Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
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.
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I'm sorry... I love your stuff, Moejoe, and wouldn't mind it if you were right... but you need only look at the most random assortment of self-published authors to see how amateur efforts well more than 9 times out of 10 result in despairingly amateurish results.
And the size (or even potential size) of any hypothetical community willing to do such work will never be able to accommodate the number of books that can reasonably be published in a(ny) country in a given year.
I'm not saying such communities can't exist... but at this time I cannot take seriously a suggestion that they'll supplant professional publishers... ever.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alisa
One of the possible business models I can see developing as ebooks become more common is one where the author retains the rights to their work and self-publishes but hires a consulting company to help with things like editing and marketing. In this scenario I don't know if I would call those consultants de facto publishers. A nit picky argument to be sure and it has no bearing of the validity of your statement but it just got me wondering what technically defines a publisher. If they're not the gatekeeper to the presses and bookstore distribution and if they're not given any rights to the works, are they "publishers"?
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This already happens. And the quality of the work is the reason that it is so simple to recognize (or, some would say, weed out) the works of self-published authors. (Mainly because any such consulting companies don't give a damn whether the book ever sells a single copy, so long as they've already gotten paid... and since mobileread is living proof of how little the average person knows about bookmaking, results that any random author is satisfied with are still far from being guaranteed to be even halfway competent.)
Despite many people's feelings about it, being gatekeepers (that even today hold back a lot of trash, even though they could be doing a far better job of it) is a genuinely worthwhile and useful function of publishers.
Not everything written is worth reading. Not everyone that writes ought to be published. Having individuals who dedicate their whole life to making and selling books try to make the decision what gets sent the public's way and what doesn't, is not a bad system. It's an imperfect system, that is made worse by the fact that western culture downright expects/mandates sociopathic behavior from corporations. But it's imperfections are held increasingly in check by the low barrier to entry for publication.
If you write the greatest novel of this century, and no publisher is willing to take a gamble on you, with a bit of effort you could self-publish potentially for as little as a few hundred dollars. And if your book is as great outside of your head as it is inside of it, you will be able to successfully promote it in cost-free ways to the point where it starts selling and bringing in money.
I don't even see the publishing
industry needing to change much at all, even if and when paper books eventually bite the dust.
All that's needed is for individual publishing companies to start acting like they are run by people who aren't morally bankrupt. But then, I don't think that's anything unique to the publishing industry.
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Just my thoughts. But otherwise, I would be neither surprised nor saddened if 90% of companies that make up the publishing industry today were gone by the end of the next decade. Little of worth would be lost that newer (and hopefully more honest/sane/fair) companies couldn't replace.
- Ahi