Self Publishing

Here is something I am thinking about a lot these days. We have seen both a dramatic rise and a change in kind with Self Publishing since Amazon got in the game. It used to be, not so many years ago, that self publishing options were call "Vanity Press". The idea was that if you had to pay to have your work published; if you couldn't find a publisher to publish it; then your work was not worth publishing. And, if you paid to have it published then you were doing so to satisfy your own vanity. Most people who did this landed up with boxes of their book in their garages which they gave away to friends and relatives.

That isn't to say that nobody made any money on self publishing. Some did extraordinarily well. But, there were very few. This was because publishing houses controlled the means of distribution. So most self publishers could not get their books to the public. And they sat in boxes in the garage.

I have been carrying on in my Patterns and Predictions  blog about Dying Hegemonies of Access . The premise is that industries who primary role was to provide access to a resource that technology can provide better access to do not have a bright future. Publishing is, in my opinion, on of those Dying Hegemonies.

Any body can publish a book these days on Amazon. There is a bit more to it than this as there are Kindle books and hard copies. Of course, one must have writing skills and something to write about. But, But of all the writers who are capable of cranking out something worth buying, only a tiny fraction of them saw their books in book stores. Now, with these new options for self publishing, the marketplace is wide open. And Amazon is not only vehicle for self publishing. It just happens to be more well known.

I also don't want to imply that everyone who publishes this way is going to be successful. But, historically, publishing houses controlled which books were published and which books got into book stores. This is still true for a majority of books published today. But, that is changing and it is changing very rapidly. Self publishing is beginning to challenge traditional publishing in the same way that bloggers and people using their smart phones to make videos challenged traditional journalism. More about this to come.