Published author looks good?

<p>Hey guys, just out of curiosity how helpful is being a published author for college admissions when the rest of your academic stats are fairly average? (29ACT, 1860SAT, 3.85Wgpa) Just curious as to how much a published book will balance out some loose academic ends for schools such as: UCSB, UCSD, UT-Austin, UGA, UMiami, UDub, UCLA, UCD. Thank you :)</p>

<p>Fiction or nonfiction? Self-published, published online, or published by traditional publisher?</p>

<p>It’ll help, but keep in mind that you go to college for an education, so everything comes secondary to academics. But I don’t think you’ll have a problem getting into a lot of the schools you listed here.</p>

<p>Fiction, self-published but distributed through Amazon and Barnes&Noble! Thanks for the replies</p>

<p>Self-published is not a head turner unfortunately. Good luck though.</p>

<p>That’s understandable haha thanks for the responses though!</p>

<p>To actually get it to Barnes & Noble, regardless of self-publishing or not, is extremely impressive. Congratulations! I’d say you’ll have a great shot, that EC’s probably a decent hook, I’d say.</p>

<p>What is the subject matter? That matters!</p>

<p>Getting an e-book into Barnes & Noble requires only the ability to use Smashwords, or having $20 to pay someone else to run it through the Meatgrinder for you. Sorry, OP. :)</p>

<p>If you’re getting enough paid sales to be #1 in your category or relatively high up in the overall rankings, and the book is really clean (in the sense of free from grammatical and typographical errors), no harm in putting it on there, although I believe many of the schools on your list are numbers-driven, and won’t care.</p>

<p>Thanks for the honesty guys, it is a fantasy(magic, dragons, etc) novel with (in my opinion) a really cool twist at the end with a strong and driven moral. Also, I wrote it to surprise my best friend for her birthday(inside joke backstory) which I included in the essays so it shows that I wrote it out of passion not to just put on a college app.</p>

<p>And if it matters, the book is only sold as a physical copy not as an e-book.</p>

<p>You undertook a fairly lengthy project and saw it through to completion. That would be a good thing, whether the project were a self-publushed novel, training for a triathlon, or running a coat drive for the needy.</p>

<p>But for purposes of college admissions, a self-published novel isn’t necessarily any better than having done a triathlon or organized a coat drive.</p>

<p>That makes sense^ Thanks for the feedback guys :)</p>