Authors On The Net

I was listening to a radio show the other day and they were discussing this horrible economy we find ourselves in today and, more specifically, they were discussing the lousy sales figures the publishing industry posted in October. They were speaking with a lady who works for one of the large publishing houses and when they asked her to comment on the poor state of the publishing industry she said, in effect, that the publishing industry is an old model that needs to be changed.

She was referring to the distribution system that allows bookstores to return books. This puts most of the bookselling risk on the publisher’s shoulders. She also said that the days in which a publishing house is willing to take on an unknown author and invest promotional dollars are long gone. Most of the large publishing houses actually say on their submission guidelines that they are not accepting books from new authors. Just click on the link at the end of this post if you don’t believe me.

This interview, rather than depressing me, got me excited. It also got me thinking that if the publishing industry were to really undergo a transformation, how would the industry look five or ten years from now. What do you think?

Here are a few things to consider:

1. Authors can make 35% royalty from Booksurge (owned by Amazon) if they use their Print-On-Demand service. That’s considerably more than a publisher will pay per each book sold.

2. You can take a book idea and not even write a “book,” but rather you can take the contents of your book and put it on a subscription-based website and charge $4.95 a month and if people only pay for one month, you’ve made more profit from that sale than if you had sold 5 books the traditional way.

3. You can take your book and break it into several ebooks and charge $4.95 an ebook. Again, 1 book nets as much as 5 books sold the traditional way.

Today, the traditional publishing method is still, in most cases, the best option for making money. But I think it is changing. This change has been going on for several years and once it hits a tipping point, the transformation will be swift I think. So here are some questions I have and would love to hear from others on what they think:

1. Is POD - Print-on-Demand - the future of publishing? If not, why not?

2. Are people making money from subscription-based content websites/blogsites? If so, can this be the new model going forward?

3. What will it take for ebooks to overtake traditional books?

Let us know what you think. Here’s the link to the article I mentined above.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6617241.html?rssid=192