Archive for the ‘Self-Publishing’ Category
The Best & Worst of Traditional Publishing
A recent blog post on“Writing on the Ether,” by Porter Anderson—an always a very thoughtful and nuanced journalist and commentator on the publishing industry—got me thinking about what seem to be common misperceptions authors and readers hold about what traditional trade publishers do, what they do well, and what they do not-so-well.
In commenting on Porter’s post, I wrote “One function of traditional publishers is as an investor in future revenue” — in other words that “publishers subsidize some portion of their published list.”
Porter replied, “There’s a concept on the street now that advances have fallen apart and publishers are investing very little at all in their new authors. So while your point is right, I’m not sure it will fall on very receptive ears in a community that has largely decided the traditional publishers are abdicating their own leadership.” Continue Reading…
You’re Gonna Have to Serve Somebody (Sorry, Bob)
Peter McCarthy–a keen and experienced digital marketing expert–recently quoted a friend who once told him:
The only two constants in the publishing value chain are authors and readers. Authors create, readers consume. Everyone else in the middle serves merely to make that exchange as efficient, scaled, and pleasurable as it can be.
Whether you agree or not is likely to turn how the word merely strikes you. I expect it would cause many literary agents, editors, publishers, marketers, and publicists to scoff. The arbiters and gatekeepers of what counts as worthy of publication naturally feel that their role is crucial. It is. I’d say the function they provide is more essential to the vitality of the author-reader relationship than ever before, but it’s migrating away from the domain of traditional publishers in myriad different directions and taken up by: Continue Reading…
Self-Publishing and the “Q-word”
It’s been fascinating to watch the growth of the number of self-published authors and with it the number of service providers springing up to support them (think every thing from Amazon’s CreateSpace and Lulu to Bublish, BookPulse, and the legions of freelance copyeditors).
A recent post by Eugenia Williamson in the Boston Phoenix.com called “The Dead-End of DIY Publishing“ caused a bit of a dust-up over the future of self-publishing and whether it was really a viable option for authors who wanted to get their work to readers and make some sort of meaningful income. The discussion got picked up by Porter Anderson at “Writing On Ether,” bringing more light to the conversation (thanks to Porter) and more heat (thanks to most of the folks offering comments).
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