If you are contemplating becoming an INTERNET publisher, you undoubtedly have a number of questions. The following FAQs should give you a great deal of the information about which you are curious. If they do not, then don’t hesitate to contact us at mccollum@3mpub.com and we will be pleased to discuss your concerns in detail.
#1: So all I need do is put my book online and then sit back while the money rolls in?
We wish it were that easy. Unfortunately, if that is the amount of effort you are willing to expend on the project, you are going to be sorely disappointed and ought to save your money. Like everything else in life, success on the INTERNET is a matter of hard work and diligence. While the invention of the INTERNET has dramatically altered the economics of publishing, it has not magically solved all of the problems. If you choose to publish your book on Third Millennium Publishing's website, then you will have solved three of the inherent problems of publishing. You will have made your book available to the public, you will have provided yourself with a means to collect money, and you will have access to a distribution system that delivers the book to the buyer after the sale.
The only problem that remains is finding customers who are willing to purchase what it is that you have written. On the INTERNET, that is the hard part. Let us say that you are a budding young author like Tom Clancy was in the 1980s. You have written a book that literally millions of people will pay to read. You put that book online and are ready to rake in the money. Exactly how do those millions of people find your book? The answer, of course, is publicity.
#2: How do I publicize my book on the INTERNET?
There are a number of ways to publicize your book on the INTERNET.
Some of these Third Millennium Publishing can assist you with. Other options, you will have to pursue yourself. By being associated with Third Millennium Publishing, you automatically come to the attention of the people who visit the site each month. Whenever someone comes into the site, either to check out a particular author or just to browse, they have the opportunity to read about your book. If you pique their interest, they may reach for their credit card and you will make a sale.
One of the best ways to be found on the INTERNET is to have a URL (uniform resource locator, or address) that is easy to remember. We have one of the best. The site address for Third ( 3rd) Millennium Publishing is 3mpub.com, a simple 8 character code that is easy to remember. People find you on the web by typing in 3MPUB.COM/YOUR NAME. What could be easier than that?
#3: What steps can I take as an author to publicize my book?
There are a large number of things that you can do to get the word out. Some of these are free and others are extremely cost effective. You can advertise with web services such as Google's Adwords. These allow you to specify a series of key words that will alert people who are interested in the subject of your book and cause them to click on the Google link when it comes up. You only pay for actual clicks and not for everyone who receives your ad.
You can also take out a small advertisement in the backs of specialty magazines. If you have written a “hi tech” science fiction novel, for instance, you can advertise in the classifieds in Analog Science Fiction Magazine. If your book is of interest to astronomers, you can use several astronomy magazines. If you have written a mystery, then there are Ellery Queen's and Alfred Hitchock Mystery Magazines. You can contact your local newspaper or television station and arrange to have a story written/broadcast about your entry into the new world of publishing in cyberspace.
Possibly the best way to publicize your book is to use Social Media. Find a group that specializes in what your book is about and let them know where to find your work. Then there is Tiktok. You can make an interesting video and at the end of it, give viewers the link or address of your 3mpub.com site.
#4: You say that I am the publisher. Isn't Third Millennium Publishing the publisher?
Third Millennium Publishing is not a publisher of authors so much as it is a cooperative of authors.
Each writer who participates is selling his or her book directly to the public and collecting the revenue. Except for payments that cover the cost of sales and infrastructure, there is no middleman in the transaction. You sell your book and then receive approximately 70% of the money received (versus 6-8% for traditional publishing).
Third Millennium Publishing will provide you with “printing” services (that is, we will prepare your book for electronic transmission), display services, money collection services, and distribution services, and (if a paperback) manufacture books for you.
We do not own the rights to publish your book like a traditional publisher. You own those rights and are exercising them for your own benefit.
Note: If your book is currently being published by a traditional publisher, you must get them to “revert” your rights before you can sell it yourself online. I know of no faster way to be sued than selling a publisher your “right to publish,” and then going into competition with them. In fact, the "publisher" is the party who owns the "right to publish" (by definition).
At Third Millennium Publishing, that is the author.
Although you are in business for yourself, there are major benefits for being a member of the cooperative. While you are out advertising your book to attract customers; so, too, are all of the other writers on our website. When any writer succeeds to attracting someone to the website, then all authors have the opportunity of a visit from that same customer. As the number of writers on the website grows, word spreads and a snowball effect begins. When any one author makes a sale, all authors benefit because that customer knows where to come the next time they are looking for a good book to read.
