Publishing

If you are not familiar with some of the common publishing terms, check out this glossary of publishing-related words and phrases.

Acid-free paper: Alkaline paper, free from chemicals that destroy paper. It lasts longer, but costs more and is generally used for library books.

Advance copies: First books sent to those who ordered, requested or were promised a book, generally before the book goes into distribution.

Alignment: The position of text lines on a page. Left alignment means that the left margin of each line down the page is even, and that the right margin is ragged or uneven; right alignment means that the right margin is even down the page, and the left margin is ragged or uneven. Alignment can also refer to margins being justified, which refers to both left and right margins being even down the page, causing extra spacing between words when necessary. Center alignment means that the lines […]

Wheatmark’s publishing agreement is nonexclusive. What does it mean to you, the author?

In short it means you are not locked into an exclusive contract; you are free to cancel or publish elsewhere at the same time.

Let’s say you have been publishing your book with Wheatmark for a while, and you have an opportunity to get thousands of copies of your book printed cheaply by a different printer, say, a printer in Hong Kong or even one in the United States. You still want to keep selling your book on Amazon and Barnes & Noble using Wheatmark’s book distribution system, but you just don’t want to pass up the opportunity to get thousands of copies for a better price. The good news is that you can do both: publish your book with Wheatmark and have extra copies printed by different printers. Because our publishing contract is nonexclusive, you have the freedom […]

This just in: publishing a book is a smart move for your business. Yesterday, BusinessWeek ran a nice article about how to get a book published to help you grow your business.

To summarize:

1. You could try getting an agent and selling the book to a publisher of business titles.

2. You could publish the book yourself by getting an ISBN and marketing it online.

3. You could use a “transitional” publisher. (This, apparently, is a new way of referring to a “self-publishing service.”)

It all sounds so simple!

All sarcasm aside, however, the article is a good introduction to the broad strokes of how book publishing works.

To read the full article, click here.

As president of the Arizona Book Publishing Association for the last two and a half years, and as head of the self-publishing firm Wheatmark, www.wheatmark.com, for the last eight years, I’ve talked to hundreds of publishers and authors, and read countless articles and studies on the publishing industry. This experience has made it clear to me that a significant transition is taking place in the book publishing industry. The era of the major publisher and the bestseller is ending, and the era of the independent publisher and the micro market is beginning.

Major publishers’ titles account for an ever decreasing portion of overall book sales in the United States, while independent publishers’ titles and self-published titles account for an ever increasing portion. Similarly, bestsellers constitute an ever smaller portion of the total publishing pie, while books selling in the few thousands or hundreds account for an ever larger portion.

This shift […]

The following terms will prove helpful to you before and while publishing with Wheatmark. These terms are specific to the way Wheatmark operates and may not apply to other publishers.

Adobe PDF: The file format read by the Adobe Acrobat Reader. PDF is the file format for presenting documents independent of the original software they were created in. Wheatmark uses the PDF file format to show authors the exact page layout of their book as it will be printed. You must have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to open and print a PDF file.

Author copies: The initial set of free books an author receives upon the book’s publication.

Back matter: Printed material found in the back of the book after the main section of the book. This includes the appendix, the bibliography, the index, and other related matter.

Baker & Taylor: One of the largest wholesalers of books […]

Have you ever found a book online about your favorite subject, but didn’t buy it right then because you weren’t sure what was inside? You may have gotten in the car and driven to the nearest bookstore to check it out before you made your decision … and bought it online later for less.

What about the book you’ve written? Can your audience look inside it online to help them make up their minds about it? How many more people do you think would buy your book if they could look inside and make a decision to buy on the spot?

You can now have your readers browse the inside of your book. Amazon and Google have started scanning the interiors of books so that their search engines would be able to retrieve and organize information from inside printed books as well. A few days ago Microsoft launched a similar program called […]

The third way the Library of Congress may be involved in your book is through the U.S. Copyright Office, which is located within the Library of Congress. In the previous two posts about the Library of Congress we discussed the LCCN and the CIP data.

Copyright Registration

Registering your book with the copyright office has nothing to do with the LCCN, the CIP data, or with cataloging your book. Therefore, getting an LCCN or CIP data for your book from the Library of Congress does not amount to copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. If you so choose, Wheatmark can secure copyright registration for your book, or you can apply for one yourself directly.

Keep in mind that registering your work with the U.S. Copyright Office does not establishyour copyright for your book; rather, it confirms it. Your work is already under copyright protection whether you register it or not. Once you […]