Hot topic this week is literary agent Andrew Wylie's deal with Amazon to epublish his clients' books, cutting traditional publishers out of the loop. With such an illustrious client list as John Updike and Saul Bellow this has caused seismic ructions in the publishing community and been met with much gnashing of teeth and cries that this is the End of Publishing As We Know It.
I don't pretend to know enough to offer an opinion on this, but we certainly do live in interesting times. The implications are huge. One author I know of, Joe Konrath, has launched himself as a self publisher after being dropped from his traditional publisher with apparent success. If high profile authors can publish themselves why would they need publishers, or even agents for that matter?
Joe Konrath discusses the issue on his blog. It's food for thought.
5 comments:
Yes - publishing is changing, and there will be winners and losers.
But we live in interesting times...
Authors don't need publishers anymore. Myself and three of my good friends have now left our major publishing houses (one after winning a top industry award) to publish our next books on our own.
Publishers offer very little for the amount of an author's profit that they take and in some cases I've known publishers to work to the detriment of a book by bad design and marketing in direct opposition to the author's wishes.
@Lexi - Indeed. Aren't you planning to self-publish?
@ Thad - Welcome to my blog, Thad. How very interesting - I'd love to know more about your story.
Just seen this. Yes, I've done the Smashwords and Kindle versions of Remix, and the paperback is nearly ready to go to the printers.
Best of luck with it!
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