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Quote of the day:
"Patience is not passive. It is concentrated strength."
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Rapid Growth in Self-Publishing!
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G'day guys,
Today I bring you some interesting facts about the state of publishing, courtesy of Suw Charman-Anderson of Forbes.
The number of books and ebook self-published each year in the US has increased by 287 percent since 2006 says Bowker, America’s ISBN agency, in a new report on self-publishing. Bowker counted over 235,000 titles self-published in print and digital compared to 148,424 titles in 2011, although it counts only those books with ISBNs. From the Bowker press release:
“Self-publishing is now supported by a sophisticated and highly accessible support structure,” said Beat Barblan, Director of Identifier Services for Bowker, an affiliate of information powerhouse ProQuest. “It’s provided everyone who has a story to tell with a method for sharing it and leveled the playing field to an unprecedented degree. This is no longer just vanity presses at work – self-publishing is out of the dark corners and making its way into the mainstream. Notable success stories include a number of self-published authors landing their titles onto the prestigious New York Times bestseller list for ebook fiction.”
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Ebooks experienced the greatest gains, up 129 percent since 2006 compared to 33 percent for print over the same period. Bowker also reiterated results from a 2011 study which revealed the four major players in the self-publishing services market. CreateSpace “dominated the print segment” with 58,412 titles or 39 percent of self-published print titles, whilst Smashwords took the largest part of the e-book pie with 40,608 titles, almost 47 percent of self-published e-books. Author Solutions (part of Penguin Group) racked up 47,094 titles and Lulu Enterprises 38,005 titles. No other company had more than 10 percent of the self-publishing market.
Author Polly Courtney, who now self-publishes after three years with Harper Collins, said:
“It feels as though the ground is shifting at the moment … It’s quite liberating. Some sort of transition was overdue. The growth rate is amazingly high. The UK is considered to be a couple of years behind the US but I think it’s going the same way here too.”
This particular report doesn’t include the UK, but earlier research by Bowker found that about 11 percent of all ebooks bought by UK readers in the first half of 2012 are self-published, accounting for just 1 percent of all print and ebooks.
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Bowker’s report lends more weight to the words of Smashwords’ Mark Coker, who told me in July:
'Four years ago self-publishing was viewed as the option of last resort for authors, where failed authors went, but this attitude is changing dramatically. For a lot of authors, self-publishing is going from the option of last resort to the option of first resort. There was a lot of stigma associated with self-publishing four years ago and very little stigma associated with traditional publishing. I think over next few years we’re going to see that reverse. The stigma associated with self-publishing is quickly disappearing as we see more and more indie authors becoming commercially successful on their own merits, and as some of the problems with traditional publishing become more apparent.
I’m unsurprised by Bowkers figures. The meme that ‘everyone has a book inside them’ is a particularly attractive one, so there’s quite a lot of pent-up demand still to be expressed. Self-publishing allows people to get their inner book out there into the big wide world, but this gold rush, like all others, won’t last forever.'
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This rapid growth is part of the climb up the Peak of Inflated Expectations. We can look forward to a significant backlash against self-publishing — more so than the current mutterings about quality — when it crests that peak and crashes down into the Trough of Disillusionment. I give it a couple of years before that happens.
Ultimately, though, no matter the perception of self-publishing, for serious writers it will remain a valuable tool in their arsenal, one which will eventually live comfortably side-by-side with traditional publishing and various other ways of skinning the authorial cat.
Clancy's comment: Mm ... time will tell. Stay tuned.
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