[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Truth and the reason the publishing industry is crashing (quite independently of ebooks). They don't care about the core of their business, they are only focused on the bottom line and return on investment.

Publishers are not crashing. They are more profitable than ever. There is a tendency on MR to conflate one's opinion of what publishers *should* do with what they are actually doing, and to assume that because they aren't doing what we think they should, they are dinosaurs who are failing. However, this really isn't true - despite doing things a lot of people disagree with (i.e., no library lending), they are making more profit than they have in years.

Originally Posted by J. Strnad

These days it seems that indies have become a farm team for publishers to choose from. Once you hit a certain sales point, they become interested. I haven't seen them discover any new writers who weren't selling well. As noted above, they exist to publish what sells, period. They lost their "gatekeeper" credentials about twenty years ago.

I think the farm team analogy is a very good one.

Originally Posted by hidari

I reckon Steve made a good comparison....more or less.... However, The main point to consider is how young the indie 'ebook' industry is....I am guessing by 2015 or 2020 things will be very different and people will have more respect for the indie industry.... That said... Seeing books with 4 or 5 stars after just being published is a bit pathetic....

I don't think people will have any more respect for indie publishing generally in 2015 or 2020 than they do now because I don't think that indie publishing as a whole will improve. The problem with indie publishing is that it is 95% bad. It's not like an automobile where you can improve the parts that aren't working: in the future it will still be 95% bad...or even 98% bad as more people discover it.

Note, however, that 5% of a large enough number is still a large number.

You can use word of mouth to cut through the dreck, and people whose books were previously published tend to indicate this fact.

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

I would imagine that there are indie authors who like their independence, who doesn't want editors hanging over them with deadlines, or who doesn't enjoy book signings, speeches, university lectures, all the extraneous stuff that comes with being an established author. People who want to remain independent, maybe even reasonably anonymous.

Of course there are people like this; the difficulty, if they are talented, lies in getting their books known. IOW, how do they separate themselves from the undifferentiated mass? (Particularly if they don't want to do the kind of extraneous stuff that can help to get your book known.)