More books than ever before are being published, more authors than ever before are finding an audience and, surprisingly, more writers are discovering that they can have a significant audience without the help of a traditional publisher. For many, of course (especially entrepreneurs and business leaders), traditional publishing remains a way to reaching a wide public – or at least of being anointed by the traditionalists as someone worth paying attention to.
But the power is going increasingly toward the person who decides to become an entrepreneurial author. That is, to join the ranks of those authors who do it on their own.
Just as the personal computer enabled more people to write quickly, recent technological advances in e-reading devices, content delivery through the internet, and the marketing prowess of innovative retailers like Amazon, allow authors to publish their work and find audiences for it. This has revolutionized publishing.
Yes, in the past authors could self-publish. But doing so was considered something like a vanity project. Or simply something personal or corporate – a family memoir for one’s descendants, or a business history for clients and executives. Or self-publishing was the last resort of someone who couldn’t get noticed by the gatekeepers of publishing, that is, the big publishers.
But now many writers, especially of so-called genre fiction (mystery and thriller, science fiction, romance, erotica, fantasy) are finding a willing and even broad audience for their work. Before, their books might have languished because they themselves were too unknown or their work too specialized or editors too timid or too reluctant for other reasons to publish them. But many of these formerly unpublished writers are now successfully published – by themselves.
Still, self-published business books and certain nonfiction works haven’t yet found a big audience, but that’s likely to change as a new generation of readers, more accustomed to absorbing content through electronic devices, will look at self-published nonfiction as a viable part of the content they choose to download.
What does this mean for the individual author, however?
That’s the subject of our next post.