Whether you're a seasoned author, or simply a proficient writer with a great idea, there is a lot to know and consider when preparing to have your writings published. The art of printing and publishing dates back to several centuries ago, when the first printing presses were created and used. The act of publishing has come a long way since those times, and in today's publishing world there are a great many avenues for writers to get their work available to the public. Since the early days of publishing, there have been around 1,879,000 books published all around the world. This equates to an average of 479 works published every day, or roughly 19 books published each hour. With such a high volume of work being published every day, you can be assured as a writer that somewhere out there exists a market for your work.

The standard method of publishing that involves printing is still widely in use today's publishing market, though in recent years it has started to be overshadowed by digitized solutions. This article will cover many different ways in which an author can become published in these modern times. While in the past it may have been a real challenge to get a piece of work published, in today's market there is a publishing option for almost any different type of writing that's out there. This is a great time to be a writer, because there is so much more access to the market than there has been in the past.

For the benefit of the slightly older writers out there who may be focused on conventional publishing methods, we'll start out by discussing some of the traditional avenues for getting a piece of writing published. Even in the age of digital media, there are still a number of different large publishing firms doing business in today's market. Some of these firms include Macmillan Publishing House, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster, and Random House. These are all prominent names in publishing; companies whose heritage extends far back into history. When seeking to have a piece of writing published by one of these firms, it is typically important to have a literary agent or some kind of professional representation when interfacing with different publishing houses.

Having a publishing agent represent you can open up a lot of doors for your writing. This is true in that the diversity of the potential buyers of your writing will increase dramatically with the assistance of an agent. Instead of having a relatively narrow range of options for where an independent non-represented author can market their work, a literary agent can pitch a client's writing to more than just the standard publishing houses. Beyond publishing houses, literary agents can get client's work seen by theatrical producers, and film producers as well. Utilizing the services of a publishing agent will provide a writer with the networking capacity to actually get a piece of writing noticed and recognized by many different publishing and production outlets.

While these literary agents tend to represent non-fiction writers, novelists, and screenwriters, they also take on clients who produce writing of perhaps a less-conventional nature. Maybe you are a commercial writer, a poet, or any other type of writer in-between; regardless, you could be significantly benefited by enlisting the services of a reputable publishing agent. These agents are usually paid a fixed percentage of a writer's earnings (this percentage tends to be around twenty percent for international sales, and around fifteen percent for domestic ones), based on the fact that they helped negotiate the terms of the writing work being performed by their client.

For writers who would like to take the 21st century route and self-publish their work, there are a number of different outlets for having this done. One of the most popular of these outlets are eBooks. eBooks are publications that turn print or prose into a digitized format that can be accessed and read via any number of different eReading devices such as the Nook by Barnes and Noble, the Kindle by Amazon, or the iPad by Apple. Sales of eBooks have skyrocketed in recent years, and the numbers are only continuing to grow. Both authors and readers are beginning to understand that eBooks can offer tremendous benefits compared to traditional publishing methods.

The main benefit of eBooks, besides their obvious advantage in portability, is that they tend to be much cheaper to purchase than writing that has been published in hard cover or paperback. For this reason, consumers are considerably more likely to take a chance on buying a cheaper digital publication, since even if the writing turns out to be bad, they only spent a small amount of money on a copy of the work. For authors, eBooks present a huge advantage with regard to the amount of royalties that can be earned by a given writer. Since eBooks do not have any shipping fees associated with their cost, they tend to earn their writers much higher royalties than authors who choose to publish in hard copy.

No matter what type of publishing a writer ends up choosing to utilize, there is one underlying importance; a great editor. Having your work thoroughly edited by a professional book editor prior to having it marketed is entirely critical to the process of achieving success with a given piece of writing. Even if a piece of work is superbly written and wildly interesting, it will lose a massive amount of value and credibility if the grammar, spelling, and overall formatting is not correctly implemented within a text.

Depending on the type of budget an author is working within, they may want to allocate most of it to the expenses of a good professional editor. This is because of the fact that an error-prone piece of writing will ultimately become a waste of time for everyone involved in its publishing, and its marketing as well. So in conclusion, it ultimately doesn't matter what kind of publishing you pursue, as long as the work you are seeking to publish is polished and professionally edited.