The self-epublishing bubble

[DrNefario]

I don't see it as a bubble at all. It might be a gold-rush (although I don't see that there was ever that much gold), with a new market opportunity and low barriers to entry, but it seems exactly like the iPhone app store from where I'm sitting, as a professional app developer. It will become more and more difficult to get noticed, until it becomes dependent on mastering some other kind of filtering mechanism - charts, storefronts, ratings, marketing, whatever.

Offering a free book won't be enough when there are thousands of new free books being added all the time.

So it'll probably slow down, but so what? Who is betting the farm on this?

The worst thing about self-publishing, in my eyes, is that there are good books out there which aren't as good as they ought to be.

[Matth79]

They say everyone has a book inside them, but there's probably many that would be better staying there - not sure I could consolidate a string of thoughts sufficiently for anyone else to find them worth reading.

Mind you, at least with what could be described in some cases as vanity e-publishing, it doesn't cost anything.

[davidwfleming]

This article on a proposed "e-publishing bubble" was a fascinating, and I must admit, painful article to read.

I've self published some books lately and I've also had a couple short stories tradtitionally published. Though, I'm in my early thirties, it feels like I've been in it for the long haul and have adjusted to all the developments as they came up. I was anti-epublishing, then I changed my tune. I've studied creative writing at college and highschool, went to conferences, participated in Zoetrope, blogged, queried, submited, had interested agents... you get the idea.

This article could be very frustrating to me.

It basically says that after five years of work on a novel, the timing is off for you again, everyone's came out with their book, and your work will be buried. Meanwhile, good luck with traditional publishing because it's in crisis mode as well. A rock and a hard place and a good measure of stigma to boot.

However, I'm not upset, I feel halfway decent. There's more to this story than money. If you're proud of what you've done, you've done your best and you did it all for the right reasons, the outcome becomes less important.

I'm not sure if it was Orwell or Hemingway who said something to the effect that "the best writing was written from a sense of outrage..." implying that real writing, the best writing is an attempt to criticize and thereby improve the status quo of a society. Don't get me wrong, I like money. But that quote is to me what all this effort is really about. It's not about trying to calculate what your hourly rate would be or when you can recoup your costs. Come on, people! This is a labor of love and we're privilaged to even live in a country where we have a title-shot.

[nigel p bird]

The article, to my mind, uses a fairly shaky analagy. First of all, it's only one model related to economics and, secondly, it's a bit stretch to apply it to ebooks and self-publishing.

It's one of those predictions that will only be tested in the next few years. I suspect that it is off the mark, so there's my neck on the block.

Watch that bubble.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I expect the article isn't that far off: I also expect that a lot of people who have been churning out books to self-publish will reach a point where they see no or tiny return for their effort, and will decide it's not worth it. The flood of self-published books will wane. But I don't expect it to dry up completely.

There will still be self-publishers who will exhibit patience and keep pushing, however energetically, to keep their books out there and earning something. They will improve in their writing and write some more. There will always be new books written and self-published, just as there were before the web came along.

The question for the future, therefore, becomes, how will the traditional and self-publishing worlds co-exist, and how will the public interact with them? We have the potential for the public to decide that self-published books are equal in quality to traditionally-published books, and make greater efforts to seek them out (and separate the wheat from the chaff). We have the potential for the traditional publishers to "go to war" against self-publishers, using more overt negative campaigns and even sabotage to pollute the self-published market. We have the potential for the public to decide that neither is acceptable, and have book-reading fall into an almost-exclusively backlist market.

I see the result of these questions to be greater than the concern about the self-publishing bubble. They will determine the future of all books and writing.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

We have the potential for the public to decide that neither is acceptable, and have book-reading fall into an almost-exclusively backlist market.

Already has. Just go visit a school; the number of kids you see with books for entertainment is at an all- time low.

Although with things going the way they are, I wouldn't be surprised if literacy was to become a massive stigma in a few years, with a large vocal class of "won't read" people actively destroying what writings they can. Its already happened once or twice in human history.

