Two paths diverged into a wood (filled with books): Indie or traditional publishing

Now that you have a revised manuscript, your next step is to figure out how you want to move your book from .doc to done. Maybe you’re toying with querying agents, or perhaps you’re thinking about just flinging it up for sale on Amazon. The internet means that the publishing world is your oyster, but let’s explore how to make sure that you find the gleaming pearl in that oyster shell, rather than just a quick mouthful.

Your first decision—whether to start shopping your novel around to agents and editors or to take the self-publishing route—needn’t be an either/or, at least not at this stage. You can do both! At some point for each book, you will have to commit to a particular course, but right now, you can both query traditional publishers and start working toward releasing your book independently.

Let’s say you want to start by querying a few agents or editors to see if they’d be interested in your book. A query letter lets editors and agents know why they should want to read your book. If your query letter doesn’t pique their interest, chances are neither will your manuscript. Here’s a list of items that a killer query letter should include.

• Personalization: Agents and editors read tons of query letters; they know if a query letter has been written specifically for them. Write unique query letters, address them to specific people (names spelled correctly), and end them with gratitude.
• Hook: Your query letter hook should be one sentence that sums up your whole work: who does what and why that should interest readers. Don’t worry—you’ll get more room to expand on this, but the hook lays the foundation and draws the agent into reading the rest of your query letter.
• Description: Following the hook (and before you’ve said anything about yourself), provide a more detailed synopsis of your work. Don’t get carried away, though; give away too many details, and you’ll leave agents with too little incentive to read the manuscript. Leave the agent hanging.
• Credentials: Use the final paragraph to explain why you are the right (and only) person to author this work. Include your writing credits, previous publications, real-world experience, and so on. Avoid apologizing for a lack of any of these things. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Once you’ve written your query letter, check the publisher’s or agent’s submission guidelines to see if they prefer snail mail or email and how much of the manuscript, if any, you can send with the query letter. And if this seems like an overly daunting task, Elite Authors can create a professional, polished query letter for you, one crafted to meet all industry standards and maximize the possibility that your book will be requested and read.

While you’re sending your query letter out to editors and agents, you can also get started exploring your self-publishing options. One significant difference between independent publishing and traditional publishing is time. Even leaving aside the time it takes to shop your book around to agents and editors, once a company agrees to publish your book, the typical timeline is at least two years before your book will hit the shelves (whether virtual or real). Self-publishing timelines are typically half that, if not even quicker, especially if you go with a one-stop shop (like Elite Authors) that can do everything from edit to format to cover to position your book. This means that you can actually write to the current market, something that’s frankly impossible to do via traditional publishing houses.

Another big difference is the percentage of profits that you receive. While there are more up-front costs when you take the independent route, you’re also in a position to pocket 70 percent (or more) of the profits from your book sales, in contrast to 30 percent at most.

Obviously, there are pluses and minuses whichever way you leap; happily, you do not have to decide right this second whether you will forevermore be an indie author or a traditional author. Many authors have both traditionally published and independently published books. Just because you decide to self-publish one book doesn’t mean you’re going to self-publish everything else you ever write. In fact, more than one author has been discovered by traditional publishers after successfully self-publishing one or more books. In addition, many well-known authors with numerous credits and traditional publication opportunities have chosen the independent route for their most recent books. So start exploring because all roads through this wood (whether less traveled or not) lead to your book in readers’ hands.