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

Rating:
Summary: Redundancy coupled with hand holding
Review: 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.