Publish or Perish?

I'm a week into this new venture and deeply gratified by the response to date. Many of you have written to me off-site with words of wisdom about patience and voiced your confidence in the book. Others have left comments here that have been thought provoking and equally supportive.

A few of you have mentioned the option of self-publishing which is certainly a topic for a few posts.

Self-publishing has been around forever, although it has come a long way in terms of respectability by the main stream industry as well as in terms of cost to the author. I actually work for one so-called "vanity press" that publishes commissioned books, usually about corporations or organizations celebrating a milestone but I have done personal histories as well. The client orders a certain number of copies of the book and they take care of all "marketing" activities which usually are nil since they give the books away to their employees and board members. I think the average run is between 500-1000 copies.

What has changed in the self-publishing industry since the advent of desktop publishing is the fact that they can now print books on demand. So if one chooses to publish with say, iuniverse, one of the largest in the business, you only pay for as many books as you want. They offer editorial and layout services to their clients and the big ones also have marketing divisions, but the bottom line is that it still costs the author to publish.

All of which may be fine if you are writing your family history or the great American novel that has lurked within you for fifty years, but I think the book I am proposing has greater market potential that those. And while there have been many examples of books that have jumped from self-publishing houses to mainstream ones, at this point, since this project was not my idea, I think I am going to give the tried and true method a little longer to either make or break me.

On some level, I will admit to a certain "snobbery" associated with making it in the big leagues but more than anything else, I will acquiesce to my need for superb editorial services which I assume comes with the turf of say Random House. I am a good writer but a great writer has an even greater editor or two.