You’re a writer. You have a book written. Now all you need is a book publisher to put your hard work in print and you will have achieved your goal of being a published author.

Sounds simple but the fact is, it’s not. Getting the attention of an agent and/or book publisher can be very time consuming, even for the best of writers. The process can be tedious and cause more than a few writers to give serious consideration as to whether or not writing is the career for them.

For years, there’s been no other alternative to the grueling process of submitting work and waiting for publishing responses. That is…until the 1960s when self publishing made its entrance into the world. The early self publishers were looking for ways to publish what they wanted to write, when they wanted to write and in what format they wanted. With the availability and low cost of self publishing at the present time, now more writers than ever have access to publishing resources instead of waiting on others to “discover” their work.

Now the biggest decision you, as a writer, have to make is whether to search for book publishers who might be interested in your book or whether self publishing is the answer. Making that decision might not be as simple as you think. Let’s take a look at some of the issues you need to address before deciding if self publishing is for you.

* Issue One: Time

If you opt to go the self publishing route, you’ll need to have a lot of time. Not time to wait for publishing; that will be completed in a fairly quick fashion. What you will need to have time for is promoting your book. If your book is published by one of the many publishing houses that market in-mass, the promotion of our book is taken care of. If you go the self publishing route, you’ll be doing your own marketing.

* Issue Two: Design

Most people who know anything about how to publish a book understand that once a writer turns over his or her manuscript to book publishers, they then have no control on what goes on with their book after that point. With self publishing, a writer has total control over every facet of the book publishing process. The design of the book can be exactly what you envision for your book whereas going the more traditional book publishing direction means giving that control up.

We’ve looked at a couple of issues involved in the debate over traditional publishing versus self publishing. In part two of this article, we’ll look at even more issues such as content and book profits so that you can decide which avenue is best for you!

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