Re the current viability of self-publishing:
This week's New York Times eBook nonfiction list has 35 titles, and, if you count Random House as commercial, every one seems to have been published by an imprint of a large commercial publishing house:
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-...tion/list.html
Certain types of nonfiction books, like autobiography, might move to self-publishing. Some of the novels on the fiction list are probably autobiographical. But I can't see an end to book proposals* and advances doing anything good for nonfiction. Imaginative literature is different, because there will always be extraordinary novelists who can do almost the whole job themselves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyBob
I didn't dig too deeply, but it strains credulity that "The Great Gatsby" is really the #7 best-selling e-book.
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And it's not even on the 35-book-long New York Times fiction eBook list:
http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-...tion/list.html
Maybe the Times doesn't measure sales to schools, which, as noted by teh603 in #43, are significant. This could explain the discrepancy.
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* Many nonfiction writers don't write the book until the proposal is accepted by a publisher.