The Business of Being an Author
Writing and publishing a book makes you an author. Getting paid properly for it, keeping the rights you should keep, and not being taken in by the people who make a living from new authors makes you a professional one. This is the least written about stage of the journey and the one where the expensive mistakes happen, usually quietly, usually in a clause nobody read.
These four guides cover the money, the ownership, representation and the frauds. Every figure is labelled with the year it was checked, because fees and rates move and advice that does not date itself is worse than no advice.
The money
Royalty percentages are the most quoted and least useful numbers in publishing, because a percentage means nothing until you know what it is a percentage of. This guide covers the distinction that costs authors the most money and takes up two sentences on most pages that mention it.
The ownership
Your book is copyrighted the moment you write it, which means the real question is not how to get copyright but what registration adds and when it is worth the fee. This guide also covers the reverse problem, which causes far more trouble than theft: what you are allowed to quote in your own book.
Representation
An agent is the only door into the major publishing houses, and no help at all if you intend to self-publish. This guide starts with whether you need one, because a year spent querying for a book that was always going to be independent is a year nobody gets back.
Protecting yourself
New authors are a target market, and the operations that target them do not look like frauds. They look like publishers. This guide describes the patterns rather than naming companies, and then holds our own terms to exactly the same test.
Tools for this stage
Three free tools answer the arithmetic these guides describe. The royalty calculator shows what each price leaves you per copy on every platform, with print cost worked out from your page count. The copyright page builder writes the page a printer expects and downloads it as a file. The query letter builder holds each section to length and flags the openings agents see forty times a week.
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The next stage
The cycle starts again with the next book, and everything you learned here makes the second one cheaper and faster. Our writing guides are where that begins, and the full author resources library covers every stage in between.
Everything we do is defined work, and you keep every right
No royalty share, no exclusivity, no rights assignment. You pay for named work, you own the result, and the contract says so in plain language.