But lets play with numbers that could happen:

Academic publishing drops off as lecture notes replace books and the books that exist are held to much higher standards. This starting happening in Math and the Sciences about 15 years ago but there on the internet before there was a web. A smaller number of books but those that exist are excellent, standard references and widely read.

Fiction: authors that can command large audiences get widely distributed. Breaking into fiction becomes more like being a successful actress/actor but once you have the name recognition it is worth a lot.

Consumer non fiction. These fall off quite a bit as other mediums work better. These authors move to web/specialized application delivery. They are still writers but the mechanics of publishing has changed.

So we could be looking at a world of say 15k books / yr coming out of the NY houses. Picture the movie business:

far far fewer products than the book business
most products go “direct to video” which would be the low end of publishing books that sell in small runs (say 2-15k) to specialized readers, probably mostly in e-book form.
after that come the independent films which go to theaters but appeal to niche audiences. Much less niche than the direct to video. Say runs of 15-200k by way of analogy.
then we have the commercial films which account for most of the 1.37b tickets sold in the USA last year. (200k, ave 1m).

That likely what commercial publishing would look like. The vast reduction in books / publishers will make the survivors more popular. I think the analogy in publishing is closer to newspaper in the 70s, where a massive wave of bankruptcy in newspapers in the 70s bought the survivors another generation of good profits that held out till about 2000, and it is this second wave when it looks like the industry is mostly disappearing.

Or to put this is short order. The consoldiation that has always been part of the film business, came to the music business in the 1950s and came to the newspaper business in the 1970s is hitting publishing.

As for access to books for the poor. The cost of books, particularly used books is almost nothing. Many libraries throw out thousands of books. Books are sold for pennies on the pound by remainder houses, etc… And the poor do have cell phones, if Asia is any indication the next likely step is “cell phone fiction” free fiction designed to be read in under an hour on a cell phone. AFAIK this hasn’t caught on in English yet, but its not like the idea of a short story is alien the only thing our typesetters would need to learn is how to lay out a book for extended cell phone reading.

So anyway I think that’s a more realistic view of the publishing world of 2035 than either you or the pro-POD people are proposing. As for paying for gatekeeper role. Absolutely I buy most of my books based on either the author or trusting the publisher. If I know neither I need to read lots of reviews and think carefully about the purchase.

But the parallel to movies/DVD/video on demand is absolutely germane. The distribution channel has evolved, accessibility to diverse content has increased, and the ability for small, unknown creators to become noticed now exists (try that in the studio system of the 1930s and 40s).

Traditional advertising and reviewers are becoming less influential – those who use twitter and facebook (rather than just “play on them”) rely on recommendations through those channels far more than traditional sources. There are certain audiences that still aren’t effectively reached that way, but the tide is most definitely turning.

So while aspects of the traditional publishers’ role are still of value to self-publishers, the evolution of the internet to support a community approach to publishing will certainly allow interesting, important voices to be heard that otherwise would not be.

(and i have several friends without computers who still use software and access the internet via public terminals, schools and the library – so even they can self-publish if they choose.)

Somebody pointed me to your blog, interesting post. I’ve written over 450 blog posts about self publishing since 2005, but I stay away from writing about fiction since I never made a living at it.

The fiction/nonfiction divide is pretty stark, but you did ask about zero cost publishing so I’ll give you a couple examples. If you’re willing to forgo any chance at bricks-and-mortar store stocking, which most self publishers do forgo whether they realize it or not, the best option today is Amazon’s CreateSpace. Gets the books on Amazon, obviously, and doesn’t cost anything beyond a FedX charge for the proof copy – it’s a profit sharing deal. Since I have my own publishing business, I don’t use them myself, I go through Lightning Source for better distribution and discount options. The cost of doing business with Lightning Source is also basically zero, though you have to own your own ISBN block (a few hundred dollar or more depending on how many number you buy from Bowker), and there are aruond $100 in setup and proof charges for small publishers. BTW, as you point out, your books were promoted to stores. There’s no conspiracy to keep POD books out of stores, I had pretty wide B&N stocking for one of my titles for a while, but it takes either a strong sales effort or a lot of walk-in demand for the books.

On the eBook side, all of the major retailers allow you to sign up for free to sell eBooks on a profit sharing basis, but I prefer to sell direct off my website, using an outfit called e-junkie ($5/month) to handle the downloads and PayPal to handle the credit cards. That way, I net 90% to 95% on each sale. It’s not a huge business, but it’s well over $1,000/month.

