[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by John Carroll

My opinion on this as a self-publishing author and a long time fantasy genre reader.

Out of curiosity, why self-published? I gather you didn't attempt to go the traditional route?

I honestly think that ebooks will be the way of the future. 20-50 years from now it may even be illegal to print on paper. That bothers us, but our children and grandchildren won't know any different.

Why should it become illegal to print on paper? Paper is made from trees. Trees are a renewable resource. (And paper is hardly the only thing trees are used for. After all, trees produce wood, and wood has myriad uses.)

Publishers are going to change. They'll scream throughout the process, but they will change. A likely scenario is that publishers will become half-marketing firms that will find decent writers, edit them, produce their cover art, and promote them on thousands of different sites, handling the distribution and pricing wherever they're sold.

Publishers are essentially that now. While you can argue that they do it poorly, selling books is what publishers do.

What will differ will be the form in which the content is offered and the manner in which it is distributed.

(My own feeling is that ebooks will cannibalize the mass market paperback.)

Indie writers (like myself) will flood the market. This is a bad thing in many ways as it will produce a glut of bad works (not mine of course) After awhile, the bad ones will be buried under bad reviews and will no longer be taken seriously. Good writers will struggle to get the first few reviews, but as they do, more people will buy their books.

Indie writers are already flooding the market. The Internet is now the world's largest slush pile, and the challenge is to find a worthwhile offering.

But reviews may not be sufficient. Consider the state of Amazon.com, where reviews might be glowing praise posted by the author or the author's sock puppets, and not actual comment by satisfied readers. Personally, I pay attention to reviews by people I know are real reviewers whose taste I understand. (And it doesn't have to be a good review - there are reviewers whose review will make me say "He hated it, so I'll probably love it, because his taste is diametrically opposite mine.")

I take supposed customer reviews with a 5lb sack of salt.

To be successful will no longer take years of beating down the doors of publishers and agents. Now it will take years of writing and creating works that are actually good (like mine) Writers will succeed by paying attention to the market and writing books.

Dream on. I don't care how good your book is. You will not be successful simply because you wrote it and have it available. You will succeed (if you do at all), because you have successfully let the people who might be interested in what you wrote know that your work exists, and gotten them to give you a try. The majority of your time will not be spent writing, it will be spent marketing.

The reader will change as well. They will learn how to shop differently (as many of you have already) Readers will find groups with like-minded readers and will pay attention to reviews and samples of books.

This was happening back before ebooks were even possible.

The record industry and the publishing industry are screaming right now because their universes are drastically changing. The only ones that survive will be the ones that figure out how to embrace the change.

Add the film industry to that list.

But I largely agree. The question is what embracing that change will mean.
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Dennis