Guest Post: To Publish or To Self-Publish: That is the Question Brandy Miller

Traditional publishing has its perks. You get the backing of a graphic design department, a marketing department, and the benefits of working with people who know the book industry. You have someone in your corner when you are fighting for shelf placement in bookstores, or trying to protect your intellectual rights, and you have the benefit of working with people who know the ins and outs of the process that bookstores go through to pick and choose the books they carry.

However, unlike in days gone by, you are not likely to see large advances paid out to you. The days of being treated like a king or queen are pretty well gone. Publishing houses are willing to take risks on a limited number of new titles, but they also aren’t going to throw the weight of their marketing budget behind an unknown author unless they are very, very certain that author can produce the sales. Your share of the multi-million dollar marketing budget may be a tiny sliver of what bigger name authors receive, and a lot of that can be eaten up by pre-press marketing to ensure big sales the first day, week, and month. Traditional publishing houses are also slower to pay royalties (usually just twice a year) and the money you make on a $10 book may be just 8 cents each after everybody else has gotten their cut.

Self-Publishing bypasses the waiting lists and allows you to skip the rejection letters completely. You get to keep every penny of the royalties past whatever share of it Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s gets for their part, and you don’t have to fight to get your book out from under a contract that isn’t going so well. You also get paid monthly for your book sales rather than twice a year. However, the downside of self-publishing is that the buck stops with you. You are responsible for absolutely every aspect of producing, marketing, and selling your book. You are responsible for creating a website, developing an audience, editing your book, creating the cover, protecting and defending your intellectual property rights, and making the contacts you’ll need to make to start getting your book noticed in a highly competitive market. Self-publishing can be rewarding, but it can also be a nightmare, too. It can consume so much of your time that it makes finding the time to write more books, an important key to making a sustainable income, very difficult. The choice is yours to make.

About the Author:

Brandy Miller is a Creativity Consultant for Creative Technology Services in Elko, Nevada. She specializes in helping people find creative solutions to everyday problems. She is also the 40 Day Writer, known for her ability to produce quality content at lightning-fast speeds. She has published three books in the last six months, all geared toward helping aspiring authors write more content with higher quality at a faster pace. When she isn’t writing for pay, writing for her own blogs, or writing her next book, she loves to paint, draw, sew, design fabrics, and read books. She graduated in May 2006 with an A.S. in Elementary Education and studied both graphic design and game art and design through the Art Institute Online. She worked for 6 years as a sales service representative for Harcourt School Publishers, and for 2 years in the Marketing Department of Verizon Wireless before leaving to start her own company. She won several honorable mentions for her writing in high school and has won NaNoWriMo on 3 separate occasions.


Reposted From Book Daily

The Messiah Matrix Excerpt - Featured Title on BookDaily!

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Mystery & Thriller Apr. 30, 2013

