Can't afford to self publish?

Depending on how serious you are about your book and what objective you want to achieve with it, as a self publisher, an investment decision needs to be made.

Not just a time investment, but a dollar investment into printing your books, further, if the book is to have any chance of success, marketing dollars need to be spent to get the word out.

But for many self publishers, you may have the talent to write, but may not have to money to pay the upfront investment.

What do you do?

Basically then you have a few choices:

1) Try your luck with a publisher...chances are not great that you get picked up, as you well know, and even if you do get published this way, the likelihood of you faring any better as a self publisher is not that much better. In fact, nowadays some publishers are minimizing their risk with clauses for new authors to buy their own books if their books do not do well in the marketplace.

2) Obtain financing. BookPal has a financing option that allow people to get financing for their self publishing expenses, so that it becomes affordable for people to self publish as they can pay their bills over 6 months instead of getting hit with one big bill upfront. In fact, many self publishers have used this to sell their books first, make a profit and then pay their bill later.

This is just another product that BookPal has to help make self publishing easier.

However financing must be taken with wisdom, if you do not have a regular stream of income and are not sure whether you can sell all your books, it is a good idea not to finance more than you can afford if things do not go according to plan.

While there are self publishing success stories, there are also horror stories where people have mortgage their houses to the hilt to finance their self publishing efforts for very little return.

The key with financing and self publishing, is to find the right balance between funding your publishing efforts to make sure it has sufficient investment to give it the maximum chance for success, and at the same time ensuring you can afford the financing so it doesn't become a burden.