Michael Blowhard of 2Blowhards sent me to this excellent post by Seth Godin on the perils of "making a living" writing non- fiction. A couple of quotes?
"Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business".
"There is no such thing as effective book promotion by a book publisher.
This isn't true, of course. Harry Potter gets promoted. So did Freakonomics. But out of the 75,000 titles published last year in the US alone, I figure 100 were effectively promoted by the publishers. This leaves a pretty big gap".
Read & weep. Or maybe not-- he has some intelligent things to say about the changing paradigm, including his conclusion:
"And the punchline, of course, is that if you do all these things, you won't need a publisher. And that's exactly when a publisher will want you! That's the sort of author publishers do the best with".
I'm still figuring it out-- I have only been doing it for 30 years.
2 comments:
Godin wrote: "When the world moved more slowly, waiting more than a year for a book to come out was not great, but tolerable. Today, even though all other media has accelerated rapidly, books still take a year or more. You need to consider what the shelf life of your idea is."
To me, the long incubation period of a book project is unavoidable unless your aim is to create what Stephen King calls BSOs (book shaped objects), basically ephemeral material printed in book format.
Do we need more of these?
Isn't one of the advantages of a book (I'm biased: I work in a archive amid 500 year old texts) that it holds up both physically and topically over a long period? I see it as something like the creation of an elephant: low birthrate + long gestation + prolonged adolescence = one big, smart, long-lived, tough-skinned critter. :-)
That's what you want to make of a book.
More kooky naturalistic analogies? A grove of live oaks. A longleaf pine flatwood. An ivory-billed woodpecker. Nothing beautiful and fine and lasting can be made in a jiffy.
I would like to jump in here and bring to everyones attention that the information on this blog should also be shared with the readers of http://www.articlebeat.com Our sites readers and authors would benefit from the information being discussed here and would help get the word out faster, to everyone interested. With plenty of article exchange on our site, the bloggers here would benefit from our site and our site users would benefit from the bloggers.
Come share, exchange and debate with us at http://www.articlebeat.com today.
Post a Comment