When you start out, the chances of getting picked up by a major publisher are virtually non-existent but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be a top selling author getting your book in front of the world and becoming famous anyway.

It turns out that many times the things you would do to self-publish your book and market it yourself online are exactly the things that will attract a publisher down the road anyway.

These days one of the biggest factors in getting a book published is to have a “platform” which simply means that you have designed and are actively marketing your book making a name for yourself through offline and online marketing…that will not only help you to sell your own book online but will help you get accepted by a big publisher in the future should you still want to pursue that path.

Nevertheless, here are 3 alternatives you have to getting picked up by the big boy publishing houses for your book writing project:

1. Publish an e-book or digital information product such as audio, video or course.  If you had in mind a non-fiction book on anything from cooking to travel, health and wellness to pet training – then check out the options over at InfoMarketer’sZone where thousands of first-time authors have created their own income streams and brand by publishing their own digital information products. 

2. Self-publishing is a terrific option where you can turn a MS Word draft of your book into a professionally designed and widely distributed book that can be sold worldwide through programs like Amazon and Barnes & Noble – check out this great blog post from The Creative Pen Blog on Why I Love Self-Publishing.

3. Turn your content into another format such as a seminar, teleseminar, paid membership site, paid newslettter, audio or video of the month program or other information-based product format.  We’ve coached many authors, speakers and trainers to package their content into high quality home study courses, workshops, audio and video products that earn 10X the price of a book – for much of the same content.  You become known as the expert, get much higher profit margins and can make an easy living off of your content by taking this approach.

Just because getting a traditional publishing contract is too hard in your marketplace, don’t look at that as a negative, instead recognize the positives in re-packaging your content into one of these alternative publishing formats and carry on living out your dreams.

Jeff