Best way to get published

Maxim108 said:

Just bumped into these forums, while I was looking for an agent/publisher. I was asked to find a publisher/agent or whoever needed to publish a fiction novel of a Russian author.

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You're asking for us to explain a lot to you. You need to do a lot of research before you go any further.

Briefly:

It's "novel", not "fiction novel".

Literary agents don't publish books: they represent the interests of their author-clients. They pitch their books to publishers and if and when a contract is offered, they make sure the terms are favourable. They then ensure the publisher adheres to the terms of the contract.

You'll find lots of "publishers" online but be careful: if they start asking you for money, they are vanity publishers and you should avoid them.

The author's nationality is not significant: what counts is the book. If it's good, it should find a publisher--so long as it's queried properly.

Book was translated to english, but I beleive it still needs to be edited. The author was published once in Russia.
Please ask me questions, if you need more information to help me.

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The book should have been edited prior to translation. Publishers which work with foreign and translation works usually prefer to use their own translators, so this is not necessarily a good thing.

The author's publication history is not significant unless their previous titles did very well.

I think we need to know more from you before we can help you properly.

Why have you been asked to find a publisher for this book? Why can't the author do it for him or herself? What's your stake in the matter? What are you hoping to achieve? Who is the author, and who is the translator? Do either have any significant experience in this area?

That's the sort of stuff we need to know.

Maxim108 said:

The author was published once in Russia.

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And that's where you, or the author, starts. If there was an existing relationship, and especially if this was the same work, your best bet is starting with a known quantity.

Jeff

European and American publishers buy foreign and translation rights from all over the world, even from Russia.

If the book has already been published in Russia, are you certain that the author still holds rights to publish it elsewhere? It's common for publishers to obtain all rights. If the original publisher did this, then your friend can't publish it elsewhere, they have to do it.

If you pay to have this book published you'll be vanity publishing the book. That's fine if it's what you want to do: but vanity publishers do not have the systems in place to get their books into bookshops, or to get their books reviewed in any meaningful way. Consequently your book won't sell many copies, and it won't reach many people at all. It's common for books published this way to sell fewer than 100 copies in total. So no, I wouldn't recommend that you look for a publisher happy to let you pay for publication because you've stated that your goal is to get the book "published as big as possible worldwide".

If that's what you want then you're going to have to do the same hard slog as the rest of us. Make sure the book is as good as it can be. Write a strong query for it. Send it to appropriate agents and hope they like what they see.

Note that most agents will automatically reject queries written by anyone other than the author of the book, and they will rarely work with anyone but the author of the book. So your friend really will have to do all the hard work themselves.

Also, you've had the book translated? Are you sure the translator is experienced in translating books of this kind? And are you sure you've obtained all required rights to that translation?

Maxim108 said:

Please, correct me if I am wrong... Usually authors try to find publisher who thinks the book is worth publishing money wise, because usually authors and publishers want to make money out of publishing the book. In our case it's a bit different. Author is not looking to make money out of it. He just wants it published as big as possible worldwide. He's ready to pay for that. So in our case two options are acceptable - publisher does all the work covering all expenses and we split the profit at the end or we covering all expenses and he just does his work. In other words - we're not waiting for some publisher to find the book worth it, we just need to find a publisher who's capable to publish it and do all the marketing and do it big.

It was another book that was published in Russia, so the author is still holding all the rights for this one.

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I disagree with Old Hack on one point. Paying a vanity publisher often is not "fine", because most of them scam people by feeding them all kinds of lies. I've seen this happen to a relative of mine, and also read the many many complaints that are online about it.

There literally aren't any publishers who do what you are talking about (doing all the work and making it BIG, and getting it known world wide while you pay) That simply does not exist. but you will find the vanity publishers ready to lie to you big time on this subject. The sales-reps for these companies hunt for people with your misconceptions about publishing in order to exploit their misconceptions, and scam them for thousands of dollars. You absolutely will be scammed if you believe the sales-rep from one of these companies telling you stories about how they can make your novel a success.

Books that make it BIG are predominately books that are either trade published by a great publisher, or self published in ebook form that made a huge splash in ebook form first, and generally those self published books that made it big in ebook, made it big, either because of quality, or because they tapped into something very on trend, or into a trope that has immense popularity, or had a premise that was incredibly intriguing to a large number of people. Often all of the above.

