Lily
Administrator
Posts: 2,197
Joined: May 2011
|
Post by Lily on Feb 1, 2012 15:45:05 GMT -5
 "Unlikely to last very long ... a bubble rises." Gee, that's a depressing article. I hope it's wrong.  |
|
john
Member
Posts: 44
Joined: January 2012
|
Post by john on Feb 1, 2012 22:59:44 GMT -5
The last sentence of the article says “But this is mere speculation.” I agree with that one sentence and the fact most self-published books do not sell. Just about all the rest, I disagree with.
There are plenty of self-published authors who do not sell their novels for 99 cents or nothing. I went up on my prices, not down, and never sold for less than $2.99, so I could get the 70%, instead of 35%. My next novel will be $4.99 (the Kindle version). I also always publish a paperback version, not just Kindle, and I sell hundreds of paperbacks a month and over 3,000 Kindle versions. I make a little over $2 on some and a little under $4 on one I sell at $5.90 (Kindles). I have four novels at this time, but I am working on two more that should be ready in a few months. At present, the great majority of my sales are from two novels. I am working on a third installment in the series. I have more than ten thousand readers to build on, and all that takes is to write more books. I do not promote at all. The article says we are promoting all the time and being paid nothing for it. Many are promoting, thinking that will make a badly written novel sell, but not all of us self-published writers are stupid. (Promoting is great, but you first have to have a decent novel to sell.)The rest of us are writing and working day jobs, or are retired and have other streams of income. The rest of us went into self-publishing with our eyes open and knew we would be very lucky to make a dime. We also knew it would not happen overnight. For me, it took a third novel and about six months before I made much more than a hundred or two bucks a month.
I do sometimes feel sorry for those who are desperate for money and thought they had found an easy way to at least a few hundred extra a month. I do also feel that the number of people who thought they could just sit down at a computer and write a novel with no studying of just exactly HOW to write fiction, are fools (but for the most part, lovable fools), and that someday the number of fools would have to be depleted at least enough to cut down on the amount of trash being self-published today. Sometime in the future, those who never bothered to actually look into how difficult it is to write a novel worth reading and how difficult it is to actually sell that novel will give up, but there will be more fools rushing in behind them. Still, the flood will slow and diminish in size someday, and things will settle down. This is when those who can write will continue on and enjoy a less-crowded Amazon and readers will see a general rise in the quality of books offered to them.
Change? Yes. Bubble? No. Self-publishing will last as long as Amazon does. Traditional publishing will have to adapt and stop being so greedy and thinking of authors as the least important part of the industry, otherwise, they will continue to suffer.
|
|
Lily
Administrator
Posts: 2,197
Joined: May 2011
|
Post by Lily on Feb 1, 2012 23:41:36 GMT -5
I agree, John. I don't set much store by predictions, they are more often wrong than right. Remember all the predictions of doom as we approached the millennium?  |
|
|
|
Post by jameskresnik on Feb 4, 2012 5:16:59 GMT -5
I agree, John. I don't set much store by predictions, they are more often wrong than right. Remember all the predictions of doom as we approached the millennium? A lot of geeks worked very hard making sure absolutely nothing happened. ;D As for the self-publishing boom, we can all agree that the author has a good point about market over-saturation, but he tries too hard to make the facts fit his theory. The e-publishing market deals with non-financial, non-tangible commodities. His metaphor is akin to selling apples to oranges. What I'm sure we all hoping for is a maturing e-book market that provides readers with better vetted content, while allowing better access to talented writers. I'm also hoping that good literary agents can re-tool to the new marketplace and serve as guides for quality, aspiring writers. |
|
|
|
Post by Christie Bremmer on Feb 4, 2012 14:47:03 GMT -5
I agree, John. I don't set much store by predictions, they are more often wrong than right. Remember all the predictions of doom as we approached the millennium? A lot of geeks worked very hard making sure absolutely nothing happened. ;D If the geeks saved the day then how come in Spain where they did absolutely nothing to prepare for the doomsday/millenium nonsense, not a thing went wrong except for a date glitch in their cash register receipts which was easily resolved. |
|
|
|
Post by jameskresnik on Feb 4, 2012 16:56:37 GMT -5
A lot of geeks worked very hard making sure absolutely nothing happened. ;D If the geeks saved the day then how come in Spain where they did absolutely nothing to prepare for the doomsday/millenium nonsense, not a thing went wrong except for a date glitch in their cash register receipts which was easily resolved. Maybe because nothing of technological significance happens in Spain? Or more likely, the systems were quietly patched, leaving only the cash registers. ;D Actually Christie, you make an an interesting observation. Do you have any other information on what happened there? English or Spanish is fine, though my Spanish is slightly worse than my English! |
|
|
|
Post by Christie Bremmer on Feb 4, 2012 18:09:01 GMT -5
Sorry I dont. I recall reading an article at the time about how much money other countries had spent on this so-called millenium bug and that Spain that had spent zilch only had a minor problem with cash register receipts.
|
|
|
|
Post by jameskresnik on Feb 5, 2012 2:50:12 GMT -5
You could have a point that a lot of the spending was overblown, but the millennium bug was one of those Cartesian dilemmas where assuming the best was far more risky than assuming the worst.
|
|
