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Publishing

Getting Your Book Published
As a writer you are very interested in the publishing world. Transforming your manuscript into a published book is a marvelous and often mystifying process. Seeing your name on the cover of your own book, and opening its pages and seeing the words you wrote in print is an unparalleled experience.
Knowing how to get your manuscript noticed, and seriously considered by a publisher is key to your success as a writer. The first thing you must understand is that the publishing industry is inundated with manuscripts that will never see the light of day—should never see the light of day. The problem is that at some time in their lives, most people who ever scored a “B” or better on a writing assignment feel the urge to write the Opus Magnus. Upon writing their manuscript, they set out to flood the publishing houses with their gift to the literary world. These unmeritorious manuscripts clog the conduits to publishers, which must decide how to deal with them—generally rejecting nearly all of them without even looking inside the covers. This they do for a very sound business purpose: employing someone to read all of those manuscripts would cost tens of millions of dollars every year!
As a result, an artificial barrier has been constructed around the publishing houses and literary agencies, which is intended to keep amateurs out. Scottsdale Multimedia understands those barriers, and how to navigate around them. We help our clients by instructing them on the proper industry methods of approaching the industry, from the inside. With your polished manuscript in hand (something that will distinguish you from 99.99% of all those writers we have discussed), you will be able to make “professional” contact with a literary agent or publisher.

Self-Publishing
As a rule, most writers would prefer to have their books published by the traditional publishing houses. This is not true of every writer, however.
Many of Scottsdale Multimedia’s clients prefer to have their books printed and bound by their own publisher, for various reasons. A few possibilities are:
  • they have their own distribution network in place (MLM, retail outlets, sales network)
  • their books are meant to be handed out individually to prospective clients
  • their books are meant to be supplied with product orders
  • their books are meant for limited distribution (family, friends, library)
  • the book is a gift to an honored loved one or key corporate person
  • the book is intended for digital distribution
  • the book will be sold directly through a website (web design service>>)
  • higher profit margins for the author
Self-publishing can also help an aspiring writer “boot-strap” her way into the publishing industry. There are a number of now famous authors who self-published their books, to prove their marketability to the publishing industry.
That’s correct. Just a few of the famous books that were self-published are Remembrance of things Past by Marcel Proust, Ulysses by James Joyce, The Adventures of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, A Time to Kill by John Grisham, The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton, The Bridges of Madison County by Robert James Waller, What Color is Your Parachute by Richard N. Bolles, In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters, The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., The Joy of Cooking by Irma S.Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple edited by Sandra Martz, and Life’s Little Instruction Book by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
A list of authors who self-published include Deepak Chopra, Gertrude Stein, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Mark Twain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Stephen Crane, Bernard Shaw, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Virginia Wolff, E.E. Cummings, Edgar Allen Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Henry David Thoreau, Benjamin Franklin, Walt Whitman, Alexandre Dumas, William E.B. DuBois, etc.
Why would such extraordinary authors self-publish books that were so marketable to an eager public? There are two leading reasons: 1) the author wished to receive the entire profit from sales, rather than settling for a royalty fraction, or 2) the author was an unproven commodity, and wished to prove his marketability. For this reason, many famous authors received numerous rejections from publishing companies before finally being recognized.
Below are some authors who were repeatedly rejected before being published: 

- Pearl S. Buck – The Good Earth – 14 times
-Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead – 12 times
-Patrick Dennis- Auntie Mame – 15 times
-George Orwell – Animal Farm
-Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull – 20 times
-Joseph Heller – Catch-22 – 22 times
-Mary Higgins Clark – first short story – 40 times
-Alex Haley – before Roots – 200 rejections
-Robert Persig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – 121 times
-John Grisham – A Time to Kill – 15 publishers and 30 agents
-Chicken Soup for the Soul – 33 times
-Dr. Seuss – 24 times
-Louis L’Amour – 200 rejections
-Jack London – 600 before his first story
-John Creasy – 774 rejections before selling his first story. He went on to write 564 books, using fourteen names.
-Jerzy Kosinski – 13 agents and 14 publishers rejected his best-selling novel when he submitted it under a different name, including Random House, which had originally published it.
-Diary of Anne Frank
-Stephen King’s first four novels were rejected.
-During his entire lifetime, Herman Melville’s timeless classic, Moby Dick, sold only 3,715 copies.
-J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel was taken on by the prestigious Christopher Little agency but still rejected by a dozen publishers, including Penguin, Transworld and HarperCollins. The small London publishers Bloomsbury eventually took it on, apparently on the advice of the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter.
Getting your book published by a publisher is something that you will most likely not wish to attempt on your own. Scottsdale Multimedia will show you how to avoid the pitfalls that keep most new authors out of the publishing inner-circle. However you decide to proceed, the first and foremost of all your endeavors must be to have a polished manuscript in hand. We will write your manuscript, and it will be ready for submission when it is delivered to you. Of course, an agent or publisher will have their own ideas about your book, so don’t be surprised when they begin offering their own editorial suggestions.
Have experienced, published, award winning writers bring your story to life.