As a nonfiction author who wrote a series of books for McGraw-Hill which were bestsellers by how-to standards (over 100,000 copies), I chose to return to self publishing because the I prefer being my own boss, and the money is better. Control is a major issue for many authors, fiction and nonfiction, I know a few name fiction authors whose publishers refused to consider projects they thought were either not similar enough to previous successes, or too similar. Then there are the fights over covers and outsourced editing work. I suppose there’s a golden path that some authors and publisher end up on, but it’s not everybody.

If your curious to read about the Amazon centric model, I would recommend Aaron Shepard’s book “Aiming At Amazon”, if you Google him and the title, there’s a free draft version on his website.

Morris

I believe for non-fiction, self-publishing can be an excellent option. In fact, I did a blog series here the summer before last called “Be A Sex-Writing Strumpet;” twenty-six posts, detailing everything I know about writing good sex scenes. It’s here on the blog for free, of course, but I’ve been planning for some time to turn it into a PDF and offer it as a free or low-cost download, perhaps with a little expansion. (I could give it to my agent, and have him submit it, but given that I don’t have a huge name in erotic writing and given that the advances for books of that nature are probably fairly low, AND we’re talking about selling reprint rights and not first rights, it probably wouldn’t earn me much. It probably won’t earn me much self-published either, but I didn’t do it for money anyway, though it would be nice if it bought me dinner or something. I digress.)

My point is, non-fiction has a built-in audience/platform. (I talked about this in rather more detail in a previous blog post on this topic.) Self-publishing non-fiction can work very well; as you said, you’ve been operating in exactly the right way to be successful at self-publishing.

But for fiction, it’s a totally different thing. The way people shop for books is different, the things they look for are different, and it’s much, much harder to be noticed or successful, especially when self-published books (paperbacks) tend to be so much more expensive than mass market.

Again, congratulations on all your success, and thanks for commenting!

I think self-published authors skip to commercial publishing partly for ego/status reasons, and partly because the *possible* payoff is a lot higher.

My coauthor and I sold the second edition of our book “The Ethical Slut” to a commercial publisher. It’s too early to tell for sure yet, but as far as I can see so far, we will make less money on it there than we would have if we’d simply let the first edition go on selling, and quite a bit less money than we’d have made if I’d gone ahead and self-published the second edition.

I’m not sure how all these numbers play out for fiction writers. My books are (so far) all nonfiction how-to books in a definable niche market, which is exactly the formula for successful self-publishing. And even then, getting the books out there in the world has been a full-time-plus job — for many years I was on the road at least one week per month, doing speaking engagements and so on.

On the other hand, this publishing business has supported me for nearly two decades now, and I know very few commercially published authors who can say the same.

Janet

Second, I’m genuinely curious about something, and I hope in asking the question I don’t sound snippy. But if self-publishing is so profitable, why do those few people who find success through it skip to commercial publishers as soon as they’re offered the chance? I’m really interested in your thoughts on it; I don’t mean to be disrespectful.

The thing is, yes, self-publishing is a legitimate business/opportunity. It’s certainly far superior to vanity publishing, where authors pay huge amounts upfront and get only a small portion of the profits.

But I do have to disagree that you can make a lot more money doing it than you can by selling your rights to a commercial house. I didn’t have to learn any layout or design, or pay any cash for equipment (save my computer, which I owned anyway). They did all of that for me, in addition to editing, distribution, marketing, etc., and they paid me an advance, and I get royalties. I’d imagine marketing and sales are at least something of an outlay for self-published writers.

Are my royalties only a percentage of the profits? Sure. But the publisher took all of the financial risk and paid for everything, including the right to publish my book. I don’t begrudge them some profit as well.

I’m not saying any of this to put down self-publishing. That’s not my intention. Just that I know how much money I’ve made so far on the Downside series, for example, and it’s not even out yet. I have a hard time believing that I could have made anywhere near that amount had I self-published. Same with the Demons books; the first book was issued by a small press, but it still sold better than the lowest figures I’ve seen for commercial presses, and over 500 times the numbers of the average self-published book.

I may not get to keep all of the profits, but I have access to way more readers. To me it evens out. I recognize you may not agree, and thank you for your comment, and hope you don’t feel I’m trying to put you down; I genuinely admire the success you’ve made and think it’s great. I just can’t see self-publishing as the best deal for writers, at least not in most cases.

