Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy
Those are both published by the writers, and not all writers seem to be confident enough to do that. Once you add on agents, editors, designers, publishers, etc, you add extra mouths to feed. Not all of them will add anything of value to the reader, but they will still all want their cut.
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Of all the things a traditional publisher can add beyond the original manuscript, I think that publicity is the one that is very hard to recreate without copious amounts of either time or money (often both) by the author.
We were lucky (I think) in that Elita and I formed a team, she does the writing, we contract out the editing/proofing, I do the formatting, publishing and artwork (sometimes we contract out the artwork too)... but the one that's proven to be the hardest is pushing out of the noise floor in marketing. Everything we try is already well and truly tried by others in our position. We don't have the upfront capital to drop $10,000 (a small amount really) into a marketing campaign even if it does hold a potential promise for equal returns or better.
For now, we'll just have to accept that this is very much a long term project and are not anticipating moving into the 'profit' zone for at least another 2~3 years.
For us, the biggest marketing gain will be through producing more books, thankfully we have two more coming in the short term (< 9 months).
Relating to the OP topic, piracy is the last thing we're concerned about for now, any legitimate loss of sales through piracy would be cheaper than the marketing dollars required to have impressed that person in the first place.
Paul.