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You're frustrated because mainstream publishers and agents won't look at your potential best-seller. So you've sent your ms to Publish America, or a vanity publisher, or a POD publisher and lo and behold! They've accepted it.

Before you start dreaming of the money you're going to make, take some time to do your research.

First step is to check out the publisher on the website Preditors & Editors ((http://www.anotherealm.com/p rededitors/, or follow the link in my About Me page). Preditors & Editors is a long-standing, well-respected site and you can trust its information.

Assuming Preditors & Editors has nothing negative to say, then you can feel confident you're not going to get ripped off. But before you take the plunge, make sure you understand the difference between these publishers and the mainstream.

Mainstream publishers invest thousands of dollars in publishing a book: they have to pay the editor who spends hours working with you to polish your work; marketing campaigns; printing and shipping costs. Their risk isn't over when the books get to the bookshop, because most sell on consignment (i.e., if the book doesn't sell, they have to take it back).

POD publishers and self-publishers only have to pay for the cost of preparing the book for print, and these days that's a very cheap process. If they do edit your book for free, it's probably no more than a spell-check - if they edit it properly, be sure they'll charge you and make a profit from it! Also, the POD/self-publisher knows you'll order enough copies yourself (for family and friends) to cover their costs, so they don't care whether the book is going to interest anyone else.

This means that if you're accepted by a mainstream publisher, you know your book is one of the best - because they won't risk all that money on anything less. But if you're accepted by a POD or self-publisher, it doesn't mean much - they can afford to accept almost anything, because they have nothing to lose if it doesn't sell.

So you can see that getting "accepted" by a POD or self-publisher isn't much of an achievement (sorry to burst your bubble).

Of course, there are good reasons for using a POD or self-publisher. What you need to do is work out your reason, and make sure it's valid!

For instance, are you thinking that self-publishing will open doors to mainstream publishing in the future? You may have read about authors who got into mainstream publishing this way. It's true that some have, BUT that's because they managed to sell

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