Lately I've been thinking that publishing has become increasingly difficult. RDSP's 10-year anniversary is right around the corner and this is definitely not how I imagined things would be at this milestone. At first I thought I was just tired, burnt-out, in a rut and tried to shake it off. I figured it was not publishing but me. However, as the months have gone by it's become clear that publishing is, indeed, getting harder. There are many reasons but I read an article last week that confirmed one of my suspicions. It's become increasingly more difficult to get people's attention about a book or author and I believe that is partly due to "book spam." There are so many books published nowadays that most releases just get lost like a needle in a giant haystack of pages. The article I read concerned the problem of "knock-offs," books that are similarly named to popular titles in order to trick people into buying. You can read the complete article here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/16/amazon-knock-off-bestsellers/ But the part that really caught my interest was this:
Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. "I am a single mother who home schools her children," says Peebles, who says she sells "thousands and thousands" of books a month. "Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month."
would not have any publishing company if we'd had to go the traditional route. But one thing we've insisted on since the beginning is a
certain level of quality and we plan to continue to insist on that regardless. I'm not interested in debating the merits and pitfalls of these modern modes but just want to recognize the reality of the situation. It is my hope that customers will become more savvy about the books they buy, it really isn't that hard to spot a fake or poorly written book by reading the description. But in the meantime how many great books are being lost in the shuffle?