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Writing a book is the easy part. The hard part begins when you attempt to publish the book. I'll share the five options I found as I considered publishing my book, MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: True Stories about Death, Dying and Afterlife. I'll also tell you about a new trend-setting publisher that is changing the way books get to market.

Option One: You may find a mainstream publisher who is willing to take a look at your book, but if you've ever tried to pitch a book you will realize that the rejections are extremely high and the possibility of having a publisher pick up the tab is not very likely. You must be able to market yourself and have a tough skin when it comes to rejection. Even if you do get lucky, you will still have to do a major portion of the marketing, so it helps to have some extra money to use for publicity. While mainstream commercial publishers and university presses have budgets for advertising and promotion, they tend to only use their resources to promote highly visible personalities whose books are easily sold by the power of that person's notoriety. These publishers will rarely risk a dime on the unknown author, and if they do, the window of time for the book to be deemed successful is roughly six weeks. If your book doesn't justify its costs in that time, it is back-listed and disappears from print. The author has little recourse, and can only wait out the time period until he can purchase back the rights to his book.

Option Two: is to use a "print/publish on demand" (POD) or vanity publisher. Most of these companies will accept ANY work from ANYONE, but you can expect to spend upwards of $1,000 and that will not get any copies in your hand for that price! That will cost you about $5-6 per book. You may do all the design work yourself or you may choose a la carte services or packages that include editing, designing the cover, formatting the page layout to their specifications, fulfilling orders and marketing the book. The POD will help you obtain an ISBN and list the book on Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and other major chain bookstores, but remember whoever owns the ISBN, owns the copyright. You may think you are self-publishing, but unless you purchased the ISBN under your name, you may very well have given your publication rights to the vanity publisher. One good thing about POD is they do handle distribution and order fulfillment. When someone wants to purchase your book, they will print a copy, ship it, and pay you about 30% of the

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