Has anybody e-published their work (on Kindle, Barnes & Noble)

[Tansy_Gold]

19. Actually, you have that backwards

The vast majority of flops are self-published books.

Regardless of the publishing medium, lousy books are still lousy books, and what digital publishing has done is give the authorsof the lousy books a means to "publish" them. But it's the books that are lousy, not the medium.

Having done it both ways -- paper and digital -- I can say there are some constants.

Badly written books don't sell. Traditional publishers don't buy them, readers don't buy them. When they're published on line, readers still don't buy them. They're still lousy books.

Are there some stories that aren't masterpieces of literature and style that still manage to attract huge fan bases? Sure. But when they do, it's because there is something compelling that lifts the book above the flaws in its execution.

No matter how you publish -- traditional royalty paper publisher, non-traditional small press, vanity press, digital online publisher, or self-e-publishing, you still have to produce a product people want to read. That's the inescapable bottom line.

Every writer thinks his/her work is wonderful and people are going to knock each other over to get their hands on this latest masterpiece. Odds are, it's not nearly as wonderful as the writer thinks. Odds are it's not written very well. Odds are the author ignored a lot of well-intentioned advice -- like getting an editor, learning the basics of grammar, cutting it from 850,000 words to 150,000.

Most of the books currently being self-e-published are books that no traditional publisher wanted to publish. They were flops before they ever made it to the Kindle or the Nook or the Smashwords website. I'm currently reading a novel that was written 20 years ago, and in those 20 years the author tried and tried and tried to find a print publisher. Then she tried to find an e-publisher. Six weeks ago she gave up and published it on Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program. In six weeks she hasn't sold a single copy to a paying customer. And right now, she's representative of the majority of self-publishing authors.

BUT that's changing. Many print authors are still bound by existing contracts that grant them 10% (and less) royalties. Many of them are looking at the 35% and 70% royalties paid by Amazon and saying, SHIT! why am I sticking with print when I can get five or ten times the money and get it in 90 days instead of two years?

Print authors who are getting rights reverted to their backlist titles are putting them into digital editions and not only making more money on them than they did in print, but they are raising the quality standard for digital publishing.

Self publishing isn't without its drawbacks. You need to either be a superb editor or you have to pay for one. You'll need to pay for your own cover art. You'll need to do your own promotion. And yes, you'll be just another unknown in a sea of unknowns.

But technology is going to change the way people read and buy books. Expect to see stripped-down e-reader devices similar to portable DVD players, in the $30-$50 range for the more casual reader, the person who doesn't want to be tied to a tablet or a fancy display. They just want a damn book to read. When that device hits the market, paper publishing will be all but a memory.

And the more there's a shift to digital reading, the more there's going to be a demand for higher quality in the material. Sure, the garbage will still be published and self-published, but it's not going to be read any more than it is now.

So if you aren't writing material of the quality that would normally be acceptable to print publishers, you're probably not going to sell any better digitally. Digital offers opportunities for niche books that didn't have the profit potential for traditional publishers, but the quality of writing still has to be there.