Calling All Authors! What's your publishing strategy?

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Why is it considered ok even standard practice - to publish content to YouTube if you make video, to MySpace if you make music but not to self publish if you are an author?

Even the pope has a YouTube account now, and independent musicians have their own awards ceremonies.

I guess big music labels have always been despised, and perhaps musicians have always been cooler if they are renegade. What about authors? Dont they get any credit for trying to go indie?

Seems not.

Self publishing aka the bastard child of the publishing industry inspires comments like this one from a friends of mine who just completed her book after 6 years working on it described prospective self publishing profits as meaning one harassed ones family and friends to buy copies.

And then theres Bob Young, founder of the massive online self publishing site Lulu.com who was recently quoted as saying We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind.

Despite outrage expressed on blogs web-wide, I have to say that I agree with Bob Young he was making a very vital point. One that was largely missed during the web-wide knee jerk in reaction to his comments.

What I hear him saying, with a dash of his usual humour, is that more publications does not equate to a lowering of standards of all publications. It equates to more entries at every point on what is a subjective, sliding scale.

For decades the decision over which works saw light of day lay with publishers a party whose prime concern was profit for himself, and that model for the most part - encouraged production of middle of the road material shaped by statistics. For evidence of all thats wrong with that kind of thinking simply look at the overall lowering in creative standards in the music and film industries.

Yes moving away from the middle of the road will mean that you see whats out there on the fringes: there will be a lot of stinking, rotten road kill for sure.

But there will also be a lot of great creative work that you may have been turned down for publication and never seen the light of day.

Nobody knows your tastes better than you.

And a final thought: one thing that will always remain true is that you cannot expect to get different results by doing the same thing as everyone else.

Over the next few weeks Ill be talking with self publishing and POD site representatives, publishers, literary agents and most importantly - authors, both published and hopeful.

What are your thoughts? Send me a message, dont forget to sub and favourite well get to the bottom of this yet.

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• How to Publish a Book
• Publishing and Printing
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• publishing a book
• standard publishing
• P.O.D.
• self publishing
• p.o.d.
• publisher
• self publish
• publishing
• publishers

[TechKnowlagey]

this is why i subbed you.

[TriLimTim]

cool