Passive Guy put up some great thoughts from Dave Farland about indie publishing and the future of publishing in general. Fantastic stuff, folks. Worth the read from two of the smarter people working in this business.
Dean’s Short Bio
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith published traditionally more than one hundred popular novels and well over two hundred short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he co-wrote The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom. He writes under many pen names and ghosts for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean wrote books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and wrote scripts for Hollywood. One movie actually saw film.
Dean also worked as an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He now plays a role as an executive editor for Fiction River.
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WMG Publishing Inc. is now my major publisher of all my coming novels, collections, and short stories.
Fiction River Volumes #1and #2 Are Available!
Fiction River, an original fiction anthology magazine is available for subscriptions. Unnatural Worlds, the first volume, shiped on April 23rd, 2013 and How to Save the World shipped on June 18th, 2013.
$6.99 electronic and $15.99 trade paper editions of Fiction River volumes are available at your favorite bookseller.
Or subscribe to future issues now.
This is the last line of a NY Times article on Book Expo America.
“Steve Bercu, the owner of BookPeople in Austin, Tex., said his store had its best year ever in 2010. People in Texas, he joked, “don’t even know e-books are happening.””
There’s also this: “Dominique Raccah, the publisher of Sourcebooks, a midsize publisher in Naperville, Ill., said her sales are already up more than 20 percent so far this year over the same period in 2011. “The industry is beginning to figure it out,” Ms. Raccah said. “A lot of the water-cooler conversation here is negative. But the book industry is actually growing. And it looks like the majority of book publishers are experiencing growth in this environment.”
What do you think about what they’re saying? Are they blowing smoke? Is it true in a certain context? I’m an indie author, but sometimes I wonder if I’m existing in my own little world of ebooks and blogs about ebooks . . .
Sarah, I have zero doubt, and shake my head at the silliness at times, of the ego of indie writers thinking they are changing the world. Some might be a little, but not much. Traditional publishing is just so large that a few along the outside won’t bother it at all.
The key right now is two-fold. One, the writers now have choices, a mistake the traditional publishers made by giving up their monopoly on distribution. So many of us are just growing our own publishing companies.
Second, Sourcebooks (one of my wife’s publishers) is a smaller imprint that is fairly new and growing and changing with the times because they can. But the publishers that are too big, that are not changing, that have been ignoring all this will be in trouble shortly, not from indie writers, but by the simple math of electronic books and the weight of the costs of paper books. The profits from indie books, even at 75% will not be able to hold them up with their costs of warehouses, printing, shipping, and so much more. So some will crash in this transition. Others will survive. Only time will tell which ones.
So they are not blowing smoke. Rough times for some are great times for others. This is a fantastic time for writers. Not so much for some traditional publishers. Nature of business change.
And many, many indie stores are changing and growing and there are more indie stores in the last few years every year than the year before. Fact. ABA statistics.
Dean,
Thanks for all these recent links. there may have been less comments, but that’s only because the posts say it all and there’s not much more to add. But it’s a great education.
Thanks for your reply. Your blog has been very helpful in figuring out what the proper course of action is and how to make sense of this brave new world we’re lucky to be a part of. Whether my book sales rise or fall, I’m going to keep showing up and we’ll see what happens. I love to write and every day that I can write and even make some money while doing it is a great day.
Got that on the money, Sarah. Great attitude.
Dave’s really been hammering it in his last few Weekly Kicks. And I mean, really, really hammering it. I can’t say I disagree with his prediction that e-readers will replace text books in schools within 5 years, nor that the new generation — my daughter’s generation — of young readers will be raised almost entirely on e-readers as their main mode. When I deploy a project to Kindle and Nook, I’m therefore not think about immediate sales as much as I am thinking about sales in a year, or in two years, or in five years, or even longer. As e-readers continue to proliferate and things continue to change, I know I’ll still have control over my electronic content — assuming I don’t cough up the rights to a traditional publisher.
I think what I don’t understand is why traditional publishers and some agencies seem hell-bent on tightening the screws even [i]more[/i] on the midlist when it’s the midlist that’s most likely to rabbit and take its inventory directly to the marketplace, thus cutting the publishers out of the money chain. I mean, the midlist is already fed up — and now the trad pub people want to make it worse? Talk about poisoning the well.
If Dave’s predictions are true, in ten years the trad pub houses — what ones are still left — might have to work hard to appeal to authors, in a direct 180-degree switch of the current situation. When most or even all writers can make more money, faster, easier, with self-publishing, what will trad pub have left to offer?
But then again, I hear Dean chuckling: there will still be hordes and hordes of writers depserate enough for the “Stamp Of Approval” that they will sign anything and everything — however horrible the terms — just to have a paper book come out from a New York novel house.
Brad, you got it. Writers will sign anything to get published, hire a scam artist with a business card, whatever. In all of history of publishing there have been publishers taking all writer’s rights and writers lining up at the door to give them the rights.
However, the really rich writers of the future will be indie published and taking in not only writer money, but publisher money. Those lining up at the doors to sign away rights will be wondering why they can’t make any money. And with their agents taking 50% and the writer’s only getting money after net and expenses, these same writers who get nothing much from traditional publishing will be wondering how anyone makes any money from electronic publishing.
And the myths will continue on and on.