{"id":1206,"date":"2012-02-16T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2012-02-16T12:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2012-02-16T06:00:19","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T12:00:19","slug":"modern-thinking-vs-an-antiquated-notion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=1206","title":{"rendered":"Modern Thinking vs. an Antiquated Notion"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 1px; height: 1px; padding: 0px; margin: -11px 0px 0px; border-width: 0px;\"><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;ve always thought of self-publication as a fallback option. My own plan has always been to pursue the traditional route of sending queries to agents and publication houses, and to only resort to self-publication as a last resort. As time goes by, however, I&#8217;m slowly coming to realize that my plan may be faulty. The problem with my reasoning comes down to answer two questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Agents and publishers provide something of value to the author. Are the services they provide worth the price of admission?<\/li>\n<li>Have e-books and the internet changed the answer to the first question?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Rather than answer these yes\/no questions directly, I&#8217;d like to break them down into their components and discuss them in more detail.<\/p>\n<p><strong><!--more-->How Readers Choose Books<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>As I discussed in my earlier post about <a href=\"..\/..\/2012\/01\/s\/\">my favorite book(s)<\/a>, when I was younger one of the primary ways I chose what book to pick up at the library or the bookstore was the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/ecx.images-amazon.com\/images\/I\/512b5rTXO-L.jpg\">cool cover art<\/a>.&#8221; Even as I grew older, the act of finding a book was to walk up and down the shelves, picking up books and reading their jackets, and then deciding if that brief blurb was enough to warrant a purchase.<\/p>\n<p>The act of finding a book today is a bit different. It still involves reading the brief synopsis on the book&#8217;s back cover, although most of the time the back cover is purely virtual, and I&#8217;m reading it on my computer. Finding a book in the first place usually involves a visit to Amazon to click on a book I&#8217;ve recently read and enjoyed to see if their web-site can recommend similar books by other authors that other readers have also purchased and suggested.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not the only way I choose new books, of course. Sometimes I base my selection upon a recommendation from a friend or coworker. Sometimes I chase down a book specifically because of the author. But by and large, I&#8217;m a function of Amazon&#8217;s recommendation tool. The company&#8217;s computer-generated algorithms do an excellent job of reducing my tastes and interests to a simple mathematical formula and spitting out book material that I&#8217;m sure to enjoy. And almost without exception, their algorithms get it right.<\/p>\n<p>So, can a traditional publishing house create a marketing stir that would get my interest? Sure. In fact, I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/\">blogs from some of the big houses<\/a> on a regular basis looking for new fiction. More important to me, though, would be reviews posted by fellow readers on Amazon that recommend a particular title and associate it with other books that I&#8217;ve liked. I&#8217;m sure publishing houses can help with that aspect of marketing as well, it&#8217;s just not as clear to me how they do so.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Viability of Self-Publication<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It used to be that self-publication was simply non-viable, due to the cost of printing and distributing books. That&#8217;s changed a lot in recent years with the advent of services like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/\">lulu.com<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.createspace.com\/\">createspace.com<\/a>, and others. Authors can now print small batches of books, or even have them printed to order for customers, at a very reasonable price.<\/p>\n<p>More importantly, at least to my mind, is that books no longer need to be physically printed at all. I can&#8217;t remember the last time I read a novel in printed form. Everything I read for pleasure is on my Kindle (whether purchased from Amazon&#8217;s online store or converted by me to digital format). The cost of digital distribution is a tiny fraction of physical printing, which means the cost barrier to successful self-publication is now almost non-existent. And as a bonus to the author, digital distribution typically offers much higher royalty percentages than traditional publication (70% in the case of the Kindle Store. Traditional rates have been 8%-12%). If an author is in it for the money, self-publication may provide a much more lucrative opportunity.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Goals<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Speaking of making money, I think every author needs to seriously ponder the question, &#8220;Why am I seeking publication?&#8221; For some, the answer is that they wish to be career writers. For me, I enjoy the act of writing creatively, and I&#8217;d like to have readers enjoy my stories. Being rich and famous is definitely not part of the equation for me, but being a credible, respected author is important. Do my goals lend themselves to either traditional publishing or self-publishing? I&#8217;m not sure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>My Own Experiment<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve dabbled in self-publication once already. I have a short story that&#8217;s been for sale on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B0042JUAKK\/\">Amazon<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smashwords.com\/books\/view\/23937\">Smashwords<\/a> for almost eighteen months. I also made the story freely available via a <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.google.com\/site\/tedboone\/ghostgirlgun\">variety of channels<\/a>. During that time it&#8217;s sold around 200 copies (it&#8217;s also been downloaded <em>for free<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feedbooks.com\/userbook\/15424\/stats\">more than 10,000 times<\/a>). 200 sales is a tiny number to be sure, but that is based upon almost no marketing whatsoever from me. And it&#8217;s only a short story, not a full-length novel, which limits its appeal. What have I learned from the experience? I&#8217;ve learned that, with very little effort you can probably sell a few copies of your writing via digital marketplaces. However, in order to become a high-volume commodity, in addition to needing a high-quality product and a LOT of luck, a very serious marketing effort is required. If you&#8217;re self-publishing, that effort falls to only one person: &#8220;you.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Back to the Original Question<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>So, my <strong>tl;dr<\/strong> answer \u2013 I don&#8217;t know yet about self-publication. I can see how it could work. I can see how it may be a much more viable answer than it was in the past, and that the trend towards self-publication will likely continue to grow. Is it for me? I&#8217;ll let you know\u2026someday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve always thought of self-publication as a fallback option. My own plan has always been to pursue the traditional route of sending queries to agents and publication houses, and to only resort to self-publication as a last resort. As time goes by, however, I&#8217;m slowly coming to realize that my plan may be faulty. The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[988],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-self-publishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}