Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
An important point is being missed here. CJ Cherryh can do this and make enough sales of her ebook through her website because she built a reputation through the traditional publishing process. Imagine no book publishing companies and all authors selling ebooks from their own websites. How would you know who to look for, who to buy? How many times would you need to be burned by buying poorly written drivel before you would stop buying from unknown authors?
When you (and that's the universal you, not soemone in particular) name a popular print author whose works you like and whose ebooks you'd gladly buy from the author's website, you are implicitly acknowledging the work that some publisher did to get that print book out there for you to find and the author to love. How many thousands of self-published authors remain unknown and sell only 50 copies of their work in their lifetime? How many hours each day will you devote to finding author websites and how much money will you risk on unvetted work? And if you complain now about poor formatting, typos, and poor grammar/syntax, how much more will you be willing to tolerate with unvetted authors?
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Part of this work that publishers do now - selecting good books to read, establishing and advertising connections between good books already read, and new books just coming out - can be done by the readers. Look at this site:
http://www.literature-map.com/
Then imagine it bigger, with user reviews, like those on Amazon, attached to each book, with connections between books given by readers, each connection voted for or against by thousands of readers.
Editors will still be needed to work with authors, to make a book better. But with a word-of-mouth this big, no official approval of a single person will be neccesssary - good works will eventually float to the top.