Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
Both also have their trash and their treasure. The ratios of trash to treasure might differ, and have you leaning one direction personally; because as a reader, you have no interest in changing how you go about finding books you want to read—and that's fine. But that personal "leaning" has no bearing on the actual validity of choosing the non-traditional path.
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The ratios do differ and more importantly, some of the "treasures" one might find on the self-pub path are stuff that one would never find if that option did not exist.
In books as with everything else, one person's trash is another's treasure.
And given that trad-publishers select books based on their ability to sell a *lot* of copies *fast* it is a dead certain fact that a lot of narrow-appeal books that can succeed in the self-pub world would never see the inside of a bookstore in the olden days much less be allowed to stay there long enough to deliver any kind of return to the author.
Trad-publishing is all about mass appeal, much like broadcast TV.
Self-pub *allows* (though it does no subsist solely on) niche content to find a receptive audience.
Defining "success" as a book that generates $50,000 or $50 million in sales is a nearsighted way to evaluate something that might be done more as a labor of love than as a mercenary venture. Expectations matter. And a writer might be aware that his vision has no mass market appeal and be satisfied to touch just one person who "gets" it. That no more makes the work a failure than it makes the author lazy or incompetent.
I would suggest that one of the results of the mainstreaming of ebooks is that mass appeal (or critical acclaim from the establishment) will no longer define quality or success. Success will be determined by the author and the author's expectations. If the author goes in expecting a few hundred sales and gets a few thousand that actually *liked* the book then that book will be a success in his terms regardless of what anybody else thinks.
Quality is in the eye of the beholder and success is in the eye of the creator.