Have We Reached A Tipping Point Where Self-Publishing Is Better Than Getting A Book Deal?
from the trend-watching dept
Ross Pruden points us to a recent post by author Joe Konrath (whose musings on why authors shouldn’t fear file sharing, as well as his own experiments with “self-piracy” we’ve discussed before), in which he goes back on his previous views against self-publishing and makes the argument that authors should self-publish. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the crux of his argument is that if you self-publish at a low price, you’re likely to get more sales and you get them started much, much, much sooner than if you go through the hellish publishing process, which can delay actual publishing by years. There are some other arguments, including the financial viability of the big publishers, as well as the rise in ebook popularity, which makes it such that you can self-publish just in ebook form and solve a lot of the distribution questions (a la the music industry).
Of course, there are some implicit assumptions that Konrath makes that I’m not really sure apply across the board. He seems to assume that it’s easy to sell 1,000 ebooks per month (which is the basis for his calculations). If you have an audience already, that’s possible, but if you don’t, it’s a lot harder. A publisher can really help an unknown author with marketing, and that’s certainly not something that should be diminished. Now, obviously, that doesn’t mean everyone has to do it that way. There are certainly other ways. Some authors may be naturally good marketers themselves, or they can outsource the function to someone else, at a lower “cost.” Separately, while Konrath notes at the top of his post that in the past he hated self-published books because the quality was almost always low, he doesn’t seem to mention that again. The editing process can be pretty important (though, again, there may be other options there).
So I think the real point of his post is that self-publishing can be right for a certain segment — but others may still want to go the traditional route (but certainly with open eyes).
-
mcuzino posted this
