Doesn’t everybody have a dream about writing a fantastic book that will be bought by a major publisher, where an editor will be assigned to fine tine the manuscript, a publicist will be assigned to promote the book, and everyone will live happily ever after? Forget about it. It’s not going to happen.

The publishing industry has fallen on hard times, most of the well-known publishing companies around the world are now owned by a handful of big companies, mostly European. None of them are apt to publish anything by an unknown author. If they do, the editing and publicity will be the author’s responsibility.

There are many companies offering to help you publish your book, for a hefty fee. The majority of these are branches of one company which has an unsavoury reputation. They will publish your book, but the promised services – editing, cover design, book promotion – turn out to be pretty much worthless.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that it is easier than ever before for an aspiring writer to get his or her book into print. But the writer has to take charge of the whole process – editing, illustrating, book layout, cover design, promotion and sales. An author needs help in all of these aspects of preparing a book for market and then marketing it. You can spend a lot of money, or you can look for talented people who will offer their services for free or for a very small fee as a means of gaining experience and visibility for themselves.

Create Space is subsidiary of Amazon that will publish your book at no cost to you. They do print on demand, meaning that books are printed individually when an order comes in. They offer paid services to help with editing, cover design, and so on, but you don’t have to use them. Create Space is a US company and used to withhold a very large portion in US taxes and a Canadian author would have to jump through all the IRS hoops to try and recover that money. I understand that has changed.

Create Space will provide an ISBN (International Standard Book Number), but a Canadian author should obtain a Canadian ISBN. Most countries sell ISBN’s, but they are free in Canada. If you publish through Create Space it would be a good idea to create your own name to use as the publisher. Book stores are not likely to carry your book anyway, but if the Create Space name appears anywhere on your book that could pretty much guarantee they won’t touch it.

There are small publishers everywhere and one of them might be willing to publish your book if it fits their interests and their region. Another option would be a company like PageMaster in Edmonton. The owner of PageMaster did a presentation at the conference and it sounded pretty attractive. They offer all the services you need to prepare your manuscript for publishing and you can choose the ones you need. They do initial print runs of 20 to 200 copies, so that you are not stuck with a garage full of unsold books. You can probably find a business like this in other regions of the country.

The bottom line is that your name is on the book and you want to make it as high quality as you can. Don’t ask your sister in law or cousin to edit it. Find someone who will actively look for things that don’t add up, don’t sound right. If the book was worth writing, it is worth going the extra mile and making it what you really want it to be.