If you are interested in the publishing world, how it is changing, and what a popular, well-known author has to say about it, you must read this.
I don’t know where all of this is going—which gives me something in common with everybody else in the world. The publishing landscape is changing almost daily.
But I know this: my default response, when someone asks how to get an agent, or how to find a publisher, or any writerly version of what-do-I-do-now, is to suggest publishing it oneself. That’s a course I never would have recommended to anyone, except perhaps the occasional dotard who’d penned a memoir he hoped his grandchildren would read. And now I’m urging it upon everyone—writers whose publishers have dropped them, writers who never had publishers in the first place, writers whose early books have gone out of print.
Will everyone have a good experience with self-publishing? No, of course not, nor will every book show a profit. But it has never been so easy for readers and writers to find one another, and for any book to find its proper audience.
It’s pretty exciting. I’m no authority, and people like Joe Konrath and Lee Goldbergand Dean Wesley Smith know much more about the subject than I, and share what they know more effectively. Even so, I expect I’ll have more to say on the subject over the months.