#5 How do I know this model of publishing will work?
Third Millennium Publishing was born in 2000. Our founder is the well-known science fiction writer, Michael McCollum, the author of 14 novels and 4 books on writing. He has sold 250,000 copies of his books via traditional publishers and bookstores, and has been selling them online in our sister website, Sci Fi - Arizona, for twenty-four years. Each customer who purchases a Michael McCollum book typically leaves a total of $20 behind – either in that single visit, or by returning for multiple purchases. That is a statistic that compares favorably to any bookstore in the world!
#6: What if I want to sell "real books," i.e., those printed on paper?
We here at Third Millennium Publishing love bookstores. In fact, they are just about our favorite places in all the world. Therefore, it pains us to report that the electronic book revolution has changed everything. Bookstores are dropping like flies all over the world. You can blame Amazon for that and the electronic book revolution.
What is it about electronic publishing that is finishing off the bookstore as we know it? Inventory cost! Go into any bookstore and count the number of books on a typical shelf, then count the number of shelves in the store, then multiply by $5.00 per book (average wholesale cost). What you will discover is that each bookstore has several million dollars in inventory on the shelves. That is a cost that cannot be sustained when the competition prints books as they are needed.
With the advent of the Amazon Kindle and the IPAD, the ebook came of age. Because of the nature of Amazon's accounting system, we can't upload your ebook to Amazon directly, but we can provide you with a cover and a file that will allow you to do it yourself. It is a ridiculously easy thing to do. Once you have done so, you are in the publishing business and all of the money from Kindle sales come straight to you.
#7: Most of the authors' sections have beautiful artwork in them.
Will my pages have artwork?
In the matter of artwork for your book, there are two possibilities:
If you have a cover illustration or other artwork associated with your book, then we will be pleased to put it online along with your book. You can send it to us in either electronic or hard copy version. We prefer electronic, by the way. It is both easier to manipulate and does not risk the possibility of the original artwork being damaged. Artwork can be inexpensively scanned at any Kinko's Copies, or similar copy center.
If you do not have a cover illustration, we will be pleased to provide your pages with generic artwork that will be attractive to customers. We will attempt to obtain something that is appropriate to the theme of your book, but you need to recognize that the selection of such images is limited.
#8: Third Millennium Publishing charges a setup fee and a fee on each book sold. What does this money pay for?
The initial fee ($300 for hosting one book for two years, and a declining scale for subsequent books) goes to pay for the labor required to set up your section of the website. This includes preparing your manuscript for publication, building the summary page, description page, and biography page, and setting up the money collection service.
It also goes to defray the cost of adding your book to our site. Internet Service Providers charge for two things: storage and throughput. Adding your book to our web site increases it size, which in turn, costs us money. The recurring fee ($1 per book sold) goes to cover the impact your sales have on our throughput capacity. In other words, when people come into the website to look at your book, data is exchanged over the INTERNET. When they buy one of the electronic editions of your book, that book must be transmitted to the customer.
There is another function the $1.00 fee per book sold performs.
It makes us enthusiastic about increasing your business! Let us say that you place a book online and then sell a million electronic copies. If the book sell price is set to $5.00, then you will receive $3,370,000 in revenue from the sales, after paying credit costs and sales fees. We are happy for you! However, Third Millennium Publishing will be receiving $1 million for the same transactions, which makes us VERY enthusiastic to help you increase your sales.
#9: How much should I sell my book for?
That is up to you. You are the publisher. You tell us what you want to charge. You can set your price at $50 if you wish to, although we doubt it will enhance your sales if you do. We recommend something in the $4.00 to $6.00 range for electronic copies, and $15.00 to $20.00 range for trade paperbacks.
#10 Will my book be available on Amazon.com?
It will if you want it to be. We maintain a commercial account on Amazon Marketplace for the benefit of our authors. This account costs money to keep open, however, so we charge $25.00 per year for author/publishers to use the service. That is $25.00 TOTAL per year, regardless of how many books an author has. And, of course, Amazon wants their cut of the pie. When your book sells on Amazon, they take 15% of the cover price, plus $1.00. Because Amazon is collecting the money, we do not have to charge the usual credit collection fee that comes from Third Millennium’s credit card service for Amazon sales.