[speakingtohe]

They will be there forever because there would be nothing to be gained by removing them, but after they realise they're just wasting their time they will stop adding more to the pile.

Pretty sure many will disappear through attrition. Retail outlets such as Amazon will eventually, if they haven't already require the author/distributer to renew the terms and no-one in their right mind would agree to have their book(s) distributed free forever and if they did it might be an illegal contract.

The internet is not a static entity where everything is written in stone. I am amazed at the things that disappear as well as the things that remain. History is being rewritten, things are censored in different ways, so how can an ebook that no-one wishes to read hope to remain. I am sure that some will, but the majority will disappear into obscurity.

Helen

[Ninjalawyer]

Originally Posted by teh603

Although with things going the way they are, I wouldn't be surprised if literacy was to become a massive stigma in a few years, with a large vocal class of "won't read" people actively destroying what writings they can. Its already happened once or twice in human history.

If I read that premise on the back-flap of a book, I would immediately put the book down as being unbelievable. The human race is digitizing thousands of books a month, and the pace is accelerating at an exponential rate; at the same time, the cost of digital storage is generally dropping and will continue to drop. Right now, anyone in an affluent country could store the sum total of digital literature on a device that would fit in a shoebox, and could easily share the same; in the future, your cellphone could easily store a large percentage of all of the books produced. Given that, I don't see traditional book burning as particularly effective or likely.





Also, I can't see a stigma being attached to literacy when the 95-100% are literate in North America.

[speakingtohe]

I actually had an experience where someone had downloaded an ebook containing a virus. It was a Danielle Steel book which could be read as a PDF but was embedded in an exe file. I was pretty amazed that they had downloaded/opened it and had little sympathy although I did remove the virus.

Helen

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Ninjalawyer

Also, I can't see a stigma being attached to literacy when the 95-100% are literate in North America.

Try working at a school for a few years; you'll see just what a stigma American society places on intelligence and reading.

[speakingtohe]

It was like that when I was a child, 50 years ago. If anything literacy is 'cooler' now because of a desire to social network via facebook etc.

Helen

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by teh603

Try working at a school for a few years; you'll see just what a stigma American society places on intelligence and reading.

Possibly your specific sample is a little off-sync. My two nieces are products of public school and they enjoy their reading very much. One of them bought a Kindle almost as soon as she got a job.

[phloxy]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

Possibly your specific sample is a little off-sync. My two nieces are products of public school and they enjoy their reading very much. One of them bought a Kindle almost as soon as she got a job.

There are definitely parts of the United States where ignorance is celebrated and considered "cool." Thankfully there are avid readers among our schoolchildren that can give us hope that all is not lost, but let's be honest: the quality of education is eroding in the US, and protecting and improving it simply aren't the priorities of our legislators. Class sizes are burgeoning, private, for-profit interests have intruded, funding is tied to test scores, and teachers are being wrongly pilloried as the "new rich." Combine that with the attitude that being uneducated is acceptable, and in some regions, it really does appear that learning and the desire to be educated are on the decline. There are parts of this country where Idiocracy, minus its sci-fi elements, is becoming uncomfortably close to being an accurate representation of everyday life.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

It was like that when I was a child, 50 years ago. If anything literacy is 'cooler' now because of a desire to social network via facebook etc.

Helen

Depends. If no one knows anymore how to compose meaningfully structured sentences...
Some 0f TEH N37works still run on their own rulez .
When they don't know the right way - they won't notice the wrong way. Simple as that.

[davidwfleming]

Okay, so referring back to the "ebook bubble" article, I think the question at issue is really "What is a bubble?" Saying that there is a bubble of anything really implies that something out-of-control will catastrophically burst, never again to recover.

People freaked out during the dotcom "bubble" and thought temporarily that everyone was foolish to believe people could make money on the Internet. Now look what's happened. Amazon is giving Walmart a run for it's money. Surely there will be crests and troughs in the ebook market but it seems like wishful thinking to think that the overall trend will be anything but upwards.

Mr. Konrath's take on the article: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2012/0...ok-bubble.html