Today's Featured Title The Messiah Matrix [Kindle Edition] by Kenneth John Atchity ISBN / ASIN: 0957218907 Anyone passing Ryan McKeown, S.J., on his morning walk down Rome’s Janiculum, would have witnessed a worried-looking young man with dark shadows under his eyes. His usual composed countenance had disappeared and his furrowed brow revealed the burden he now bore. Images of the penitent’s death plagued him, more so because of the man’s extraordinary confession and enigmatic last words, “Find Father Ryan…memory in ashes of Jasius…in the Gesù.” Why did this mysterious monsignor use his last breath to deliver this strange message to his killer? What was he trying to tell me?  It was appalling even to entertain the thought that Holy Mother Church might have ordered the killing of a monsignor. It was just too horrible to contemplate. Surely the Albanian was mistaken?  Not only was he wrestling with the shock of dual murders but Ryan’s doubts about his faith now consumed his every waking moment and haunted his nights. It was mind versus spirit, and the mind threatened to destroy every feeling his spirit flourished on. Ryan’s mind was filled with a jumble of questions in a jumble of languages—English, commendably fluent Italian, and an ancient dialect insiders would readily identify as the vulgar Latin spoken almost exclusively at the highest ecclesiastical levels in Vatican City. The names flashing through his brain—Eusebius, Philo Judaeus, Lactantius, Origen, Tertullian—were an esoteric litany of historians, poets, biblical scholars, and philosophers—all from the infancy of Christianity. Ryan’s obsession with tracking down the origins of the Catholic faith permeated his consciousness.  The area spanned by Via Garibaldi was a living postcard of tiled roofs, bell towers, cupolas and gardens set off in breathtaking contrast against the cloudless turquoise sky. But this morning the young American priest, lost in ruminations about the fateful confession and his biblical doubts, had been oblivious to the spectacular view--and to the breeze ruffling his curly brown hair to more than usual disarray. It would be difficult to recognize Ryan as a recently ordained priest in his casual street clothes and comfortable black Reeboks, much less one enrolled in the pontifically authorized Society of Jesus, known to the world as “Jesuits.”  Ryan’s questions about troubling inconsistencies in traditional Catholic doctrine had only grown more confusing as he’d turned from his graduate studies of the Latin epic poet Virgil to a temporary stint teaching a course on early Christian theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. At that time he was a Jesuit scholastic, getting in-the-classroom experience, and testing the demands of his calling. Now that his priesthood had been consecrated through the sacrament of Holy Orders and he had been dispatched to the Eternal City to study the New Testament and its commentaries, Father McKeown’s personal doubts and scholarly perplexities were, he feared, all too close to becoming a neurotic disorder.  “How can I accept ordination with all this uncertainty?” he’d once asked his confessor, a functional octogenarian alcoholic, one of the cadre of emeriti that staffed the Woodstock seminary.  “How do you feel about your faith?” the old man asked.  “I feel wonderful,” Ryan admitted. “When I smell the incense in the presence of the Holy Sacrament, I feel…holy…I feel right.”  “Then act as if you were certain,” the old priest had advised. “It is a corollary of Pascal’s wager. There’s no such thing in this world as absolute certainty. So accept that and go forward acting toward the best outcome no matter what.”  As the days before his ordination became cluttered with crucial commitments and endless ceremonies, Ryan found he had no more time to entertain his uncertainties. The trouble with me, he ruminated, is that I’ve always had too little time—for everything. Things just keep happening before I’ve got them figured out. He’d always wished there could be an off-calendar eighth day of the week to do nothing but consolidate what you actually think, hopefully believe, and truly feel.  It was all, to Ryan, a bit overwhelming—especially for a young man who was still intent on figuring out, one piece at a time, the immense puzzle that was the Roman Catholic Church, the religion into which he had been involuntarily baptized as an infant, willy-nilly confirmed as an adolescent, and hesitantly ordained as a priest of its most militant order. Now it was too late, as far as the priesthood was concerned. He had been confirmed in that direction and, following his old confessor’s advice, determined to make the best of it. To his grateful surprise, even after his ordination his immediate superiors not only encouraged him to continue following his scholarly nose investigating the origins of the Church, but had also mysteriously arranged the residency in Rome.  Whenever his scholarly path seemed to disappear before his eyes, he returned to the simple basic questions that had inspired this quest: How could it be that Theophilus, one of the earliest Christian apologists, wrote nearly 30,000 words about Christianity without once mentioning Jesus Christ? How come the name “Jesus Christ,” in fact, doesn’t appear in any Greek or Latin author until after the Council of Nicaea? Why was it that the only near-contemporary account that mentioned Christ, a suspiciously precise paragraph known as the Testimonium Flavianum, in Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, had been proved to be a patent insertion into that historical narrative? How could Jesus have been born in 1 A.D. when the Gospels say he was born before Herod the Great died—and King Herod’s death could be pinpointed to 4 B.C.? Even Philip Cardinal Vasta, now known to the world as Pope Pius XIII, had lamented that the greatest obstacle for spreading the Catholic faith today was that the historical existence of Jesus could no longer be made credible. If Ryan could somehow find a way to stamp a measure of documented authenticity on the career of the Church’s founder, he would be serving the Holy Father as well as his own wavering vocation. If he could make that tangible contribution to the church, he might justify his own doubt-ridden existence and give himself a break.  If he could find evidence to prove objectively that Jesus really existed as a human being, he’d be able to reconcile all the contradictions. Without that proof certain—that had eluded scholars for some two thousand years—every thread of the tapestry of biblical scholarship became just another loose end and his profession based on an allegory at best, at worst, a phantom. Continues... Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.