Trying that new burger joint downtown can be a hit or miss experience, and unfortunately often results in a stomach ache for the new patron. The same can be said for trying a digital publishing company, except the pain from a bad experience moves from your stomach to your pockets, specifically your wallet. A bad digital publisher can cost you thousands of dollars, and leave your fragile, new author confidence in the dumps. Therefore it is of vital importance to get in bed with the right digital publisher, in order to save you from the would be catastrophe. A few tips follow in the paragraphs below. Grab a pen, and arm yourself with the knowledge you deserve to go into battle with when looking for a digital publisher.

They work for you, you dont work from them. This is something you may have to remind them of when negotiating with a digital publisher. Similar to lawyers, digital publishers often like to turn the tables, and have you thinking you are fortunate to be working with them, and that you arent the client, but the service provider. This of course, is not true, and should not be tolerated. With digital publishers its often the case that you must pay them for them to print, and distribute your work. In the traditional print publishing industry the cycle is reversed. The publisher typically pays the author an advance on the book, and pays for the cost to print the book, keeping a portion of the sale price of the book as a royalty.

Digital publishers often will boast of high author royalties, and total author control. This is not always a great thing to have, would one rather have a whopping 50% royalty rate on their book if it sells 10 copies, or a 9% royalty rate on a book that sells 500,000 copies. It doesnt take a math genius to figure this one out. You want to have the lower royalty on the book that sells more units, there is power in numbers. Thus, when dealing with a publisher dont worry as much about the royalty rate, instead worry about their ability to get your book out to the public, and market it.

Digital publishers vary from a webmaster with a few links to e-book websites to full fledged print on demand companies. Define your goal for your e-book, and your budget, and pick a publisher accordingly. It probably makes sense to go with a well connected e-book publisher if that is your goal, to publish an e-book on the net. If you have print aspirations for your effort, try going with a POD publisher that will offer both e-book, and print versions of your book.

The books will fly off the shelves only if you make every effort to get them to the shelves in the most cost effective way, utilizing as much marketing possibilities as possible along the way.