3 Types of Publishing Indie-Authors Should Know

Traditional Publishing

This is probably the old-fashioned way to publish a book and back then it was the only way to get your book published. Once you finished writing your manuscript, you’ll need to find a literary agent and help you out to get into the traditional publishing companies. Then the traditional publishing company will ask you to work with their internal editors to revise your manuscripts, sometimes they’ll take control of the creativity over your manuscript. After that, the publishing company will pass on your revised manuscript to their in-house design team to work on the book cover, illustrations, and other creative finishing touches.

The advantage of traditional publishing is that you won’t need to pay upfront costs for hiring editors, illustrators, printing costs, and other publishing costs. Other than that, publishing companies will be filled with experienced people in the field for years, you don’t have to worry about how the results might be.

On the other side of it, there are going to be disadvantages of traditional publishing. One of them is that you won’t be taking full control over your creativity on your manuscript because the publishing company will have to adjust to their “taste” and what demand on market. The other one will be traditional publishing will give your earning by royalties up to 30%.

Self-Publishing

Most indie authors will choose this type of publishing to print their manuscript and turn it into a children’s book. Note that self-publish means you will work on your own from writing your manuscript until the picture book is done and finding the right marketing strategies. By the meaning of working on your own is that the creative control is full by your decisions, you could still hire professional help to get it done for you. For instance, you could hire freelance editors to revise and give you advice with some interesting ways of the plot, character building, and conflicts on your manuscript or hire an illustrator to help you out with the illustrations you’ll need according to the style you like for your children’s book. Those payments will be borne by yourself including the payment for marketing purposes.

But the advantage is that you’ll have full creative control over your works and along the way learn about the publishing process through professional help if you decided to hire them. Other than that, all the incomes you’ll make from selling the children’s book go to your pockets without needing to pay royalties to anyone.

Hybrid Publishing

Some traditional publishers have switched their strategies and become a hybrid publisher. Hybrid publishing is a combination of traditional publishing with an independent publishing. From that, this becomes a great way to get your manuscript published and get lower costs than self-publish. The hybrid publisher is going to invest half of the costs and the other half you will have to pay as well. These costs include production, marketing, distributions to bookstores. Other than helping you with the financial payment, a hybrid publisher also will offer you some helps until you get your children’s book published. This means that the hybrid publisher will be working with you before and after the book is published and ensure the quality of you and the publisher’s investments.

By that, you and the publisher will divide the income into two sides since both of you invest the money to publish the children’s book. But make sure that, the hybrid publisher provides you with several services such as distribution services, publish a book according to the industry’s standards and give potential sales to any bookstores.

Originally published at https://www.tullipstudio.com/blog