What's the future for the book industry? Succinctly put, the future is now...and it's all about you!
After a dozen years, the troglodytes who run the New York book publishing empires have never figured out a way to survive the digital era. The relevancy of major publishers today can be compared with that of the traditional music industry (all but dead), FM radio (all but dead) or the three major TV networks (still breathing, but of increasing irrelevance in a 600 channels/D.I.Y. world).
Sure, the major book publishers will still be there, but in a humbled, slimmed-down fashion. They won't matter nearly as much as they once did.
The future of publishing is in your hands, and in the hands of anyone with a few hundred bucks to self publish with a digital printing company or even to put up an e-book on their own website. In other words, the future of publishing is as much about narrowcasting as is music and video. You're the writer and the publisher (and the marketer as well). You get to choose your audience, you get to write directly to them, and you no longer need to grovel before literary agents and acquisition editors at publishing houses.
Meet the new boss: it's you.
So what do you do with all that power? We will share some of our thinking about this in upcoming posts.
[The above post was created from excerpts from The Self-Publishing Manual, Volume 2, written by Dan Poynter.]
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