The self published books that make it big are written by authors using the new free to upload self publishing, never the scammy vanity companies that charge you hundreds or thousands of dollars upfront who put high prices on the books and sink them like a stone.

There is no real way of making sure a novel becomes well known world wide.

All novels are fiction. So you should never use the term "fiction novel."

Ginger, you're spot on. Apart from this one thing:

gingerwoman said:

I disagree with Old Hack on one point. Paying a vanity publisher often is not "fine", because most of them scam people by feeding them all kinds of lies. I've seen this happen to a relative of mine, and also read the many many complaints that are online about it.

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I agree with you that most people who work with vanity publishers don't fully understand how it's going to work, and a lot of them end up getting scammed out of a lot of money. But I have known a few people who did understand what they were signing up to, and even so got what they wanted out of the deal.

I don't think vanity publishing is a good option for our OP, though.

I'm not really familiar with how things work in Russia. Are there agents in Russia who could contract this book and then try to sell it to US publishers?

Old Hack said:

Ginger, you're spot on. Apart from this one thing:



I agree with you that most people who work with vanity publishers don't fully understand how it's going to work, and a lot of them end up getting scammed out of a lot of money. But I have known a few people who did understand what they were signing up to, and even so got what they wanted out of the deal.

I don't think vanity publishing is a good option for our OP, though.

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From some research I've done I've noticed that a number of companies that were once legitimate in terms of offering what they said they did, have been bought up by an extremely large corporation that does a lot of straight up scamming, and makes a lot of false promises.

Unfortunately I think there are a lot fewer vanity publishers now, where people can expect to get what they pay for, than there once were. So it's a huge case of buyer beware in my opinion.

Also Maxim people can use Createspace for print self publishing now without the big upfront fee. That's why many authors now distinguish between self and vanity publishing and advise other authors against vanity.

Best listen to Old Hack. You are setting yourself and your employer up to be scammed by saying you "don't care about money" and are willing to pay for publication. No serious publisher accepts money for publication--not one. And no vanity publisher can attain the wide distribution you're looking for---not one. To get that sort of distribution, and the reviews and marketing to support it, you need a mainstream publisher.

Sadly, these days even those mainstream publishers own subsidiary vanity companies. Penguin bought Authors Solutions, a notorious vanity publisher, and now Author Solutions gets to claim (falsely) that their customers can get the same editors as Stephen King and other bestselling writers. There's a class-action suit against them, but they continue to expand. Here's a good series explaining how these companies work.

Old Hack's criteria for legitimacy is solid. If they want money from you for anything, they're vanity publishers, and they'll never deliver what you seek.

Maxim108 said:

Me again. So... the author wants to try a self-publishing company that also offers marketing services. Someone advised us to use this one https://www.millcitypress.net, but I'd like to ask if you know any other companies, so we can have more options. Thank you.

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Holy good God! $5,997?! Seriously?!

Run away! Run FAR away from this one!

By comparison, even if you took the highest possible package at Lulu.com, it's only half that price.

And Createspace is even less.

What you need to decide is what you want for the book. How things work in America is that distributors and book buyers put books in physical bookstores and secondary markets (grocery stores, department stores like Walmart and Target, airport shops, etc.) Without a distributor or bookbuyer, a book will likely never see the inside of a store to get on the shelf. When a subsidy publisher (like the one you posted) says they have "worldwide distribution", what they mean is it's available to purchase---if a reader knows to go look for it. It does not mean the publisher has the contacts to put the book in the stores. This is an often misunderstood concept by new authors and is the source of the most dissatisfaction by authors of publishers.

The most likely way to go "big" in America is exactly what Old Hack said. . . . slog through the muck of querying with the rest of us. Or, get a Russian publisher for that particular book such as Eksmo (which is where my Russian editions are published.) They have the contacts in the States to get the book out in the US.

Or, as others have said, go for self-publishing. But don't confuse subsidy publishing with self-publishing. They're very different things. In self-publishing, the author takes the place of the publisher, and is responsible for hiring an editor, hiring a cover artist, and working with the system to get the book in the stores. It's quite a bit of work. Those who have gone to become "big" in self-publishing have spent a ton of time and effort to reach their audience.

As Cathy has said, run away from that publisher. It's not a self publisher, it's a vanity publisher and you'll be lucky to sell more than a handful of books if you use them.