Getting My Stories Published

A couple of months ago Nick was pestering me to try to get some of my short stories published. He found out that Amazon had a program that allows authors to submit stories to be published and distributed electronically through the amazon website.

I had a look into it and discovered that if you are outside the US it is very difficult to actually earn any money from publishing through Amazon. You had to apply for an American tax file number and get an American bank account. Then there were a number of taxes you had to pay. To sum it up it was just not worth the bother.

Meanwhile over at Google they have a similar system but allow you to be paid in your own currency into your own bank account and you don’t have to bother about all those pesky US taxes.

Before I am able to get my book published there are a number of things I have to do. One of them is apply for an international standard book number or ISBN. This is the number represented by the barcode on the back of books it is also quoted on the copyright page. This number identifies a unique edition of a book from one specific publisher, it also allows your book to be found by the book global supply chain. You have to buy ISBNs in Australia from Thorpe-Bowker the only ISBN an agency in this country.

You can also apply for what is called a Catalogue in Publication this you get from the National Library in your country. This adds your book to their catalogue before it is even published. This allows anybody to search for your book, it is used by libraries and booksellers to place advance orders of your book.

One of the things I don’t have to do is find a publisher for my book. Because, I choose to publish the book in electronic format means it hardly costs anything to publish the book. I will not need a publisher to print and distribute my book. I will need to advertise it myself, but I get a larger percentage of the royalties by publishing the book myself.

Now, all I need to do is get somebody to design a great looking front cover for the book and to get all my stories into a publishable condition.