{"id":610,"date":"2009-02-03T22:04:11","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T03:04:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/?p=610"},"modified":"2009-02-03T22:04:11","modified_gmt":"2009-02-04T03:04:11","slug":"e-books-and-self-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/e-books-and-self-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"E-Books and Self-publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream media lately about the future of publishing; in particular, the e-book revolution is much in the air.<\/p>\n<p>I find this interesting.  First, because I&#8217;m just intellectually fascinated by such transitions and the human mind.  Second, because I&#8217;ve been thinking for several months now about the possibility of self-publishing.<\/p>\n<p>That term used to be a dirty word, of course.  It rings of vanity publishing, which isn&#8217;t what I&#8217;m aiming for at all.  Quite to the contrary.  Vanity publishing is where you pay money to see your work in print.  Self-publishing, to my thinking, is where you get to keep more of the money when your work sees print.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s held me back &#8212; what&#8217;s held back most folks from going the self-pub route (other than perceived stigma, which I could care less about) &#8212; is the fact that a publisher-published book is far and away more likely to sell more copies than a self-published book.  So while the author gets a much smaller cut of the pie in publisher-publishing, the pie is so much bigger that it doesn&#8217;t matter.<\/p>\n<p>What I keep coming back to, though, is whether that&#8217;s changing.  E-books are, whether we like it or not, the future.  And e-books don&#8217;t have the distribution networks required in traditional publishing.  You can theoretically distribute direct, from the author to the reader, point to point, with no middlemen.  Even if you do utilize a middleman &#8212; say, Amazon, for the Kindle &#8212; the percentages are higher (35% of cover for the Kindle Store).<\/p>\n<p>But then there&#8217;s something else, too: we live in a viral world.  What if that viral passing of material could include, say, a book?  It would need to be free, of course, but imagine if a book went viral, reader to reader, downloaded, copied, recopied, around the globe.  Released in Creative Commons, people would be free to translate it, to play with it, to do whatever-the-heck-they-wanted-to with it, so long as they didn&#8217;t profit.  The author, meanwhile, would utilize the resulting traffic to make money via advertising click-throughs, merchandising, and actual print copies of the viral book (I&#8217;ve bought CDs of material I downloaded for free, after all).  The e-copy could be formatted by the author, and the print copy, too, could be self-published on demand and shipped direct to readers.<\/p>\n<p>What kind of book would work for such a thing?  An entertaining one, obviously, but also one that has an edge of anti-establishment to it.  Better still, it would have many plot-threads with lots of cliff-hangers.  Ideally, it would be full of things that could be linked, so that the text itself could become a kind of jumping-off point in hundreds of interesting directions, embedding itself into the interwoven virtual worlds of the Web.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps I&#8217;ve been spending too much time reading things on my iPod Touch, but I think it just. might. work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream media lately about the future of publishing; in particular, the e-book revolution is much in the air. I find this interesting. First, because I&#8217;m just intellectually fascinated by such transitions and the human mind. Second, because I&#8217;ve been thinking for several &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wmGA-9Q","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":611,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions\/611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.michaellivingston.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}