Are You The Gatekeeper?
If so, your days are numbered.
Time was, only so many books could be published per year. Each one had to be printed and distributed to bookstores, so as a publisher, there was a cap on how many you could produce each year. So, the name of the game became being very selective. If you publish a book, you better be reasonably sure it will sell well. It gave them license to discriminate.
Now we can keep blogs for free, and self-publish books ourselves. With Amazon, we don't need the big publishing houses, so we can eschew them and their arbitrary standards. They've been pretty vocal about how this isn't fair, about how digital books, like those on the Kindle, are a threat to their industry.
And they're right; they do pose a threat to the industry, but what it doesn't do is pose a threat to the people who write. I grew up wanting to be a writer, wanting to share ideas with an audience (however big or small that audience might be). The fact that I don't need to convince some big publishing house that my ideas are financially solvent before I can offer them to the world is exciting to me.
You don't get to tell me how or what to write any longer. "Marketable" no longer equates to "fiscally solvent".
Time was, only so many books could be published per year. Each one had to be printed and distributed to bookstores, so as a publisher, there was a cap on how many you could produce each year. So, the name of the game became being very selective. If you publish a book, you better be reasonably sure it will sell well. It gave them license to discriminate.
Now we can keep blogs for free, and self-publish books ourselves. With Amazon, we don't need the big publishing houses, so we can eschew them and their arbitrary standards. They've been pretty vocal about how this isn't fair, about how digital books, like those on the Kindle, are a threat to their industry.
And they're right; they do pose a threat to the industry, but what it doesn't do is pose a threat to the people who write. I grew up wanting to be a writer, wanting to share ideas with an audience (however big or small that audience might be). The fact that I don't need to convince some big publishing house that my ideas are financially solvent before I can offer them to the world is exciting to me.
You don't get to tell me how or what to write any longer. "Marketable" no longer equates to "fiscally solvent".