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Originally Posted by nekokami
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The publishing "gate" is probably too small right now, but that's partly because there's very little money to be made in publishing midlist books. Despite the fact that many of the costs would still be the same for ebooks as for pbooks, I think there are a lot of inefficiencies in the pbook system that could be eliminated and might rescue the midlist catalog, e.g. paper/printing/binding, shipping, "stripped" returns, etc. I don't happen to think that good editorial services are one of the processes that ought to be eliminated. Your mileage may vary, of course.  |
Why does money have to be involved at all?????
Say a "midlist" author wants to publish a book but has no idea if it is any good. S(he) can simply post it online without any processing, editing,... some sort of very simple online store, or some community. Now nobody may read it ever, which is fine. Or few people may give it a try. Maybe s(he) persuades some friends to read it. It costs them nothing to attach their raiting, comments, etc. It may get good enough ratings that some (semi) professional takes a look at it. In my community model it would be one of the community members, gives it a read and attached comments. Now the book has "certified" comments from a community member, so it carries more weight. And so on. It may eventually have enough audience/interest to warrant editing and proper publishing, etc.
The point is using this WWW technology you can start vritually cost free. Sure a lot of junk may show up, but then decent content is bound to get some attention at some point while the rest keeps langushing.
Now for you and me, having a couple of kids, etc. not having enough time, we can simply go to "established" authors and books based on the community rankings. When I am retired and have more time I may start exploring more. etc.
So there is room for both, high quality books from well known authors having the best publishers as well as unknowns starting out. Hey, I just got a terrabyte hard disk. Certainly disk storage is cheap