Friday, July 16, 2010

Top Novelists Ditching Their Publishers to Develop Their Ebooks

Publishing & Self-Publishing: Where Is the Tipping Point? is the latest post on a blog called The Book Designer. It talks about novelists jumping ship and leaving their publishers in order to publish their own ebooks. A well-known Japanese novelist Ryu Murakami is going strictly Apple. There's even rumor that Janet Evanovich is doing solo with her ebooks. We already know about JA Konrath leaving St. Martin (or did they leave him?) to orchestrate his ebooks. The list adds up.

Is electronic publishing turning publishing on its ear? Is self-publishing turning into the norm?

Yes, books cost more than ebooks. We feel more green reading ebooks. E-readers are convenient as heck, and are becoming crazy cool. People are finally wrapping their minds (and hands) around technology. Ebooks might be coming into their own. Ebooks are easily self-pubbed. Should we follow the lead of the masters who seem to be boldly going where few have gone before? Without a big publishing house?

Before you drink the kool-aid and write off traditional publishing completely, realize there's a huge elephant in the room. Note that the author of this other blog post never really touches upon the fact all of these authors have a platform to die for . . . thanks to traditional publishing. They'd have a market if they wrote a novel on toilet paper and sold it on rolls in the grocery store. They've made a name for themselves.

Don't let the hoopla make you miss the reality. You must be able to sell your book, regardless of the medium. Throwing your story into an ebook does not sell your work. You still have to sell yourself, your book and your brand. The sea of self-published ebooks will exceed the paperbacks flooding the world now. Marketing will become an even bigger issue when it comes to electronic publishing.

NOTE: Hey, I've considered ebook publishing of my own fiction, but then I splashed water in my face and realized I'd drown in the flood of new, self-pubbed ebooks. Chill, I told myself. Keep your eyes on the horizon.

DOUBLE NOTE: I'm nursing my chicken bitten by the neighbor's dog. I've also ordered her a saddle - a cloth cover for her back, where she received a nasty wound. Since we moved her to the garage in the kennel, she's become a talker. Tonight we fed her cooked grits with milk and she gobbled it up. As for the writing . . .one publisher is very interested . . . another just requested the full manuscript.

5 comments:

Jessica Ferguson said...

I've requested the rights back for my novel so I can jump on the ebook bandwagon too. I just downloaded the Kindle for PCs and bought a friend's ebook of short stories. I'd STILL rather hold a real book in my hot little hands.

I've heard it takes a long time to get the rights back to a book ... wonder why? The book came out in 1996.

Hey congrats on the requests! It's just a matter of time.

T. Powell Coltrin said...

Yay on the hen. She will be so spoiled that the other ladies won't let her back in.

Ebooks. There is room for both, but I have to say that if all authors went with ebooks then what do we put in our libraries? One lonely Kindle?

Congratulations on the interest. So exciting.

Teresa

book publishers said...

Very interesting article - more and more book publishers are now using twitter, the way social media is being employed seems to be changing the marketing landscape for how books are reaching the reading public.

Anthony J. Langford said...

Yes, you make good points. This is also the reason I havent bothered with self publishing. The crazy amount of books out there.
Keep us posted on your own work. Sounds promising!

Anne R. Allen said...

This is a fascinating subject. I'm discussing it over at my blog and linked to this post.