THE ICE PICK

Publish Your Own Novel, by Connie Shelton. Angel Fire, N.M.: Columbine Books. ISBN 0-9643161-6-1. $18.95.

At last a self-help, self-publishing handbook for fiction! And this one is outstanding.

This book is a step-by-step guide to being your own literary agent and publisher as well as an excellent example itself of what Shelton is talking about. As a former book editor for a small publishing house myself, I can testify to Shelton’s accuracy and comprehensiveness.

Among the many reasons for self-publication is the time factor. If you don’t want to wait months or years for a trade publisher to even decide whether they want to publish your novel or not, and more months and
/or years before it gets into print, only to have it placed in a bookstore for often as little as three months, then you may want to consider self-publication.

Many of us think vanity presses are the only alternative, but are concerned with the stigma and the financial risk. And some of these presses are shoddy operations that take your money and run. Even if they are reputable, they will still leave all the hard work of selling up to you.

However, now that even major publishing houses expect authors to do most of the promotion and market analysis, many more writers are opting to self-publish, figuring that if they’re going to do most of the work anyway, they might as well get the elephant’s share of the profits rather than the 6 to 10 per cent advance on royalties the houses offer.

Yet self-publication does not have to be through a vanity press. Whether you want to publish only your works or you want to set up your own publishing company and publish other authors’ works as well, this book can show you how to create beautiful, top-quality books and sell them.

In fact, the book is a great resource for authors even if you do get your book published by a trade publisher, offering lots of behind-the-scenes information on how the publishing industry works, how books are placed in bookstores, etc., plus many quick and inexpensive ideas for promoting your book, making a name for yourself, setting up book tours, and so forth.

Shelton also offers plenty of warnings of what not to do, and of the pitfalls along the way.

If you’re tempted to look down on self-published authors, then you owe it to yourself to think again. You will be in good company not only with Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, but with modern authors like James Redfield--who self-published The Celestine Prophecy and later sold it to Warner for $800,000.

If all this makes you think you might consider self-publication, then this book is for you. At the very least it will help you decide if you have the courage, stamina, and financial resources to handle self-publication.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter. Sept. 1998. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Dec. 1999.}