to put your manuscript in more reader friendly format. You will do well to take advantage of their services. I don’t need to mention specific names but I encourage you to Google, “PUBLSH MY BOOK” and the machine will give you more than a dozen options.

Piracy

Piracy is defined as a situation when somebody or an organization reproduces a copyrighted book without permission from the copyright owner with the result that the copyright owner does not benefit financially from his labor. This is a global challenge to which the world has not discovered a cure, especially in developing countries like Nigeria. Most music, videos and literatures sold in Nigeria are pirated. Monitoring boards set up by government have not been able to check this menace.

Besides criminal mindedness another major reason for piracy is when good manuscripts are not available or the selling price is too high creating room for the pirate. I was speaking in a coaching class when somebody pointed out that some publishers could pirate ones book. Well, let me repeat here what I replied him; you must be a lucky person for a publisher to consider your manuscript for piracy. Except in very special cases, pirates don’t go for budding authors; otherwise their practices should be encouraged. Pirates go for established authors and titles which means the publisher is also a victim because he is deprived of his reward after he would create the market by first publishing. If you visit any publisher he is likely to have plenty of manuscripts begging to be published, so I don’t see how he will border about an unknown author. But there are cases when your manuscript is on target, what the publisher will do in that case is to discuss terms with you. I know one case when the publisher presented his terms to the young author but he argued that most of the gain will go to the publisher and so decided on self-publishing. Well, I bought a copy of the book from Ariaria market, Aba from where I got the author’s contact. He told me that what I have was the pirated copy. To my surprise, the pirated copy was cheaper, better packaged and had more spread than the original. So, what I mean is that self-publishing where you don’t have marketing network like the publisher will end up giving opportunity to pirates when they discover that your book is needed by consumers.

One thing I know that most publishers around the world are guilt of, is that they rarely pay full royalty to authors. Whatever is this reason is inexcusable.

What do I advice? Self-publishing is not a bad idea but if you can get a good publisher you may as well use him. There are still a number of good ones in town.

We publish too. For information on our publishing terms and contract, use the contact at the end of this book.

Excerpt from my new book, My Journey to Becoming an Author