Quote:
Originally Posted by Josieb1
Do you class small independant direct selling publishers as Indies? I'm never quite sure what the term is supposed to cover. I buy from authors that self publish as well as publish with small independant publishers. I thought 'Indie' was just for self publishing.  |
It is fuzzy.
In the UK press I've seen "independent" used to describe small to medium tradpubs.
The emerging definition seems to be that Indie refers to both self-pubs and very small ebook-savvy publishers. The problem is that quite a few successful self-publishers, having established a process to get their books to market, are taking on other authors as "customers" through non-traditional deals. (That is, contracts that don't demand life-plus-70 duration, are time-limited, and/or pay higher royalties.)
Self-publishing is fairly clear: an author acting as publisher under their own name. But authors don't have to publish under their own name and in some areas it can be beneficial to operate as a small publishing house even if the output only comes from the owner, under one name or many. Other non-trad approaches include author co-ops, (non-vanity) publishing services, and very small ebook-first or ebook-only publishers.
The dividing line is really on the business side as you can't tell from the outside what is a startup new press and what is an author doing business as a publishing house.
The author earnings folks try to distinguish selfpubs and single author publishing houses from the multi-author very small presses but acknowledge that many in the latter category are really self-pub.
Here, check this:
http://authorearnings.com/note-on-methodology/
Tradpub is usually easy to identify (by the contract terms) so indie is usually taken to mean, "everybody else".