I started as a self-publisher back in 1992. The company began to grow when we accepted a book by an author that wasn’t my then-partner or me, and now has forty or fifty books in print and is my full-time occupation — but if I had it to do over again, I might very well have stuck to self-publishing. Because the big thing about self-publishing is that YOU GET TO KEEP ALL THE MONEY, instead of being sent 10% of it every six months (if you’re lucky). Yes, there’s some initial outlay, although if you’re willing to learn basic layout and production it doesn’t have to be anything like $5,000 — but then, if you’ve written a good book and marketed it intelligently, there’s a lot more profit than you’d ever make on a conventionally published book.

Janet Hardy
Greenery Press

Take away the publishers, reduce the cost of “publishing” to $0 (print-on-demand, e-books), and you have the makings of the YouTube of books.

How exactly do you reduce the cost of publishing to $0? POD books cost money to produce. So do ebooks. So do editors, cover art, and layout people. Even if you do it yourself you’re costing yourself time, not to mention the large number of us who do not have talent in the visual arts, for example.

Not to mention that you are, again, assuming that everyone has access to the internet, which is not the case for quite a few lower-income people, or, say the visually impaired. Perhaps you don’t care about everyone having access to books, but I do; it’s a large part of the point of this post. (We won’t even get into the fact that the majority of readers do not want to spend hours and hours acting as gatekeepers, messing about with various social media platforms in order to hunt for books, and/or sifting through thousands of books online to find the decent ones; they want to go to a bookstore, where they know they can find quality books, or buy books based on reviews, and most reviewers do not review self-published books because there are too many of them and–I’m quoting–the books are not generally good enough to interest them.)

You presuppose a moneyed gentry flooding booksellers with self-aggrandized travelogues, but when you lower the cost of entry that problem goes away. Replace the gatekeepers with social filtering, the editors with ad-hoc writers communities supported by social networking sites, and you have a fertile and supportive system that promotes the work of gifted writers independent of financial status.

Except that even if the “cost of entry” were free, human nature is what it is. There will still be wealthy people spending money on advertising and marketing, or on making their books look better, and less-wealthy people trying to get the money for same, and other people trying to make money. I get enough email spam from people trying to get me to buy their books; I’d rather not get it from every author out there, or be accosted in every forum I go to about buying people’s books, and I really don’t want to have to engage in those behaviors myself because there are no marketing and sales departments at major publishers anymore.

To suggest that because a mother/writer in Cleveland is “STEALING” from you when she self-publishes is a clever bit of syllogistic logic that only serves to put the discussion on an us/them basis.

That isn’t remotely what I said or even suggested. Nor do I believe I’ve made any comments at all relating to “us vs. Them” or implying I see things that way.

Accept that the model is changing, participate in the change as you see fit, but don’t stand back in the arms of your publishing houses and throw stones while people explore the possibilities of an emerging market.

Sorry, what stones did I throw, and at whom? I stated my opinion, based on what I know, of what may happen if all publishers are eliminated. That’s hardly cowering in the arms of my publishers and calling people names.

Trying to hold onto the old publishing system will soon appear as foolish as defending telephone monopolies and complaining about DVDs putting theaters out of business.

That’s your opinion. I don’t agree.

Change happens, the very notion of a book is changing, shouldn’t the publishing industry change as well?

I don’t believe the “very notion of a book” is changing either, and I do believe the publishing industry is changing.

You presuppose a moneyed gentry flooding booksellers with self-aggrandized travelogues, but when you lower the cost of entry that problem goes away. Replace the gatekeepers with social filtering, the editors with ad-hoc writers communities supported by social networking sites, and you have a fertile and supportive system that promotes the work of gifted writers independent of financial status.

To suggest that because a mother/writer in Cleveland is “STEALING” from you when she self-publishes is a clever bit of syllogistic logic that only serves to put the discussion on an us/them basis. Accept that the model is changing, participate in the change as you see fit, but don’t stand back in the arms of your publishing houses and throw stones while people explore the possibilities of an emerging market. Trying to hold onto the old publishing system will soon appear as foolish as defending telephone monopolies and complaining about DVDs putting theaters out of business. Change happens, the very notion of a book is changing, shouldn’t the publishing industry change as well?