He's not important. He's only the author

There is an old Hollywood joke about the wannabe film star who was so dumb that she slept with the screen writer. Basically the joke shows what little power writers have in tinsel town.

The same is true of authors. Unless you are a top best selling writer you have no power. All the power in the writing business resides in the hands of the agents and publishers. It is they who decide who they will represent and what will be published. You can't hope to succeed in main stream publishing unless you have one or both of them on your side.

Is it any wonder that increasingly new writers are self-publishing their work as ebooks. They do this because they want to get their work out into the public domain and to receive at least some feedback from real readers.

Whatever people say publishing an ebook; paying for a good Copy Editor to do their magic, converting word files, uploading onto Amazon and other platforms and buying in some publicity is not cheap. Most writers will not recover their costs no matter how good their book is because they are generally unknown and don't have a publicity machine behind them.

So why choose to do it? The one in a thousand chance that your book might be picked up by a publisher? Possibly. But, more likely it's because the motivation for writers is to communicate with others. To share their stories and in doing so to share something of themselves with the hundred or so people who buy an unknown writer's ebook.

My next non-fiction book The Little Book of Big Management Wisdom will be published by Pearson's in November and A Death in Spring: 1968 is with Troubadour and will be out soon - I promise.

Regards,

Jim