So am I, so I read this New York Times article with interest: Ins and Outs of Publishing Your Book via the Web. Excerpt:
Digital publishing and print on demand have significantly reduced the cost of producing a book. The phenomenal growth of e-readers and tablets has vastly expanded the market for e-books, which can be self-published at little or no cost. Writers who self-publish are more likely to be able to control the rights to their books, set their books’ sale price and keep a larger proportion of the sales.
But one thing has not changed: most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say.
There are breakout successes, to be sure, and some writers can make money simply by selling their e-books at low prices. Some self-published books attract so much attention that a traditional publishing house eventually picks them up. (Perhaps you’ve heard of the novel “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which began its life as a self-published work?)
Still, a huge majority of self-published books “don’t sell a lot of copies,” said Mark Coker, the founder and chief executive of Smashwords, a no-frills operation that concentrates on self-published e-books. “We make it clear to our authors.”
Some people have no problem with that; they want only to print 50 or 100 copies of a memoir or a family history at a relatively low cost. But others continue to dream big.
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