Self Publishing–NY Times
This Sunday’s NY Times Magazine had an article about Amanda Hocking and her phenominal success in publishing her books on Amazon and all the other e-book outlets. She is selling 9,000 ! ! ! books every day.
There is more to the story, but it illustrates what a powerful change is happening in the publishing business. The Big Six (now the Big Seven–see Christine Rose) will have to change their ways or go out of business. I predict that the Big Six will be forced to reduce their people and their influence in the business.
So what should we authors do? The easy answer is to do the same as Amanda, but she hit on a subject (genre) that young readers like. We can’t all write about Zombies. Not all readers are intersted in Zombies.
So what do we do? Definitely get your book on all the e-book outlets. But then you will have to build a following. First, get Christine Rose’s book Publishing & Marketing Realities. It is a good start to learning social media. I suspect that the changes in even the past six months will have her write and update this valuable book.
Now that authors can forget getting an agent and go directly to e-books, the number of books available will increase so that there will be ten times as many available as three years ago. And then finally one hundred times available.
How will a reader select from this ocean of new books? I predict that an author will need a publicist and the new direction that publicists will take will be through social media: Twitter and Facebook, Blogs and a good web site. As in the past, an author must take an active role in promoting her/his book.
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