The Guardian's Ewan Morrison did an indepth article which makes slightly grim reading for all involved in the e-selfpublishing movement.
It can be read here... http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/30/self-e-publishing-bubble-ewan-morrison
All the while I was very lucky to give a counter argument on BBC Radio Ulster a day later with Ewan which is basically me just talking about my love for writing essentially...
It can be listened to here... http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01b65jm
For the most part he is right, anything new will attract a ton of peole, and you'll see a lot of them leave; both authors and publishers. However I think that will be more the smaller sites/readers with a few of the big ones like Kindle, iBooks, Nook, maybe Kobo, and maybe Sony eReader living through it.
Also he has a fairly black/white view of success. Of couse the vast majority will never come close to the sales of the people he named BUT if someone is happy with say $30,000.00 a year which would be about 49 downloads a day, which depending on the number of book is HARD but way easier then publishing a million books.
Maybe I don't understand the arguement, but by "Bubble bursting" are they saying eBooks are going away?
That seems ridiculous. Printed books aren't going anywhere, but pretty soon they're going to be relegated to something akin to Albums vs CDs or MP3s.
If anything the "bubble" is just starting to inflate. It's going to be a madhouse as soon as that first series of books comes along that falls in the Harry Potter/Twilight mold. Then there's going to be a whole thing about whether ebooks should be published in hard copy form, and there's going to be a bunch of hipster stuff over which edition is the most "real."
Can you imagine if we had a Mormon President? Does that mean we would have to take that Joseph Smith thing seriously? Would South Park get cancelled? Would Christmas be outlawed? Would we have to answer the door to young boys in dress pants? Would polygamy be legalized?
"Can you imagine if we had a Mormon President?"
I'm going to quote JFK, which probably seems strange, but I'm going to do it anyway, as a reflection of how I would like all politicians to act in regards to their religion.
"I'm not a Catholic president, I am a president who happens to be Catholic."
Actually, despite the fact that I put that in quotes, I'm paraphrasing because I don't want to look up the actual quote. You are warned.
I know, I know. I was just being a smartass.
Yet people associate the religion of a President with politics, it's silly. Like imagine having an atheist President, the majority of the nation would freak out because they are religious and wouldn't trust him because of it.
I think the so-called elitist "serious writers of serious, serious fiction" just hate self-publishing because it demeans the concept of elitism. Is there some terrible self-published crap? Of course. Does that mean all of it sucks? no.
This argument doesn't make any sense to me. There's more than enough crap from actual physical publishing houses. Unless they're trying to say that the ratio of crap to good is a lot farther apart for self-published works.
E-publishing opens enormous potential for creative design. It has become a popular choice for an increasing number of publishing professionals.
