New Year's is near, so Dean Wesley Smith has put up a column looking at the state of publishing in the US, with a few looks to the future:
http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/?p=11156
The comments are interesting, too.
A few choice quotes:
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And following the trend that started three or four years ago, the big traditional publishers are working to tie down as many writers’ books as possible, and control as many rights. So their contracts in 2013 managed to get even worse and have become completely anti-writer.
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Some points look ripe for debate:
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Smashwords, the largest distributor of indie work to stores (Amazon is a store), got faster and cleared out a bunch of bugs in 2013 and actually started a revamp of their site. But they still have a horrid accounting system that will eventually drive all but the erotica authors away. But it seems from the outside that Smashwords clearly had a good year. Right near the end of the year they partnered with Scribd, which may or may not turn out to be a disaster. Scribd is known for being a pirate site.
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During 2013, indie publishing in many, many ways, both paper and electronic, spread out over the world. Now your indie books get a much wider reach than any traditional publisher can manage, which not too many people have talked about yet, but will in 2014.
Yes, I said that. Your books go to a wider worldwide audience when you indie publish them than if you sold them to a traditional publisher.
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It's not just ebooks; POD distribution is going global for indie publishers.
TradPub, of course, still works off the dated regional rights system and georestrictions.
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Agents had a horrid year in 2013, just as they did in 2012, and the future does not look bright for an area of publishing that, for the most part, seems to have outlived its value. Many agents, ignoring any hope of pretending to be an actual “agent” under agency law, opened up their own publishing arms to take care of writers too lazy or afraid to do electronic backlist publishing themselves. Many other agents just turned themselves into scams to make a living off of taking writers’ money. But in 2013, many of them learned it wasn’t going to help them.
And with advances and paper sales falling like a stone for even the top bestselling writers, agents entire business model is falling apart around them. We should see some pretty major collapses of agencies in 2014.
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The main word I heard the last few years from writers was “freedom.” It seems that suddenly we all feel free to write what we want, not what we think some editor and sales force might like. That’s great fun and really became a clear force in 2013.
We also have the freedom to not take bad contracts from traditional publishers if we don’t want. That’s a fantastic bargaining chip in a negotiation, so smart writers gained power over the last year. And now writers who care about their work have an option. And smart writers go to lawyers now, not agents, for help on contracts of all sorts.
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From the comments:
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It’s because of money and the fact that the writer, who has the most invested in the book, has no control in traditional publishing at all. And to those folks in those big corporations, your book is a widget to just dump out onto the market, while to you indie, it’s your work that you are proud of.
So one thing in 2013 is the balance of poorly copyedited books has switched to the traditional side. Makes sense, when you look at it, actually.
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Lots more at the source.