Zombie Lloyd Betsen weighs in: "Senator, I served with J.K. Rowling, I knew J.K. Rowling, J.K. Rowling was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no J.K. Rowling" (This is probably Nicole's most obscure reference EVAH! If you get this joke, you're OLD!)
The news that J.K. Rowling will be embarking on a self-publishing ebook venture was met with great hoopla. But what does it mean for newer writers (like yours truly)?
Nothing.
(That is, nothing, in my opinion).
But wait, isn’t the phrase “in my opinion” redundant? If this is my blog, isn’t it a given that it’s my opinion? Alas, I digress…
*
I’ve seen a handful of…opinions offered that Rowling’s plans lend greater credibility to self-publishing as a whole. I respectfully disagree. In fact, the more and more I think about it, the more I think that it may be time to put the word “self-publishing” out to pasture. Why? Because it’s being used in multiple contexts to refer to vastly different creative projects that bear none but the most superficial resemblance to one another. It’s ceased to mean much of anything anymore.
Authors who already have an established readership and the money to pay people to edit and design their book, design marketing campaigns, plan publicity, etc. can experiment with “self-publishing” and may find it lucrative. Rowling is using self-publishing in a way that’s actually fairly conservative — as a riff off of her various other books that have established a significant readership through traditional publishing. In other words, she’s not unveiling a brand new world or brand new characters, etc. She’s taking something that’s insanely popular in traditional publishing, tweaking it, and self-pubbing it.
She’s also planning the kick-off of Pottermore a couple of months after the release of the last Potter movie and close to the start of the holiday buying season. In other words, she’s leveraging a major Hollywood motion picture event (built on the foundation of her traditionally published books) to create a unique publishing event.
That’s not the same as newer-author-with-no-name-recognition-me going out, putting an ebook together, and promoting the crap out of it online…by myself…with no allies or anyone else financially invested in the book’s success. For every Rowling, J.A. Konrath, or Amanda Hocking there’s thousands of folks whose titles get stuck in a glut of relatively low-selling e-titles. And if you’ve read your Locus for the past two months (and you do subscribe to Locus, right?), you’ve seen that even Amanda Hocking is moving to traditional publishing. Self-publishing requires wearing a lot of hats (self-editing, self-graphic designing, self-promoting, self-marketing, etc.). Few people can pull that off. Even a spring chicken like Hocking has apparently gotten fatigued from doing all of her own promotion and marketing.
Gate keepers are not the enemy. Absent gatekeepers, all authors get thrown in a big stack, and the reader is stuck with the job of separating the wheat from the chaff. That’s not appealing to me as a reader or an author.
Just my two cents, your mileage may vary…Feel free to discuss in the comments section below.
