Can selling your ebook on Kindle help to get a publishing deal.

Regarding fiction --The simple answer is... yes it can.

However, it takes a lot of hard work and good, best-selling books, in most cases.

However, these days, the *Traditional Publishers* are in panic mode and the deals they are offering are more and more draconian. Add to that that some agents are also in panic mode and maybe reluctant to work for the author, and you have an incredibly bad situation for authors...

My closest author friends and I have a saying *friends don't let friends sign with trad pubbers*

If you do get an offer, have a good entertainment lawyer look it over... We're not talking intellectual property these days. Someone needs to protect the author.

There are some authors who are successfully working with trad pubbers and self-publishing. They're called hybrid authors, but you need to enter negotiations with a strong sense of what you want/need, the ability to protect your long term rights, and an understanding that if you are successful enough to attract the attention of traditional publishers, you'd likely do better on your own.

An author on a mail loop I'm on -- let's call her Author A -- posted recently that she'd just gotten 3 month sales figures back from her traditional publisher for three books she had with them. NOTE - she had signed the contract before the indie revolution.

If she had self-published and had the same number of sales, she'd have made $75,000. I assure you that she made nothing close to that. Note - she is a well known author and has a following.

Another well known indie -- we'll call her Author B --, who considers herself not as well known as Author A, reported on the same discussion that she had published a similar book in Dec 2012 and as of the end of July, she'd sold almost 80,000 copies at $3.99, making just north of $200,00.

Let me assure you that these days, traditional publishers are not willing to pay that kind of money -- at least in most cases.

Another example is an author who has a non-fiction bestseller and has gone on to write novels for the same sub-genre. He passed 1 million in royalties this summer. He sells his books for $9.99 and never puts them on sale. His sub-niche doesn't even exist with traditional publishers...

A strong mid-list indie (writing and selling a lot of good books) can fly under the radar and make far more money that we can imagine... and, depending on the sub-genre, his/her books will be far more evergreen than the latest report on how to came the system.

That's my goal. I don't care about best-seller lists... I just want good, steady sales and a growing readership. ;-)

So, yes, you can get offered a traditional publishing deal, although the odds are against it. The biggest question to ask yourself -- can you afford to take a deal like that?

At the moment, the answer is likely to be NO.

Best of luck with your writing...

Thank you all.. and you are right, If I sold an ebook at £10 (im in the UK) and sold 1,000 thats ten grand whereas through a publisher I would be lucky to make 2G and then agents fees etc and in the self help field im not sure that they would market it much and I know you get less royalties for overseas sales whereas I can sell anywhere myself on line and I have a 54k following on FB and many people have asked for a book so I think im in with a good shot.

Before you sign, read relevant posts by Kristine Kathryn Rusch at Kristine Kathryn Rusch. You'll have to search but she's done some terrific posts on the details of the terrible contracts trad publishers are offering these days, as mentioned by Tink.

Then have the lawyer look it over for you. Laura Resnick has list of them on her site.