NONFICTION - June 29, 1986

HOW TO PUBLISH, PROMOTE AND SELL YOUR OWN BOOK: THE INSIDER’S GUIDE TO EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT SELF-PUBLISHING, FROM PASTEUP TO PUBLICITY by Robert Lawrence Holt (St. Martin’s: $16.95). Robert Lawrence Holt is a former stockbroker with assertive and businesslike habits and a well-founded distrust of other people’s reliability. His book is a complete, detailed defensive-driving course for aspiring self-publishers.

Holt has himself self-published four books successfully, this one now taken up for distribution by a New York firm. He tells you how surprisingly often printers’ work is defective, how painfully hard it is to collect money owed by bookstores, how distributors often go bankrupt. His horror stories, about both the incompetence of publishers and the manifold perils of self-publishing, are impeccably realistic. So is his advice about deciding whether your project is actually salable, about getting editing and counsel, and about all-important distribution and publicity.

You won’t be led seriously astray by following Holt’s advice, if you are capable of the picky, obsessive and persistent work involved and have some business sense. However, in two important areas, his advice is not state-of-the-art. He assumes you will use local printers, but book printing is almost always much cheaper in the Midwest. And he omits “desktop publishing” technology, which makes cheap, passable typesetting much more accessible.

Such developments will doubtless lead to even more bad books being published. But if you feel that the unorthodoxy or quirky brilliance of your work has gotten it unfairly rejected, Holt offers a way out. And even for writers who have publishers but want more control, more speed, more assiduous publicity--even more money--the process may have attractions. Nobody who reads Holt, however, will have any illusions about the complexities involved. This reviewer self-published “Ecotopia” after it had been rejected by 20 New York publishers; it has now sold about a third of a million copies. But I learned publishing first, through 20 years as an editor for the University of California Press in Berkeley.