A publishing company has offered to edit & publish my book for a fee of $1700.00. Is this practice normal?
The company has said that they are interested in the work but they are not buying copyrights now. The contact informed me that they would be willing to make sure my book in market ready by offering services such as proofreading, cover design, marketing, manuscript analysis, and online advertising. For this service, the fee is $1700.00 and I would be required to pay $5.00 per softcover book and $10.00 per harcover book printed to sell
Does anyone have any opinions about this practice?
I think that is an outrageous price! How can they justify charging so much?!?
I published a book. Completly FREE.
I self-published a book of poetry through http://www.lulu.com/ (you don’t need an agent for self-publishing)
Lulu is completely free and very easy to use. You can then buy a global distribution, or ISBN, which will put your book on Barnes and noble, borders, Amazon…. I really like lulu, I think they are great. They also offer a great customer service if you get stuck. Once published with them, you automatically get the copyright, and you keep all rights to it. You can have books printed in b/w or colour, hardback or soft back, and in a variety of sizes.
Lulu offer service providers who can professionally edit, proofread, format, cover art… They are very reasonably priced. Some service providers are extremely cheap, and very reliable. I’ve never had any problems with Lulu, or their service providers.
The only down side is that you have to promote the book yourself, even though some of Lulu service providers also do that.
I think no one should ever pay to get their book published. If anything the publishers should pay you. It is your book. You wrote it. And you should never give up the copyright to it. If you give up the copyright to the company, they can then change the story completly, and it will end up being nothing like what you wanted.
I really don’t think you should pay that much.
Hope this helps. Good luck with your writing.
For any more information about Lulu you can contact me at forensic_dreamer@hotmail.com (if you do contact me, put Lulu in the subject line, or I might report as Spam)
Cheers, Deanna.
Introduction to Book Publishing