Quote:
Originally Posted by Deskisamess
Many of his points are valid. I am curious how many people just wander aimlessly through Amazon looking for their next book. It is indeed a very large sludge pile.
Which numbers are wrong?
I remember an indie author spamming on one of the Amazon Kindle forums. He was convinced he would sell enough to earn $1,000 a week. I've lost track of his name...I followed him for a while to see if he garnered any reviews. I never saw one, good or bad.
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There is so much wrong with the article that it really does need a fisking to do it justice. If only I had the time. And the talent.
It is not so much that his figures are wrong. It is the observations he makes based on these figures. One that stuck out particularly was his reference to the plunging sales of consumer ebooks. It is not that the figures he presumably relies on are wrong. It is simply that they exclude Indies and in particular Amazon! So of course the declining ebook market then needs saving, when what in fact needs saving is traditional publishing's share of it. And, of course, he makes no reference to agency pricing and high retail prices for these books.
Another example is indie author's earnings. He states how few make a living from it, but in the next breath points out that for most of them it is a hobby. And, of course, he makes no comparison with the earnings of traditional authors, current or historical. Most of them don't make a living either, and didn't even before self-publishing. Once again his figures are presumably accurate, but he has used them to mislead.
A few words of my own on discoverability. There is no question that it is now very easy to self-publish. And discoverability is of course a huge challenge to Indie authors. It is a problem. The decision to buy a book used to be made by visiting a book store and perusing a sometimes large but manageable stock of books. In an online store, the sheer number of books is not manageable. The supply may as well be infinite. We all develop our own strategies for dealing with this, and businesses are falling over themselves to find methods to help us do so. But we are still in a transition phase here. It remains open to anyone for whom the Indie experience doesn't work to simply confine themselves to traditionally published books. There are some Mobileread members who do this, and I applaud them for doing so, though if I adopted this course I would miss out on books by many of my now favourite authors. Some mostly adopt this approach but will buy an occasional recommended Indie. The rest of us presumably recognise the discoverability problem but find it preferable to the old limited choice curated by self-appointed gatekeepers. And develop our own methods to select books.
I have never met someone coming from a brick and mortar bookshop saying they were overwhelmed by the Indie titles and could not find a good quality book. Michael seems to overlook the fact that traditional brick and mortar bookshops stock few if any Indies. Try finding even an Amazon imprint in most brick and mortar book stores. I'm in Australia, so perhaps things are different in the US, though I doubt it. I suspect if such bookstores adopted Michael's suggestion of segregation then there would be whole stores devoted entirely to traditionally published books, whilst some may devote a shelf or two to the few Indies they stock. Online, you can search and filter to your heart's content. It is an ineffective solution to a non-existent problem.