Hi babydoe

First of all congratulations on the book, that is an incredible title!

As others have said, the "regular" way of getting a book published is to find and submit your book to an agent (the person you contacted is NOT an agent!) and then they submit your book to a publisher.

You are not supposed to spend money on getting the book published... that is the publisher's role. They take care (and cost) of printing, distributing, and marketing. In return they hope that many copies of the book will sell and that will make a lot of money for them and for you.

Since they are relying on book sales after the money for printing etc is laid out, obviously they are very choosy about what they will pick to take on. It has to be something that they have faith will sell well once it is on the market.

Publishers do not accept manuscripts to evaluate from authors for legal reasons. So the middleman here is to find an agent (a real one) and their role is to submit your manuscript to the publisher, in exchange the agent gets a cut of the profits. Because the agent is also relying on book sales to earn her profit, agents are also very picky about who they choose as clients. A reputable agent with experience benefits you and the publisher because the publisher knows anything the agent submits is "pre screened" and worth the publisher's time to read.

So to start out, authors will often submit their work to many many agents, hoping one of them will "bite". It is also possible to find agents that specialize in a specific area, such as children's books, self help books, or biographical journals like yours. That is not to say that you shouldn't submit your book to any agents you can find. You do have to be prepared to receive a lot of rejection letters, that goes with the course. But don't be discouraged, you just have to find the right agent who understands and appreciates your work.

So to start, you should find a list of agents to submit. I am not sure if they want you to jump in with your manuscript, they may prefer a synopsis and maybe a few chapters at first for evaluation, based on that they will either pass or ask for the full manuscript. You will have to contact them to find out what they want. As a clue to whether they are reputable or not, remember your experience with the one you tried already. Look for an agent that really works with publishers and gets books published, and they should never ask you for money.

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Having said all of that, there is also another legitamite course of action, which is indeed to publish the book yourself. I would take this only as a second option if you cannot find an agent or publisher and also only if you can afford it. This simply involves paying to have the book printed on your own, and then taking on the task of marketing it yourself.

Of course this is exactly where your first "agent" was pointing you towards, the scuzzy thing there is that they should have made that clear at the get-go and also not presented themselves as an "agent". In truth if you are getting the book printed yourself you do not even need their services, you just need to find a printer which you can do on your own. It is necessary to have someone set up your book in the proper format for printing... do the typesetting, pagination, etc. but many printers can do that in-house (for an extra fee) or at least recommend someone they work with to do it. Also a cover will have to be made, and like the typesetting, many printers have artists in house or can recommend someone for you to work with to generate the art.

Once the book is printed comes the hard part, which is marketing it. For the actually sales, it is not that difficult to do. Amazon.com has a program to sell it for you. All you need is the printed book, and you have to get an ISBN number for the book (that will usually be printed on the back cover). If you look at any book in your house, on the back near the bar code is the ISBM number. This identifies your book, there is an agency that takes care of these. Once you get the number, someone has to generate the bar code to print on the book, again the printer can likely take care of this for you.

I can look up the name of the amazon program for you, they have info on their website. They will ask you to submit somewhere between 2 and 5 books for initial stock (they are not going to keep a hundred books in their warehouse before they know if they will sell). They will ask you to send more copies after the originals sell. You don't get very much money at all from this, only a teeny tiny percentage of the book's retail value. If you are more interested in getting the book out there than on making money this is a good option though. Personally though I would want to do something that would at least make back my expenses even if I wasn't interested in a profit.

Getting the book for sale on amazon is very easy. The very difficult part of course is getting people to see and buy your book. You're book will come up on searches on Amazon but no one is going to search for it if they don't know about it. You can maybe get websites to promote it for you, or take out ads, or whatever. Obviously this is a very risky business, which is why publishers take on this role (they have the recources to lay out the costs) and why they are so picky (their company's success and profit depends on them choosing the right books to get behind.)

Also bear in mind that printing costs rely on volume. By far the large majority of the expense of printing are the costs to get it on press... press setup, burning the plates, etc. Once it is running on press running more and more copies is relativly easy. No one will print 5 or 10 copies of a book for you, it would cost way way too much. Business cards and letterhead for example, usually print shops will print a minimum of 500 for maybe 15 dollars, and a thousand for 17 dollars, 5000 for 20 dollars etc. To have them print ten they would have to probably still charge the 15 dollars or maybe 14.99 so it just doesn't make sense to do it. So even if Amazon is only going to take 5 copies initially you are still going to have to print and store a whole lot of copies of the book, and be stuck with them if they won't sell (you could give them out as gifts to people of course). You will have to check with the printer for costs and minimum quantities.

With new technology there are also now many digital quick print places around. Unlike a traditional printer or quickprinter (like minuteman press or sir speedy... these shops usually do traditional offset printing) these new places print digitally on what is similar to a very high quality, high volume copy machine. A place like this may be able to produce fewer copies. There is still traditional binding involved to make it a book so you would have to see if they can offer a better deal or not.

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Two last comments... the money you gave to the "agent" is probably lost but it wouldn't hurt to pursue some action there. I'm not sure if there is a standing on this but you can at least find out if there is some fraud involved with them presenting themselves as an "agent". There may not be if they since they made it clear there would be costs up front. And it seems they did provide a service... that of a typesetter or graphics firm, just not the services of an agent. At the very least a report to the better business bureau of rmisleading you. Maybe even get you're local newstations "helper" or "on your side" reporter or whatever you have locally. Can't hurt to try.

Second thing, although I don't necessarily recommend pursuing doing the printing and marketing yourself, simply because of the cost involved and the low chance of success, if you do decide to go that route at some point I can offer to set your book up for you at no charge, if you have a Word document or something you can send. I can set it up so it looks nice, table of contents etc if you want, and give you a PDF to proofread and ultimately to send to the printer. It is what I do. It may be more convenient to work directly with the printer on this but if the extra cost is prohibitive it is an option. Also bear in mind that depending on my current state, with my depression and whether or not I am working again, it may take me a little while to set up for you. It shouldn't be too long but it won't be overnight.

Also if the "agent" has indeed already done this then it may actually be all ready to submit to a printer. If they have, you have already paid for that so they should give you the file. Important though, even if they did a good job at setting it up, you may have paid much more than you would have paid by hiring a typesetter on your own, so I would pursue getting some money back from them first. Once you accept and make use of a finished document from them I doubt you would have any legal recourse.

-- The world is what we make of it --
-- Dave
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