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Wonderful thread. Thanks to mr ploppy for providing the link. I got into this without any expectations of making any money. Hitting it big in any art form is a near-miracle. I had few illusions that I would be hailed as the "next" anything.
Still, I hoped to find a small audience and in fact have for at least one of my books, so it's not all whine and cheese. What I didn't anticipate was getting caught up in a deluge of writing, to the point that readers can't find you. Like most writers, I believe in my books and think readers would enjoy them if they could find them. That's pretty hard to do in the e-book marketplace, where hundreds of books come out every day.
The solution most writers go to--and one which Amazon has now institutionalized--is to offer one or more of their works for free, hoping to attract readers. But as Ewan Morrison points out in his article, free isn't a good long-run business model. I'm learning that the hard way on KDP Select, but that's another story.
Another problem is that the get-rich-quick writers may abandon their efforts, but their fast and furiously self-published material could remain forever, orbiting the publishing world like space junk. Will this huge glut pass through the system or will it remain in Amazon's and other e-book distributor's catalogs in perpetuity, a permanent ocean of tear drops? Do the big boys periodically weed out under-performers? How about over-performing drek?
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
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