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Writing, whether it is a novel, a short story or a poem, is a solitary pursuit made enjoyable by the thought that what has been written will give pleasure to others for years to come. Admittedly, there are a few people who write as a form of catharsis, never intending that their words should be read, but, however worthy the exercise may be, that group does not concern us here. Finding a publisher or even a literary agent is a difficult and frustrating exercise and, unless the writer is exceptionally lucky, not to be attempted unless the writer is prepared to be rejected time after time. Rejection, though, is not necessarily a reflection of the quality of the work but is far more likely to be linked to the sheer cost of producing and marketing a printed book by an unknown writer: traditional print publishers cannot afford to take too many risks and any unknown author represents a risk. Given the choice between, let's say, a novel, no matter how outstanding, by an unknown writer and a ghosted 'autobiography' of a currently popular celebrity, guess which will be published? That's right, the one with the guaranteed sales, irrespective of literary merit. Of course, for a long time it's been possible to pay to have your book published, either by undertaking the whole job yourself or by going to one of the many companies that will do it for you. It's a costly option that will usually involve the outlaying of several thousand pounds, but that still leaves the question of marketing the book and that's far from easy. Some writers feel that this is the route for them, despite the cost and the problems, and if that's what they want to do who's to say it's wrong? It is a course of action that is often both expensive and unsatisfying: your book may be printed and may look very nice, but will it have been proofread, corrected, or even read at all before being printed? We've seen a lot of examples of such books and most are riddled with glaring errors which the most elementary of proofreading exercises would have picked up. Undertaking the whole publishing exercise yourself is entirely possible, of course, and 21st century technology has eliminated much of the horrendous cost of so doing. However, without any sort of marketing organisation behind you, how are you going to sell any copies of your book, never mind make any money from it? After all, you can spend days just driving around visiting bookshops only to end up a with just a few sales - and the majority of them on a sale or return basis - and find yourself out of pocket just by taking your petrol costs into account. Publishing on the internet is, if you want to see it that way, a sort of third option. Because your book doesn't ever exist in any tangible form it doesn't have the huge production costs of a printed book, nor does it face incurring expensive distribution costs. It still needs to be marketed, of course, and if you create your own website to sell your book you'll face the problem of getting people to visit that site instead of any of the millions of other sites they could be visiting. Somehow you have to overcome that problem and convince your visitors that your book is worth buying: once you've got a visitor on your site you have very little time, measured only in seconds, to grab and hold his attention. It's a lot easier to use an established eBook site, such as Deunant Books. Our site has been established for over four years and has evolved a successful formula. We've found that by adding to our catalogue regularly we have a high number of visitors returning time and again to see what's new; that puts an obligation on us to ensure that new material is of a consistently high quality. That poses a question, doesn't it? What do we do if we decide that your book isn't quite good enough to be accepted? It's a fair question and deserves an answer. If we have to reject your work - and there is much that we do reject - we'll explain why we feel it isn't up to scratch and you're welcome to resubmit your work. There are books on our site that were initially rejected then were worked on and finally accepted, so all isn't lost with an initial rejection. It's not all publishers who do this. Let's assume, though, that your book is good enough to be accepted. It can be submitted to us in any of several different ways - firstly on disk, either CD or floppy, in .doc or .rtf format, second by e-mail in the same formats, or third typed on paper, as long as it's A4, single sided and, ideally, single spaced. Here, though, we have to give a word of warning, because there is almost always a backlog of work needing to be looked at so you may have to wait for a month or so - perhaps less, sometimes longer - before you receive a response. It's because of this more or less constant backlog that sometimes we need to use proofreaders and editors outside of the Deunant Books team. This involves us in paying their fees and unfortunately we need to pass those fees on to the writer. We won't incur any fees unless we've agreed with you that we may do so; the advantage to you is that your book will appear on our website rather sooner than it otherwise would. We'll ensure that the book is checked for spelling or grammatical mistakes and that any that do appear are corrected. We'll also ensure that as far as possible everything in the book flows along and that there are no obvious inconsistencies in the story - readers can be really irritating in the way that they relish pointing such things out! When the book appears on the site it will be as near to being perfect as we can manage, but we are only human and therefore fallible so the odd mistake might get through undetected. To give your book extra impact we'll arrange for the creation of a 'virtual cover', an eye-catching image to draw attention to the book's written description and the free extract - from there on it's up to the reader to decide whether to buy the book. To encourage him to do so the book will be priced at considerably less than a bookshop would charge for an equivalent paperback. There will also be a descriptive paragraph or two about you, the author, if you wish. We don't insist on it, nor do we insist that what you say about yourself is necessarily true. Some of our writers have created a wholly fictional life for themselves and it's that fictional life that appears, not the real one. Our old website didn't allow for the inclusion of photographs of any writers, but this can now be done. Promoting our books is an exercise that never stops and we've developed good relationships with many journalists; this helps us gain exposure for new releases but we must sound a note of caution. It's impossible to predict the results when we send information to newspapers and it's never worthwhile to expect huge numbers of sales just because of some publicity. On the other hand, every time another writer's work attracts Press comment it draws attention to the whole website and that's a good thing! Atlantis Community Biography Children's Books Classic Writing Crime and Thrillers Fantasy General Fiction History Hobbies and Interests Horror Humour Philosophy Plays and Screenplays Poetry Politics Romantic Fiction Science Fiction Self-help Short Story Collections Sport Theology Travel Welsh Literature Zoe's Adult Book Club This page is about writers writer authors authorwriters e-writers electronic authors book books eBooks biographers children's writers writers of classics crime writers thriller writers fantasy writer historical author horror writer humourous writing philosophy playwrights adult books electronic biography crime thriller fantasy science fiction horror
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