My fellow moles and I detect some seismic tremors in the publishing and bookselling edifice. "Vanity publishing" is out; "indie publishing" is in. So instead of one or two blessed individuals passing through the eye of the commercial publishing needle we can now all churn out books in a quality-free-for-all. Is this really a good thing?
It simply isn't sustainable to heap all the cost and all the effort of creating, producing, marketing and selling a good book on the shoulders of each individual writer. At the moment, everyone else in the production and distribution chain has their cut of the income before anything gets back to the poor old writer. We are told to do our own marketing without any market data, let alone resources. The most talented, I suggest, are also the most fragile, and in such a harsh environment many good writers will give up long before the loud, confident and wrong brigade.
It's a major achievement for an amateur writer with next to no guidance or resources to write a half decent novel - yet a goodly number achieve it. Many more would do so with a modicum of sympathetic editorial support. About time some out-of-the-box thinking was applied to the end-to-end system of writing, editing, publishing, distribution and sales, if you ask me.
What's that? Oh, you didn't. Well, that's the beauty of the internet. I can say it anyway
It simply isn't sustainable to heap all the cost and all the effort of creating, producing, marketing and selling a good book on the shoulders of each individual writer. At the moment, everyone else in the production and distribution chain has their cut of the income before anything gets back to the poor old writer. We are told to do our own marketing without any market data, let alone resources. The most talented, I suggest, are also the most fragile, and in such a harsh environment many good writers will give up long before the loud, confident and wrong brigade.
It's a major achievement for an amateur writer with next to no guidance or resources to write a half decent novel - yet a goodly number achieve it. Many more would do so with a modicum of sympathetic editorial support. About time some out-of-the-box thinking was applied to the end-to-end system of writing, editing, publishing, distribution and sales, if you ask me.
What's that? Oh, you didn't. Well, that's the beauty of the internet. I can say it anyway
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S.A. Rule's Blog about books, publishing, writing, music, Shehaios, fantasy, and anything else that flits through her mind.
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