Being published has always been a very expensive, complex and time-consuming process. Most writers never even get a chance to be published. However the publishing industry has been tremendously affected by technology these past few years. Not only are books being replaced by eBooks, but also being published is now cheaper and easier than ever! This is, to a large extent, due to the introduction of self-publishing: publish a book or else no longer has to be orchestrated by an established publisher (such as Pearson or Hachette) but by the author itself through a platform. Companies such as Lulu or Amazon embraced this new concept and created a new way of publishing. It has been successful from the beginning and more and more companies specialize in this business.
As it is easier and faster, authors enjoy using those platforms. Once a book is written, the author can pay a small fee and be published. Companies often have partnerships with book retailers such as Amazon or Bol.com or local bookstores where the book can be found on the webshop. If a customer buys this book, only then the printing process starts. Companies do not hold stocks of self-published books, but prints on demand; or offer eBook format. Most of the companies also offer extra services such as cover designs, marketing, re-reading…
Self-publishing is very trendy. It gives the opportunity to anyone to be a writer. Even though the chance of the book to become a bestseller is very small, it is a reliable option for young and inexperienced writers to publish what they have worked hard on.
With this new system, everyone can become a writer for a day! Whether you are writing for your relatives and friends, or simply for the feeling of holding your own book: unleash your inner writer!
Self-publishing, everyone is a writer
9
October
2016
Hi Olympe, thank you for your blog! I think this blog is also the perfect example of why everyone can become a writer: each BIM student is suddenly a blogger for IS! With the rise of information technology, it is suddenly very easy to get your book/story out there. The same goes for music and movies: if you invest in making a song, you can publish it on a platform of your choice and share it with other people.
I wonder, do you think the publishing of books will dissapear completely in the future?
This post is a great example of the Long Tail. As Chris Anderson has written in his book on the Long Tail, part of it is the democratization of distribution. This is a prime example of that. As means of distribution such as Lulu and Amazon enable everybody to publish a book, more books are published, and different audiences can be reached. Even though a book might only have a handful of readers, it has become easy to actually publish the book and reach your audience, instead of only being able to publish a book with the backing of a large publisher who recognizes a ”hit” in your book. This has brought us to a point that there is a big market. However, what is important to stipulate, and this is exactly what Chris Anderson has also done in his book, is that this causes the need for great filters. With the growing ease of publishing books, automatically, there will be many available books that do not fit into one’s interests. I think it is important to mention this as well in this post, because the growth of writers does not only bring about advantages. The disadvantages, such as a lot of books that are far from worth of a reading, should be mentioned as well.
Hey Olympe,
Nice blog 🙂 I know a friend who hired a guy in India to write a book for him. I think the book is about yoga but I am not sure anymore now. Anyway, He paid the writer less them 20 dollars and was selling the e-book on Amazon for around 5 dollars per copy. I found it super weird when I first heard about this because I thought no one would bought it, but apparently a few people did. Thus, I agree with Hady that this is an perfect example of the Long Tail.
I think the fact that self-publishing writers rather spend more money on having printed version of their book instead of just having the e-book version is interesting because it would make their books more expensive and maybe harder to sell. This behavior somehow makes me wonder if e-book will actually replaces printed book one day. In this case, I still think the need of printed books are still strong.