Quote:
Originally Posted by MGlitch
If authors see the benefits of going Indie, and Indie starts getting better authors producing more polished works, the trad. pubs will need to change their game or go under.
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Did you notice the breakdown of authors by when they got started? There's a bunch of charts in the full report: from there is it pretty clear that around half the Indie authors actually selling books are hybrids or tradpub refugees. (In the appendix and the comments DG mentions the raw numbers of authors *not* selling books, for both Indie and tradpub. It ain't pretty. It also isn't terribly different for either side.) When Sturgeon said 90% of everything is crap he wasn't talking about Indies, you know. The only differences between Indie writers and tradpub writers is how they get their books to market and how much control they keep over their books and careers.
There's this myth running around that, for some mysterious reason, Indie book buyers have lower standards than tradpub buyers. That they buy "crappy" Indie books solely because they are cheaper. That is not a very polite thing to say. Not when over half of all ebooks sold in the US market are Indie.
Want to a quick way to know if a book, Indie or tradpub, is crap? Look at the publishing date and look at the rankings. If it's not buried in the rankings it's not crap. That simple.
It may not be great.
It probably won't be to your taste.
But it won't be crap.
Readers aren't stupid.
There is no shortage of good books at good prices so there is no reason to buy crap just because it is affordable. And with sales rankings, reviews, and above all, *free samples* and good return policies therd is no reason go get stuck with a bad book. And most readers don't.
There is an old joke about how God must love mosquitoes... because He made so many of them.
Well, it's no joke that ebook readers do love Indie published books... because they buy so many and keep buying them, in ever increasing numbers.