Piper White asked Scott Hawkins:

Could you recommend any self publishing companies or publishing companies that accept unsolicited manuscripts?

Scott Hawkins I honestly don't know a lot about it. I looked into self-publishing at one point, but the "publishing" part seemed like it would be both a lot of work and well outside my skill set. I decided to focus on the writing end and hope for the best.

If you're looking to self-publish, I'd encourage you to check out the forums at absolutewrite.com. There's a large and active self-publishing community on that board, and they'd be able to give you much better advice than I can.

That said, here's my $0.02:

I do know that there are a lot of scammers out there. Generally, the rule is this: money always flows towards the writer. If someone in the literary business--agents or publishers--wants you to send them a check for any reason at all I would say that's a huge red flag. At a minimum, do an in-depth google before you send any money at all.

Legit literary agents do not charge their authors fees. To the best of my knowledge, there are no exceptions to that rule.

If it was me, I'd take a long hard look at e-Publishing. First, e-Books are a legitimately huge chunk of the market these days. Second, the startup costs for are trivial compared to what you'd pay to get a box of books printed up. Third, it's an unfortunate reality that even if you do pay to get a box of books printed up, your chances of getting a book not backed by a major house into any bookstore is basically zero.

Similarly, here's a word of caution about marketing companies. Having e-published, it's most likely that the first thing you'll notice is that nobody noticed your book. Hundreds (thousands?) of new e-books hit the market every single day. You do the math.

To that end, quite a few marketing companies have sprung up to cash in on people who want to get their e-books noticed. I wouldn't necessarily characterize them as scammers, but you get what you pay for. These guys tailor their fees and services to what self-publishers can afford. So, you give them $500ish and they'll "promote your book." That's probably technically true, but from what I can tell, for $500 they'll mostly do stuff that you could just as easily do yourself--e.g. send out some tweets twitter, and maybe get a review someplace.

For comparison, when a major NYC publishing house hires outside marketing teams, they pay fees starting at around $10,000.

All that said, there definitely are ways to get your book into the marketplace without getting scammed. The Martian, 50 Shades of Grey and Eragon were all initially self-published.

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