Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Perhaps if you were a bit more forthright in your points. Obviously Patterson is a traditional published author. Is your point that he uses co-writers/ghost writers? If so, he's hardly the first one. Tom Clancy does too (one could say that he is the ghost writer now. [yes, that is an attempt at humor]) Baen paired recognized authors with less recognized authors all the time. Heck, the practice goes all the way back to the 1800's.
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You are being orthogonal.
My
point was, it is very difficult for any indie writer to compete directly with a Collective, whether that collective is Clancy or Patterson.
It is also difficult for an indie to directly compete with J.K. Rowling. Or John Grisham. Or the Bible.
But, critically, neither can John Scalzi. Or most tradpubbed authors.
Yet apparently your takeaway was "Hugh Howey is the/a top-selling indie author". (And to dismissively claim "though a million probably isn't correct. How many authors publish books with traditional publishers in a year. It's got to be far less than 100,000". Clearly you have never heard of a specific very famous figure of speech. Or else you are raising nitpicking to... well, actually, your usual high. Why am I continually surprised?)
I have no idea if he is, all I know that he is:
- popular
- respected
- makes a lot of money
- publicly opinionated on the matter of self-publishing
- respected for that too
On the matter of top sellers, the obvious choices are a handful of thrillers and cheap "romance" that make up their numbers from the vast majority of book buyers who read a book a year and have a gravitational attraction to total dreck (the trad- AND self-pubbed kind).
Witness how 50 Shades was and still is a bestseller.
And yes, I did just lump Patterson and Grisham in the same category.
Otherwise-known-as: Why eschwartz Is Depressed With The Human Race.
Sorry, I'll get off my soapbox now.
