Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
No, I'm not overestimating. That's 5,000 copies *per week*. Compared to a self-published ebook which may be lucky to sell 5,000 copies *ever*.
Self-publishing your ebook is great if you're well-known. And it's your best alternative if you can't get published at all. And even some great authors like Boyd Morrison here can't get in print. But to suggest that authors are better off financially publishing their own ebooks than being published in print is nonsense 9 times out of 10.
Regardless if you can making a living on it or not, if you don't care about money then give it away for free. If you do care about money, you should be trying to get the best deal you can.
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5,000 copies per week funded by million dollar advertising and promotional campaigns. Of course no indie-publisher is going to achieve those kinds of figures, but that was never the point. And better off is subjective. If you must insist on measuring this in monetary terms, then you are right, they probably won't be better off. But 5million or 50 the attitude toward publishing is changing, and it's not about caring about money, it's about money as a motivator in an industry with a dwindling mid-list, notoriously bad deals for creators (except those at the top) and sales figures that are taking a month-on-month dive into the toilet.
If money is the motivator behind writing then why write? Only the slim minority of authors make an actual living from writing. And do you really think a first time author has any say whatsoever in the publishing industry? Do you really think he can go for the 'best deal' on his/her terms? Of course they can't. That's reserved for vacuous celebrities who get million dollar advances and have ghost writers doing all the heavy lifting.
I read an agent recently on her blog talking about how if 'everyone' publishes themselves then the bookshelves (virtual or not) would just be filled with rubbish. She then went on to say how she'd secured a new client who was nothing more than a 25th generation knockoff of that prose murderer Laurell K Hamilton. And I bring that up because the publishing industry has nothing to do with actual 'writing' good or bad, it's product. The writer is the product to them, and the more familiar and inoffensive that product is, the better chance it has of selling.
So that's the choice writers face, a choice they might never have had before. Do they want to be a product? Do they want to bend and twist under the whim of some corporate gatekeeper with dollar signs in their eyes in the slim to nonexistent hopes of making a living out of all this? Or they can do what they want, when they want and how they want.