The above explanation is for paperbacks. If you want to sell your Kindle versions on Amazon, you will have to load your book to Kindle Direct Publishing yourself. That is because Amazon's payment systems are not sufficiently sophisticated to separte your money from our money. We will provide you with a MOBI file and a cover electronic file suitable for uploading to Amazon. You then set all of the terms and you are in the electronic publishing business for yourself. We take no additional moneys from your direct Amazon sales.
If you find yourself intimidated by this, don't worry. The process is ridiculously simple.
#11: How much can I realistically expect to make at Third Millennium Publishing?
Business on the INTERNET has improved dramatically since we first went online. However, as we noted earlier in this information series, selling on the INTERNET is not a panacea for the problem of putting food on one’s table.
It is not unusual for new vendors on the net to make very little their first few months in business. And, if you have written a book that does not have wide appeal, you may stay at that level for quite a long time. On the other hand, if you advertise diligently and have written a book with wide appeal, then you can expect to make a respectable amount of money. The secret on the INTERNET is that you get to keep most of the money from the sale, whereas in bookstores, you only get a small percentage of the purchase price. To date, the record check we have written to one of our clients was $1000 for three weeks of book sales. We hasten to add, however, that this particular client has a very good publicity machine working for him.
#12: Are you saying that you can't guarantee that my book will be a best seller?
If we could guarantee that, we would be charging a lot more than $300.
There are a number of things you can do to increase your book sales, even to reach “best seller” status. The most important of these is that you must first write a good book.
We know, every author who has ever lived believes that he or she has written a masterpiece. The reason for this is that authors write what they like to read; and therefore, they really like what they have written. The question is: “Does anyone else like to read what the author has written?”
We mentioned Tom Clancy earlier. Tom Clancy had a devil of a time selling The Hunt for Red October. In fact, it was initially published by the Institute for Naval Proceedings, a publisher of dry technical papers written by professional naval officers. Initially, the only place you could buy it was in the Pentagon bookstore. However, those who bought it told their friends and the rest is history.
#13: How do I get my novel to Third Millennium Publishing?
There isn’t much we can do with your manuscript until you have it in an electronic word processing file that is spell checked and edited. We use Microsoft Word for output. Word imports Rich Text Format (RTF), all versions of Word, and Adobe PDF.
If you have some other format, send us a copy and we’ll work on it. The file should be formatted such that the individual paragraphs are units. That is, the hard return character (¶) should occur only at the end of the paragraph, not at the end of each line. That way, the word processing program can format the lines as necessary. Note: the above paragraph marker is inserted into your manuscript every time you hit the ENTER key. You can't see it because it is invisible, but rest assured that it is there. DO NOT hit ENTER or RETURN at the end of every line like you did with a typewriter (remember those?). That will render your manuscript unworkable.
Any special fonts such as BOLD, ITALICS, or SYMBOLS should also be retained by whatever format you use.
Note: We had a situation where an author scanned her manuscript into an electronic file and sent it to us. However, there are TWO kinds of electronic scans.
There is Optical Character Recognition (OCR), where the computer actually reads the text and puts it into a word processing file that can be manipulated by programs like Microsoft Word. There are also electronic scans where the pattern of light and dark dots on the page are recorded (much as they are in a fax machine).
We need your manuscript as a Word Processing File in which the words are stored as TEXT in the computer. The other kind of scan stores the words as though they are a PHOTOGRAPH. All of the black dots are there and look like words to the human eye. Unfortunately, computers aren't that smart. As far as the computer is concerned, such files consist of several billion unrelated black dots. Until computers get smarter, there isn't much we can do with one of these "scans."
#14: I hear pornography sells well on the INTERNET. What if I have an "Erotic" book to sell?
Yes, pornography is selling very well on the INTERNET. While there is nothing innately wrong with pornographic books, we at Third Millennium Publishing do not deal in them. The reasons for this are commercial rather than moral. Basically, we have too many children's books on the site to also deal in pornography, as they will tend to depress the sales of our other author/publishers.
If you would like to discuss the possible sale of your books on the INTERNET further, please email us at mccollum@3mpub.com.
Thank you for considering Third Millennium Publishing to assist you in putting your book online.
created with
HTML Website Builder .