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The Impact of Self Publication (6 posts)

Topic tags: authors, media, publishers, self publication, writing

Kenneth Golden said
7 months, 1 week ago:
Do you feel that certain writing fields are experiencing a rise in Self Publication compared to other writing fields? To me the major publishing companies try to control as much of yourself as they can. Does anyone else feel this way or am I just imagining this?
@klg007 | # | Top
Dave MacKay said
7 months, 1 week ago:
@klg007 Perhaps you would elaborate as to meaning of ’major publishing companies’ for this post. Because I am new to this area, I have little to say about writing, I will be most interested in seeing how others view this situation…
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Kenneth Golden said
7 months, 1 week ago:
Dave these major ones come to mind. 1.Pearson – U.K., 2.Reed Elsevier – U.K./NL/U.S., 3.Thomson Reuters – U.S., 4.Wolters Kluwer – NL, 5.Hachette Livre – France, 6. Grupo Planeta – Spain, 7.McGraw-Hill – U.S., 8.Random House – Germany, 9.Oxford University Press – U.K. and 10.Readers’ Digest – U.S. just to name a few.
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Dave MacKay said
7 months, 1 week ago:
My thinking is that the periodicals and dailies may be of influence, not necessarily the hard cover books. The trends of the periodicals could be of influence, because they are reflective of current views.
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Judith Gotwald said
7 months, 1 week ago:
All of publishing is experiencing a shake up (long overdue). It’s not yet clear how publishers are going to deal with their loss of control of the market. Neither is it clear how readers and self-publishers will relate long-term to their new voice and influence.
Newspapers and periodicals are struggling to find their way. They need a pioneer or visionary.
The world of book publishing is also endangered as reader habits change.
Self-publishing is hard. Proof-reading, continuity and copy-editing tend to be a challenge. Overall, I am encouraged that authors’ access to the marketplace comes with its own checks and balances. If you force your way to the top with phony rave reviews, you will be exposed by your readers with a truthful analysis right quick.
Take the publishing of the sixth and final novel in the Earth’s Children (Clan of the Cave Bear) series. This series was loved by many and the fans were thrilled after a long hiatus to hear that the story would continue just a little longer. Rave reviews were posted — many of them banking on the popularity of earlier books. Bantam/Random House took advance orders.
The book was beyond terrible. Readers were outraged. Hundreds of angry readers posted legitimately bad reviews on Amazon. It was so clearly a case of the publishers milking a fan base one last time. If I worry about self-publishers copy-editing, well, this sequel had large sections of one chapter cut and pasted in subsequent chapters. The writer (we can’t be sure who it actually was) changed the endearing personalities of the leading characters to make them repulsive. To top it all off, there was simply NO story. What an abuse of publishing power! If this was the result of a noted publisher adapting to the new terrain in publishing, it will live as a primer on what not to do!
This experience sold me on self-publishing!
Publishing seems to be happy to go digital. But what if we lost power and thereby lost our ability to communicate. There will always be a place for print for this reason.
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Shari Stauch said
7 months, 1 week ago:
Agree print is important — like to read my non-fic titles on iPad — but the fiction is something most of us would still rather curl up with.
Here’s the skinny on traditional vs. non-traditional… 4 years ago they were neck and neck in production (about 280K each)… Then self-published titles blew ‘em out of the water, first with 500K titles, then over a million, and this year projected over 4 million.
That’s a LOT of cruddy books, to be honest. And when you consider that 80% of high school kids NEVER read another book once they get out of HS, but 80% of Americans “dream of writing a book” — well, you see the challenge.
For biz titles, especially in an ever-changing digital landscape, it makes little sense to traditionally publish — you can get it out there faster and more effectively self-publishing for sure (a few months vs. 18 months). For fiction it can be tougher…
All that said, publishers have – up ’til their own budgets went south – been the “gatekeepers” for most “decent” reading… If self-publishing isn’t going to collapse in on itself then it really WILL be incumbent upon authors to hire REAL editors and REAL proofreaders and REAL marketers to help produce their work, else we’re in for “Idiocracy” sooner than that silly movie projected… (though the line about going to law school at Costco still slays me…)
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