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Originally Posted by darryl
@fjtorres. Interesting. But is this access more theoritical than actual in the case of a self-published author, given the economic barriers.
Book stores need to be convinced to stock your book. Printing and distribution needs to be arranged and paid for. Perhaps some promotion. Such costs come out of someone's pocket. If not the authors, an investor who will want their pound of flesh. Like, for instance, a publisher.
I agree totally with your comments on the promotional prowess of big publishers.
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It is very real and not just theoretical.
The thing most tradpub apologists would like people to forget is that selfpub authors aren't a bunch of rejects and novices but are often longtime veteran midlisters with a following who were either dropped by their publisher or who chose to walk away. There are many who made their name as indies but there are also many who came to success by recovering the rights to mismanaged titles the tradpubs saw no profit in.
One of the reasons romance went Indie so fast is that Harlequin readily reverted older titles without a thought; they had plenty of new ones in the pipeline and no shortage of dreamers begging to get into it in the worst way.
So a lot of Indies are known quantities to bookstores.
People like Lawrence Block, Terry Goodkind, Kevin Anderson, and Kate Wilhelm have no trouble getting their books into stores. Plenty of others with track records under a variety of pen names.
You won't find Patterson or King in those groups but there are a lot of mid-list genre writers known to the bookstore buyers. It is not unheard of for Indies to get into B&N stores.
And no, it is not terribly expensive at all to get books printed and distributed.
Again, Ingram and Baker & Taylor handle POD (a good starting point for writers new to selfpub, investment is near-zero) just fine; the books get listed side by side with those of tradpub. More successful authors can contract with small presses or big Chinese presses for print runs in the hundreds or thousands to be delivered and warehoused at the distributor. Again, the costs are in the low thousands (figure around $2-5 per copy). A typical newcomer can start out digital only, add POD after some success, and add audio and batch printed pbooks once they hit six figures a year. And there are thousands of authors in that general territory. A lot more in the high 5-figures.
The infrastructure for Indie publishing by now goes far beyond Amazon and ebooks; once the money got big enough most of the distribution system opened up. With "big enough" happening in 2013.
The main trick to it is the Indies savvy enough to get into pbookland do it by setting themselves up as actual publishing companies. Kinda like Indie musicians set up their own labels and Indie game developers set up their own studios. They msh be single person businesses but they *are* businesses, incorporated, paying taxes, contracting freelancers, often dealing with international publishers for foreign print rights.
Indie publishing may be a shadow industry still to many but it is already selling well over a billion dollars a year in ebooks, pbooks, and audio books.Some have been optioned for movies and TV. )(Heard of WAYWARD PINES on FOX?)
Turns out you can have a successful (and profitable) career as an author without front table payola or being a celebrity.