Quote:
Originally Posted by pilotbob
Or, if the author's sold them directly for $5 a book they could make it by selling 8 books.
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... Assuming of course that the author wants to go into retail, marketing, sales, and distribution.
I, for one, don't want to go there. I write because
I want to write; from my point of view, the publisher takes care of the boring but necessary business of turning what I write into money. I
could do that stuff, but it's not only boring but time-consuming; I'd have to divert a lot of the time I currently spend on writing to selling stuff, keeping accounts, and so on. Even with ebooks -- selling direct without DRM, either via stores like Fictionwise or via my own blog and CMS, which I'm capable of doing -- there are overheads: copy-editing, typesetting, keeping accounts, collecting VAT (essential if you want to stay on the right side of the law, and it cuts in at a surprisingly low threshold).
I know a guy who has successfully broken into print by breaking the rules: he self-published his novel, had a couple of palets of books delivered to his garage, then hit the road and sold it hard (mostly targeting schools -- he's a YA author). He's now with a major publisher and happy to leave the 60 hour weeks of sales-and-marketing activity to the professionals. Not because he couldn't do it, but simply because it was a distraction from the core business of writing.
I'm not an accounts clerk, subeditor, web storefront programmer, and art director. I can do that stuff (probably not as well as a full-timer, but adequately) ... but it would take time away from my writing. Far better to let someone else do it for me, in return for a cut.