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.