You have written your book, sent out inquiry letters to publishers, heard nothing, did some research, discovered that you need to represented by an agent, sent out more inquiry letters, heard nothing, etc. That's the way it goes in about 99% of the cases. But, let's just say that you hear from an agent, who decides to represent you, and that agent gets your manuscript past the "slush pile" (where most manuscripts languish and die at publishing companies), and you get signed to a contract with an advance. Hooray! In eighteen months your book will hit the shelves of bookstores. And every step in the process of getting it there, what it looks like, and how it is marketed is under the control of the traditional publisher.
Now, what do you make for all this effort? In most cases, you get a small advance on royalties--$5,000 is typical for a first-time writer at an average publishing company--and your royalties range from 5% of the net price of the book to as much as 15% of the selling price. The "net" is what the publisher receives after giving what amounts to a 55% discount to the wholesale buyers of your book. Let's say you have produced a "trade" paperback, as opposed to a "mass market" paperback (the former is a better quality book measuring approximately 6" x 9"--the latter 4.25" x 7"), and it has a retail price of $13.95. If you have been given a very generous 10% of the selling price royalty (you are not Stephen King who commands 15% or more), you would receive $1.40 per book sold. Your payment would be only $.31 per book if you were on the lowest end of the royalty scale. If you were to sell one million books, you would be doing well in either case. But if you were to only sell 2,000 books that would mean royalties of $2,800 on the 10% deal and only $627.75 on 5% of the net. And, you still owe your agent 15%.
And, what's even worse, in 2004, Nielsen BookScan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books and found that nine hundred and fifty thousand of them sold fewer than ninety-nine copies.
I don't mean to be so discouraging because many writers do make it, but for the time being you should not consider quitting your day job.
Then, there is self-publishing where you can get your book into print within a little more than a month and have complete control over the process.
True self-publishing means that the author forms a publishing company and that company name appears on the copyright page of the book as publisher and the book's ISBN number is registered by Bowker (the ISBN agency) to the author as publisher. The true self-published author not only produces the finished book, but also markets it.
Companies that charge authors for producing their books can accurately be called subsidy, cooperative, partner, or even joint venture publishers. In the past, the term "vanity" publishing applied to the process of authors paying to have their work published. The stigma attached to vanity publishing arose because many companies printed works with little or no regard to quality.
Today the publishing industry is changing, and two factors make author subsidized publishing more acceptable: (1) the emergence of digital print-on-demand technology (POD); and (2) the significant increase in rejections of first-time authors by traditional publishers. The number of books produced by authors who have paid to have them published is approaching the number printed by traditional publishers.
Printing hardware and software advances make it economically feasible to print from 1 to 500 copies of a book. Conventional offset printing requires the printing of significantly more copies, and, hence, a much larger up-front investment. The exceptionally high cost of printing and marketing books today have forced traditional publishers to accept less than 1% of the works of first-time authors.
If you are in that other 99%, you must consider either self-publishing or subsidized publishing. The stigma of taking control of producing your own work is much less of a factor today.