Selling your book - ideas.

I've just spoken to a number of classes in Narangba Valley High School. It was a great experiance. I've spoken to students at Tweed River High School and Port Macquarie High School with similar feelings. I'd recommend any writer of YA fiction or fantesy, to approach the Premier's Reading Challenge of all states to have your book included in their reading list. When you've got it into the list, contact all Australian libraries to buy a copy of the book.

One of the questions I was asked was about getting published. I've signed up on the website Absolute Writing Water Cooler and I find that authors overseas seem to put a lot of energy into being taken on by an agent. Looking Australian Literary Agents on the internet I find twelve companies listed with their national organisation. Eight are not accepting new authors. So it takes little time to query agents in Australia.

Of publishers, I've found there are three types (please correct me if I'm wrong). There are 'vanity' publishers. These people generally put your book together and give you the number of copies you ordered. Most don't seem to pay for professional editing or for distribution. Using a vanity publisher is the easiest way of having a couple of hundred copies of your family's history printed, for personal reasons only. This kind of publishing has a bad name but I believe it has a legitimate place in book production as long as the publisher makes his operation and its limits clear to the author.

The second type is the subsidy publisher. Some people warn against this type of publishing because, again, the author has to pay for the book to be published. I've experience with subsidy publishing. My book, The Gatekeeper, is published by Zeus Publications, a subsidy publisher. The difference I see between subsidy and vanity is that subsidy publishers charge an amount of money but then do virtually everything a traditional publisher would do. Zeus secures an ISDN, organises professional editing, organises the cover art, pblishes the books and makes sure all demand for the book is met for a period of three years. The subsidy publisher must be professionally interested in the quality of the book (and will reject substandard writing) because they make their profit in proportion to the success of the book in the bookshops.

The third type of book is the traditional publisher. In the USA authors suggest that a true publisher is one which gives the author an advance on royalties. I'm being published by a Canadian publisher, Lachesis, which doesn't give advances on royalties but doesn't charge in the way subsidy publishers do. Lachesis also has a very professional distribution service for its books through USA and Canada.

I was probably impatient when I first contacted major publishers. I looked on the internet for names of publishing houses - plenty of those. I looked at the individual websites of the publishers to make a list of those publishing my genre - fewer this time. Then I looked at this last group for ones which were open to submissions (even fewer) and of these the few which deal with the author direct.

Of this depleted list I looked into the website of the most prestigious company. They (like most of the rest) required exclusivity. I could only deal with them if I dealt with only them, no others at the same time. So I waited six months for a rejection slip. Same with the next one. At this rate I imagined being published posthumously, if at all. So I didn't contact more of the heavies and tried one of the smaller ones, and that was Zeus.

So I hope this is of use to any author starting on the road to getting published. Good luck.