Traditional publishers assume upfront costs and overhead (e.g., editing and distribution) and recoup those expenses by keeping up to 90% of revenues, sharing only 10% of royalties with authors. Nearly all traditional publishers require authors to work through a literary agent, who also requires a share of royalties, making this path to publication challenging for authors who may have world-changing ideas but can’t find a way to easily publish their manuscripts in a timely or cost-beneficial way.

Self-publishing is a popular choice for many authors who want to maximize their royalties and who don’t want to give away all of their hard-earned potential revenue to publishers and literary agents. This option lacks the benefits of producing high-quality work through a robust network of qualified independent reviewers, professional editors and copyeditors, as well as marketing and sales experts to promote your work. Self-publishing is extremely time-consuming, and 100% of the burden is on authors to prepare and copyedit their own manuscripts. Most authors don’t have the skills or time to adequately prepare their manuscripts for publication, let alone navigate the complexity of how to publish, distribute, and promote their books to maximize sales.

Authors using third-party publishing consulting services pay all costs out of pocket (review, editing, revision, proofreading, layout, and cover art) and charge you typically an extremely high fixed fee to publish and distribute your work (can be thousands of dollars). Don’t confuse “distribution” with “promotion” - distribution just means that your work is available online or in bookstores. Promotion means proactive marketing of your work to specific market segments to maximize sales. These kinds of “services” often fall short of helping authors to produce quality products. There is a lot of variability and risk in the market for choosing a reputable service.