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The New World of Publishing: The Real Price of Traditional Publishing
Authors Pay a High Price for Traditional Publishing. This new world of publishing now allows authors to make many publishing choices after they finish a book. That’s a great thing compared to just ten years ago. Now an author can go the old traditional route, they can go full indie and do everything. Or they can publish somewhere in the middle, taking responsibility for all the work, but hiring out parts, or all of the tasks needed to be done. A thousand choices in the process now. And that’s a very, very good thing for authors in the abstract. But all choices have costs. This post is about the costs of…
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The New World of Publishing: No Balance
It should be clear to anyone following traditional publishing now that no traditional publisher will fail in 2012 when ebook sales hit the magic 25%. In fact, because of a number of factors, even with paper book sales declining, most traditional publishers are making more money every quarter. Not all, and there will be some major publishing failures coming up over the next five years. But most traditional publishers will just fly through this with profits. The reason, of course, is that they are raking in high margins for every electronic book sold. And that, of course, is thanks to authors and their agents caving in and changing electronic royalties…
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The New World of Publishing: Traditional or Indie? What To Do Now?
Over and over I get the question, “Should I mail books to traditional publishers or not these days?” And honestly, over the last year my answer has varied and shifted. But now I have finally settled on an answer I feel comfortable with for the next year or so. Remember, please, this is just my opinion. And how I am moving for my career. But every writer, every career in fiction writing is different. Please keep that in mind when reading this. The Problem Right now the problem is that a former stable industry is changing at light speed. Faster, actually, which makes everything looks so warped and confused. (Sorry,…
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The New World of Publishing: Time
Boy, discussion about “time” seems to be coming up a lot lately, especially in the context of writing and indie publishing. So let me take a hard look at the two routes only through the lens of “time.” So why spend the time to talk about time now? It was a week where I got hit with a number of factors concerning time. I made some basic projections on speed and income in the last two posts in this column and had a number of people take me to task because there isn’t enough data to make projections, even though I was only using information from this very moment and…
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New World of Publishing: Speed
Truth: The slow writers in this new world of publishing are going to have trouble. Far more trouble than they had with traditional publishing only. We are in a new golden age of fiction. The first golden age was the pulp age. Speed of writing was celebrated in that time and it will be this time around as well. Okay, say it: I have no fear. Or better yet, I’m as dumb as they come for bringing up the subject of speed of writing. Speed of writing is the third rail in publishing, but in the discussion of the new world of publishing, it has to be talked about. So…
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Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writers Compete With Each Other.
This myth in the old days (meaning more than three years ago) used to get knocked out of young writers early on in their careers, so it had little or no impact on writing careers as young writers came into the field and got help along the way from older, more experienced professionals. In fact, for the longest time in publishing, the apprentice system was a main way in. I know I got fantastic help coming in from major superstars of fiction writing and I feel fantastically lucky they spent the time to give me advice and help. So I’ve tried to do the same now that I’ve somehow managed…