Before you read further, a caveat and a few facts about me: I’ve worked for several decades in the publishing industry and worn all sorts of hats, from self-publishing/direct marketing, to advertising (mostly my own publications), to author (80 some books with large publishers like HarperCollins and Avon on down to small presses you’ve likely never heard of). I’ve ghost written for people you’ve likely seen on TV. Now I mostly create illustrations for books, magazines, and CDs. I know a lot of the ins and outs of the publishing industry.

All that said, I think we’re on edge of something very different, a major shift in how the industry works.

This change is happening on several fronts. Given the ever-expanding electronic market, instead of suggesting that self-published writers are outside the publishing industry (is that a realistic claim if they print books and sell them at a profit?), it might rather be that we’re on the edge of something new. That is to say, dismissing this trend as something less than publishing might be as wrong as scribes claiming in 1440 that “this new Gutenberg thing is not a part of real publishing.”

Other considerations… Is one percent of the publishing market really small potatoes, or only small in comparison to what the big publishing houses bring in? Yes, some self-publishers are only selling to mom, dad, and the other relatives. But others are clearly making a living at it. Are these folks not actually publishers by some definition of the meaning of the word?

And what about when a market like China opens up to self published books.

For decades (perhaps even a century or more), self publishers have been making good livings by marketing books outside common venues such as direct mail, magazine ads, and (now) Amazon.com and the Internet. If a person prints books and makes a living from the book sales, can we truly say they are outside the publishing industry? Or are they simply working outside the confines of the big publishing houses?

Likewise, is a University Imprint that produces quality literary titles yet see few sales and bringing out only a handful of titles in any given year all that much different from an author who hires an illustrator, editor, and designer to create his self-published title? Can we really argue that both have few sales yet one is a legitimate publisher and the other is not?

Now don’t get me wrong. The big money is with the big presses.

Yet why are the big presses staggering economically now while self-publishing is exploding? When one sees such shifting in an industry, would it be proper to ask if we’re seeing the start toward a very different economic model?

Those who have been working in the industry for a while know something is changing, and that it has the makings of a very radical change. Something is changing even though no one can quite put their finger on it.

I think it’s a mistake to dismiss self publishing as something that lacks any merit — just as it is wrong to dismiss the big presses as dinosaurs who are soon to depart this mortal coil. (That said, I see self-publishing as something quit different from the “Vanity Press” which is another whole ballpark and too often in the past indefensible in many — but perhaps not all — cases.)

There’s room for both types of publishing and I suspect that both will continue for some time, just as the direct marketing title publishers have operated outside mainstream publishing for many decades.

I would suggest that we might be in the middle of a sea change. If so, it would be a mistake to draw premature conclusions about what will sink and what will float until the boats right themselves and have a chance to head out to sea.

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Duncan Long is a freelance illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See my cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html