Customer Reviews

How to Publish, Promote, & Sell Your Own Book: The insider's guide to everything you need to know about self-publishing from pasteup to publicity

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As most aspiring authors have done, I have searched for helpful books on authoring and publishing. I came across this book and it seemed promising because it offered both sides of the track and everything in between. For someone interested in the basics who has not read anything, this would be a book to read.

Holt goes from point A to B and doesn't miss any details, no matter how small. He'll tell you what color pencil to use in editing, to how to open your mail. Much of this the normal person with any amount of common sense would know how to do, why fill your book with what everyone knows how to do? Other times he writes on every detail you could imagine on how to write and prepare your manuscipt, or how to promote and distribute and so on, only to become redundant, writing the same advice several times throughout.

Also, this is most certainly not a book to help the fiction writer. Where there are some anecdotes to help explain some of the printing and editing process, it is geared strictly for the nonfiction authors and their world. He tries to mask it at first, talking about both the fiction as well as the nonfiction, but quickly leaves fiction by the wayside. Then, out of nowhere, something on fiction will creep in for a line or two, and then is gone. The author made no mention in the book description or title that this was a how-to book on how to write and publish how-to books. Some blaim falls on myself, I guess, since I didn't take the time to peruse the chapter headings, but, wait, that would have still fooled me. Even when I read some of the text of the book at the bookstore it seemed, without reading the whole book, that it would be useful on both sides. I was wrong.

If you are a fiction writer looking for guidance, look elsewhere. As so many how-to books on publishing and writing do, this one doesn't cover fiction writing. Every publishing how-to always says to find a field that is marketable, well how come people aren't writing on this one, on how-to write and publish fiction? Perhaps some day, until then we must settle for the nonfiction how-tos to gleam a small amount of help.

I was looking for a book on self publishing and I knew which one I wanted but I grabbed this one by mistake. It has some interesting information about the publishing industry and some good advice about editing.

But some of the things he said about the publishing industry just seemed wrong. He was also talking about B. Dalton and Crown books as if they were the largest book sellers in the indsutry. No mention of Amazon or B&N? Something seemed wrong. Checking the copyright page I found that this book was published in 1985.

The industry has definately changed over the past 20 years. The Internet, Word Processing software, and other technology advances since the early 80's have changed the way books are written and published. It is time for an update to this book.

This book is not recent, therefore some of the information does not ring true anymore. However, it does provide a lot of good information. I checked it out from the library, but it wouldn't be a bad book to own. There is not mention of anything about the internet as it was published in the 80's. It is mainly geared toward nonfiction writing. Though the information would be good for anyone planning to self-publish. Another book I would recommend if you're really into self-publishing, is Dan Poynter's Self-Publihing manual.

This book is very informative and written in layman's terms. It is easy for a first time publisher to understand. The author is very real with his communication;no complicated verbage.