Achieving Your Dream

There are many ways to publish your book these days. Certainly at the top of the heap would be a book deal with a New York publisher, where they give you a six-figure advance, pick you up in the limo and have a ticker tape parade in your honor with huge inflatables of your book floating above you, along with adoring crowds holding up your book.

But then reality sets in and you get a series of rejection letters or nothing at all. What started out as an amazing process and a gift you wanted to share with the world has turned into a demeaning and demoralizing put down, and you feel dejected.

Fortunately you pick yourself up and say, “I don’t need permission to publish my book. I can do it myself.” So you set your course to do just that and start looking into exactly how to do it. You visit some of the self-publishing websites. They make it look easy. But you realize that you still need to get your book edited, and you don’t have a really great cover yet (the one your nephew did is nice, but not nice enough), and you need to get the book laid out.

You find that there are a lot of decisions to make and that self-publishing is a lot of work. You also find out that many of the online self-publishing companies will help you with your cover and your layout and your editing. For a fee. You decide you are willing to pay to have your book prepared for publishing, but you find out you can’t really talk to the editor, or the designer, or the layout artist. It is all very clinical, very automated. Very impersonal.

You wish there was a publisher who worked with the same standards as the large New York publishers, but would talk to you as a colleague and help you, and give you honest feedback about your work, all for the sake of making “the work” as good as it can possibly be. You dream of a publisher who would not put you down but lift you. You wonder if there is a publisher who will collaborate with you and treat you like a professional versus a worthless baby writer. You just need a hand up and you wish there was someone, anyone, who would reach down and pull you up into the big leagues and help you get it right.