by Norma Budden

Created on: April 13, 2008

Publishing books through mainstream publishers definitely has advantages over self-publishing books - providing you can get a mainstream publisher to purchase your book, that is. However, self-publishing is beneficial in a variety of areas and carries its own rewards.

A mainstream publisher will not accept a book about your family history, regardless of how entertaining it may be - regardless if one hundred members of your family wish to purchase it.. The market would be too small. Book publishers seek markets numbering in the thousands and tens of thousands. In such a case, self-publishing may be the best option.

A mainstream publisher will take more time getting your book into print, as there are so many other books in the process of being published. If you have your book ready and you need it sooner rather than later, you may wish to self-publish. Within three to four months, providing you have no corrections to make, you may be holding a copy of your book.

A mainstream publisher has editors which come as part of the package. Editors read your manuscript, checking it for grammatical errors, punctuation, spelling mistakes, and for the general storyline to see if it is of interest to a large number of people. Editors will ask you to make a number of revisions (even if you don't want to) before they review the manuscript again. With self-publishing, you are your own editor, unless you know someone capable of performing the task for you. When your manuscript is sent to the company who will turn it into a book, no one reviews it. If you have one hundred mistakes in the copy you send in, you'll have one hundred mistakes in your book, unless you pay for corrections to be made after noticing the mistakes, often charging you roughly $70/hour.

A mainstream publisher publishes a mass numbers of books per title to send to many businesses at the same time, so it can adhere to the release date which has been set for a chosen title. If the books are not sold, neither authors nor publishers get paid for those stripped books. However, with self-publishers, they decide on the number of books they want printed, whether it is one or several. Books are sold as they are printed, and the author and publishing company always get paid. In addition, self-publishers receive discounts from the original print cost of the book as the volume of their orders increase.

Though a better choice overall, with mainstream publishing, there will come a time when a book is no longer in print, whereas,

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