Over on Communication Exchange is a blog post entitled
Fiction Writers: Find a Publisher? Self-Publish? Or Is There a Third Option?. It explores options for publishing works of fiction. I posted a comment there (which appears to still be waiting moderators approval). However, I thought it was important, so I am posting it here as well.

I would like to suggest that there are actually many different ways to be published that exist upon a continuum. At one end of the continuum is the traditional publishing where you send a manuscript to a publisher and hope to get them to do all the work.

The other end of the spectrum is the vanity press where you send a manuscript and a large enough check, and they publish your book for you and you store many books up in your attic. The former is regarded highly, and the latter, less so.

Yet all of that was based on a day when typesetting was complicated and you had to make some large number of prints to make it worthwhile.

Today, we live in a world of publishing on demand. You can publish your book at a good POD publisher and they will print out a copy whenever someone orders one. Lulu press does a great job of this and is very popular with the NaNoWriMo crowd. My middle daughter has recently published her second novel on Lulu press. Two years ago, she published Subtle Differences. This year, she has published The Silent Serian.

It has been a great experience for her. Friends and relatives and a few strangers have bought copies of her books and she has made a small amount of money off of her books.

Yet with a press like Lulu, you need to do everything, designing the cover, editing the text, laying it out, and marketing.

In these days of social media, there are a lot of new marketing opportunities and I'm starting to explore some of this with my daughter the writer, as well as my daughter the sales person. We are kicking around ways to provide editing and marketing services to self publishers on some sort of commission basis which would keep POD publishing viable for NaNoWriMo type writers.

One group that already provides a service something like this is the Writers' Collective. They act like a traditional publisher in terms of accepting, editing and marketing a book, but they use POD publishing methods to keep costs under control and make their services more accessible to smaller, less known writers.

I'm sure there are other similar efforts and I would be glad to collaborate or share ideas with people interested.

I wrote my first novel as part of NaNoWriMo two years ago. It sits partially edited on my hard disk. I'm gearing up for another effort this year and my daughters are excited and gearing up to help me market the book.

So, let's hear what others are thinking about.