The new world of self-publishing: it's not just for vanity anymore!

The Wall Street Journal has a great intro­duc­tion to the new world of self-publishing:

Much as blogs have bit­ten into the news busi­ness and YouTube has chal­lenged tele­vi­sion, dig­i­tal self-publishing is cre­at­ing a pow­er­ful new niche in books that's threat­en­ing the tra­di­tional indus­try. Once derided as “van­ity” titles by the pub­lish­ing estab­lish­ment, self-published books sud­denly are able to thrive by cir­cum­vent­ing the establishment.

via Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry — WSJ.com.

It’s finally pos­si­ble to skip the tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers alto­gether, pub­lish­ing your­self (via Amazon, for exam­ple), and get dis­cov­ered by fans directly! Of course, you’re own your own with edit­ing (con­tract it out? ask the sig­nif­i­cant other?) and adver­tis­ing (social media, any­one?), and there are no advances on your sales.

On the other hand, there’s no pub­lisher telling you what you can and can­not say (but then again, there’s no publisher/editor telling you what you should say and shouldn’t say…), and no send­ing your man­u­script in – and then never hear­ing back with more than a form letter.

Instead, you write great stuff, put it up through Amazon, some fans dis­cover you and… presto! You’re rich & famous! Amazon’s dis­cov­ery algo­rithms help with this (the more peo­ple read and like your work, the more often it gets rec­om­mended), but you still need to get that crit­i­cal mass started (which is one thing a pub­lisher can do for you).

So this is great for fic­tion. I won­der if it has any pos­si­bil­i­ties for aca­d­e­mic work? How would a depart­ment rate your self-published book in terms of tenure deci­sions? By num­ber of copies sold? (But aca­d­e­mic works never sell much.) Somehow, I sus­pect the aca­d­e­mic world will be very, very slow to accept self-published works as “real” publications…

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