Publishing vs. Self-Publishing

A lot of fascinating stuff about publishing in this article from Time Magazine.

He makes a case for self-publishing that is founded on a handful of success stories. Though it strikes me that self-publishing still has a very high failure rate. But then so do novels published in the ordinary way. The problem is finding an audience. Getting the books distributed widely enough that an audience is at least possible.

But there are some excellent observations here about the publishing world at the moment. Problems aplenty.

Also in today's New York Times, a similar report appears with this quote from a bookseller that echoes what I said above:

“For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,” said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books. “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”


And the other view.