Who Needs A Publisher
A neat article from Newsweek on people who are self-publishing on Kindle and making it work. One guy, who had been turned down by every possible print publisher, ended up selling 4,000 books a week on Kindle and was picked up by Simon and Schuster. Another guy is making $100,000 a year. By eliminating the publisher, he can sell books for $2.99 and make a profit.
posted by Eleanor at 9:24 AM
2 Comments:
What I hear from most sources is that this sort of thing is a fluke. Established authors may do better, but most writers are lucky to sell a hundred copies of a self-published novel.
Two crucial elements which a writer may or may not be missing are 1) editing and 2) promotion. (And obviously 0) the ability to write well.) The book needs to be sufficiently good, and people need to know about it and know that they will like it (the total available selection of books will be extremely inflated by people who don't possess property 0, so it will be well hidden).
I think for-profit self-publishing can work, but it's too new on this scale for all the required infrastructure and community to be in place. I'm hoping that as it picks up speed there will be 1) more inexpensive independent editors and 2) more ways of aggregating and filtering the available books: things which you can kind of see in the fanfiction community, except without the money.
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