A Closer Look at Draft2Digital
Submitting Your Finished Book to Bookstores
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For those who have been writing a book, if you are approaching the end, you might wonder what now. Publishing is an exciting industry and writers have many options about what to do with their projects.
The first is to begin the process of submitting the book to traditional publishers. Perhaps hiring an agent and letting the agent shop the book to publishers is your goal and might be the best route to take for your story.
But increasingly, many writers are deciding to get the book published on their own. It’s an exciting venture and many writers like the challenge of becoming their own publisher and having complete control of the publishing process. But it’s also a time consuming and a large project that takes away from the business of writing.
There is no wrong or right way to get a book published. It’s a matter of preference and how much time and money you have, and how involved you want to get in all aspects of the publishing cycle.
If you do choose to self-publish, one of the things you will want to consider is how to get your book into bookstores. How will readers learn about your book and how will they purchase it?
Distributors and Aggregators Help Writers Gets Books Into Stores
Amazon and Barnes & Noble are the two biggest bookstores. I will discuss then on another blog.
For other bookstores (and Amazon and B&N can be included here, I just suggest keeping them separate) there are distributors and aggregators that help distribute books to bookstores.
Their job is to take your book and include them in their pre-sale catalogs, let bookstores and libraries know that the books are available, send ordered books to bookstores, and send you a royalty statement that lets you know how many books you have sold. Each distributor and aggregator is a little different but generally, this is what they all do.
They get paid a percentage of your book sales, so you don’t pay anything unless you sell books. But you want to be careful which one you choose because some distributors charge quite a bit for anything extra.
