I'm sure you'll agree with me when I say Holy Worlds has lots of talented authors. Stories are developing, growing, and gaining depth with the hard efforts of everyone on here. Striving for quality writing is one of the primary motives on this forum.

But I've been wondering; after you finish that beautiful book you've written, what do you do with it? Will you self publish, or will you find a large-scale publishing company? Why do you choose either one? What should we expect from the publishing process? What are some of the hurdles we need to go through?

In other words: How does one publish a book???

This thread is for people to learn about and share information on the publishing process. If any of you published authors have any tips, ideas, or suggestions, we'd love to hear them!

I haven't met with the details of publishing yet but I would definitely say a bigger company. I've read lots of books with great ideas from smaller or personal publishers and they tend to have a lot more errors in them. Plus more publicity from a larger company. I would look for a Christian company though.

This is my personal how not to get published, based on my experience. (Or, how to not get published).
Step 1: Start writing a novel when you are twelve years old
Step 2: Complete the story two hundred pages later when you are about fifteen years old
Step 3: Think that editing is so boring that you are still in that stage when you are sixteen
Step 4: Imagine you are done because it has been so long and seek out publishing agents. Send out queries to several. Have only a few bother to send back rejection replies.
Step 5: Join HolyWorlds and realize that most of your work is rather unappealing by comparison (no offense to the site or its members intended).
Step 6: Decide you need to re-write up to 2/3 of your book, thus eliminating the progress of the past few years

*chuckles* Thanks for the advice, Reiyen.

*chuckles* Same for me, Reiyen. Almost exactly, in fact, except I didn't even bother to send it to any publishers =P

eruheran

From what I've heard self publishing isn't the way to go. However, I wouldn't know seeing as I've never had a book published. There is one thing I would suggest though. Look up the Christian Writer's Market Guide. That would help any writer out immensely!

Moved to Village Lore.

I independently publish. That is what I believe is God's plan for me. I've sent some queries, but I felt like I was going against that, so I stopped pursuing traditional publishing.

There are thousands of really bad self-published books that have given self publishing a bad name, but it is becoming much less frowned upon. I think it really depends on what kind of resources you have. Obviously, besides good editing, cover and interior design are important for independently published books. I have learned how to format book pages and between me and my mom, we can do a lot with Photoshop to create covers. As I see it, the one of the only cons of independently publishing if you have the resources to create a good book, is marketing. You have to do much more work to get your book out to people, BUT what I didn't realize until I started researching is that you still have to do much of your own marketing with a traditional publisher. They don't market books like they used to. Most of it is now left to the author.

Those are my thoughts. Hope they can be of some help.