Writer's Trinity

Pushing, persistence and patience. Definitely the writer's holy trinity. Pushing past your doubts to enter contests, submissions, interviews, and presenting you work to agents and publishers, persistently networking with authors, agents and publishers and finding the patience to wait until they have time to review your work and get back to you.

Now not everyone in the publishing industry adheres to these guidelines. There are renegades amongst us! **Gasp!** These are the folks that grab the manuscript by the footer, publish the book prior to waiting for industry permission and then, amazingly, make real money.

Let us not fool ourselves. Traditional publishing is one step short of author slavery. They own the rights, the date of publication, how many they will print and you MUST meet the preset numbers or find yourself homeless again. Yet, the "dream" is to be published traditionally. It's "acceptable."

I've crunched the numbers...Let's see, they give you a $25,000 contract for one book. The print run is 15,000 copies. Now if your book sells for $12, then that 15,000 copies translates into $180,000 gross. Minus your $25,000 and print costs, the publisher nets a cool $100,000 or more...and you wrote the sucker. They just have the distribution! Kind of rubs you raw, huh?

This is one of the reasons why I began my publishing company, Fishbowl International, Inc. It's a flat fee hybrid publisher. Yes you must pay to get everything set up, but once the books start rolling off the press, you only pay $2 per book. Anything over and above that after print costs is YOURS! That's right, if your book costs $3.50 to print, add Fishbowl's $2 for a total of $5.50. If you sell that sucker for $12, then the remaining, $6.50 is YOUR profit. Visit www.fishbowlinternational.com for more information.

Think about it...