Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Individual companies can choose to do that. The industry itself cannot.
All the work--after the writing--that goes into a book, from editing, to typesetting, to cover design, to promotion (not to mention fact checking, and other things that are more relevant to certain genres but not others) is not going to get taken up by the author. And it is that work having gone into books--whether eBooks or pBooks--that will continue to separate professional writers from amateur ones.
Whoever handles this work will be de facto a publisher. Even if not a single such company will trace its beginnings back to before 2009.
That's why I do not see the industry itself having any threats to it.
I certainly would not be surprised if many companies ended up failing to go with the times... but... who cares about that... and why?
- Ahi
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You're right, it won't be the author alone, it
will be the community that does this. We're already seeing proofreading as a crowdsourced publishing venture through Bookoven.com (with more community driven options to come), I'm already providing covers for other "unpubbed" authors such as myself. As far as I can imagine, the writer can no longer just sit and write and rely on others to do all the leg work. The writer will have to be part of a community, an
active part of that community, not just there to flog his or her wares but to fill in the gaps that others might need. Design, proofreading, editing, all the traditional avenues of publishing are slowly, but surely, passing over into the hands of on-line communities.