Quote:
Originally Posted by petermillard
Absolutely - which begs the question, if it works so well, why aren't more authors doing this - especially authors with books out of print. How difficult can it be for an author to self-publish an eBook after the hard work (the writing) is done? Obviously there may be contract issues with existing publishers, and if a book is old enough, it may not actually exist in an electronic form, but even so I would have expected to see more of it.
Pete.
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If the author is published in print, the contractual obligations forbid him most of the times to even put more than a set number of words from the book as sample on his web site, not to talk about releasing it under cc
See P. Watts for that, Tor severely limited the number of words he could put as sample, and I believe that's true in most cases just that few authors are as candid and have this f.. you atitude that Dr. Watts has - since his book Blindsight was initially printed in a less than 4k run and not taken by one of the big chains, he went ahead damned Tor and released the whole book under cc and since then he got 3 more hc's printings, a tpb run comes next year, got nominated for all major awards and the like...
There are exceptional cases when the author can negotiate a cc release with his publisher, but most of the times that's forbidden (C. Stross is another author who talks relatively open about this issues, not as candid as Dr. Watts, but still you can get the idea...)
If you are not published, to release your work as e-book is generally seen as suicidal for any chance at a print published career. There are people that do well as e-only, but again most authors want to get a book in print, and going e first is seen as destroying almost any chance of that (again there are exceptions like J. Scalzi, but...)