sevenswells | Self-publishing and digital books

There's still a beautiful weather outside, and I'm still stuck inside my room working!

Here's a link all you authors and artists on my fpage will find very useful, I think:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

It's a dialogue between two writers who have switched to self-publishing and are happy about it.

The way I see it, the book industry is facing an unprecedented crisis, and publishing houses are part of the problem, as it's very well explained in the interview. And in my trade, which is comic books, it's even worse, because it's such a ghetto culturally speaking, with such a lack of proper recognition in France that things go even slower and are even more fucked-up (I won't even talk about the royalty rates which are, for a regular comics author, completely ridiculous). Needless to say I'm extremely unhappy with the way things are in my business, and that I'm thinking more and more about the self-publishing solution. The only problem is that it's a bit different with comics than with literature, but it seems these days the switch to self-publishing and, more importantly, to digital media, is becoming an important debate amongst the authors I know, all of which are pissed and tired of their publisher's bullshit, and we're all working on a viable solution together. The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be part of the change, and I hope we'll see the light at the end of the tunnel.

"For hundreds of years, writers couldn't reach readers without publishers. We needed them.

Now, suddenly, we don't. But publishers don't seem to be taking this Very Important Fact into account."
(Joe Konrath)