Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Indie authors, taken as being authors signed with smaller traditional publishers, have as I understand it always had some access to B&M stores through their indie publishers who provide the traditional services including arranging and paying for printing and distribution. There are also many stories about self-published authors, even in the days of the so-called "vanity" press, going door to door convincing individual stores to stock their books. I have no doubt at least some Indies, except of course Amazon imprints, can find places in B & M stores. Self-published authors, whilst not subject to a boycott, simply do not have the logistics in place or the resources to get their books into any meaningful number of these stores.
I don't like the conclusion any more than I like the Big 5, but it seems to me that to have a serious presence in those stores you essentially need the Big 5. If I am wrong on this I will be delighted.
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Well, your definition of Indie isn't quite the one we are using here.
Indie these days is the general term for all the variants of self-publishing from the "lone wolf" author to the "single author publishing house" and hybrid authors.
If it's tradpub it's tradpub and size doesn't matter; the author is still surrendering control. And income. For life of copyright.
With that in mind, yes, access to B&M for indies is recent, dating to changes Ingram and B&T made to their catalogs in 2014 to stop listing POD titles differently from tradpub titles. It levelled the playing field to the extent that a bookstore ordering a selfpubbed title from an author can't tell if it comes from a small tradpub or an Indie. Which means that, as I said above, the only remaining difference is the paid front table presence.
Note this piece on tradpubbed mythical marketing prowess:
http://451words.tumblr.com/post/8919...ney-never-wins
Mythical because tradpub doesn't do proactive marketting worth beans. What they are is good reactive promoters of books and authors that succeed in striking a chord with buyers. Once the book succeeds on its own, they flog the heck out of it and put money into it. Otherwise it is sink or swim.
As the entrepreneurial types say: the first million is the hardest.
Tradpub is good for the second and tenth million. The first? Not so much.
And the first 50k sales?
Not. A. Clue.
Patterson became Patterson doing his own promotion because the publisher didn't want to spend on his book. Grisham couldn't even find a publisher until he had selfpublished and sold thousands of books out of the trunk of his car. They made themselves.
Tradpub support came later.