Big vs. Small Publishers for Your Non-Fiction Book

"I’m Bobbi Linkemer on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I’d like to invite you to visit my website at writeanonfictionbook.com. It doesn’t cost anything to go to a publisher. Now, in the old days you wrote a proposal, you called up an editor and you said this is what I want to write a book about and you kind of got your spiel down to a paragraph or two. Are you interested? And they would say yeah I’m interested, why don’t you send me something on that. You would write a proposal and you would send it to them. They would either okay it, approve it, send it back to you, have you tweak it, give it to their marketing committee, and you either would get a contract or you wouldn’t. It is not like that anymore. The big publishers have gobbled up all the little publishers. If you read a Writer’s Market, and I don’t have a copy, but it would describe every publisher and what they’re looking for; and almost every single one of them would say to you, in this book no manuscripts accepted unless they come from an agent. So, rather than finding an editor, you would have to find an agent. You don’t have to pay the agent; you don’t have to pay the publisher. What you lose when you go to a conventional publisher is any control. They decide what they want the cover to look like; they design the book. This one for instance was published by Amicom. Originally, if I can just step over here, it had a cover, a hard cover, and the book came out of the cover and it had a CD in back of it, and it was very expensive. I think this book is 39.95 because you get the CD, which is a training program and this on people skills. They design the cover; they laid out the inside, which isn’t too exciting, and they put all the information on the back. They sent a contract, which you pretty much sign as is, and you get an advance, which is not very much, and then you’re supposed to get royalties on sales. Well if the book doesn’t sell, and you don’t realize what a big part in the promotion, chances are you won’t get royalties, so you really won’t make very much money. The good news is that you probably won’t have to pay them back, the advance. The bad news is that the shelf life of your book, in a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, is very short, and if it doesn’t sell, back it goes. The advantage of a big publisher is that you can say this was published by Big New York House. The disadvantage is you give up all the control, and you may make very little money. Some of the other options are gaining favor with authors."