33
is from the same article). This means“ book discovery” has become the number one problem. How can your book stand out in such a vast crowd?
There are many answers in the industry( and savvy marketing certainly has big role), but some of the more ground-breaking solutions come from the successful selfpublished authors themselves, like Meredith Wild and a few others that have( more or less) followed her example, like Bella Andre, Barbara Freethy, H. M. Ward, C. J. Lyons. They have struck deals with Ingram Content Group, a major book printer and distributor, thus getting their novels in bookstores, big-box stores and airports. Because, let’ s face it, when you’ re selling big in the digital market, you don’ t want to lose out in the printed one: 36 % of book buyers still read only print books( according to a 2015 Codex Group survey – for more about how print books hold their own, see this article).
" How can your book stand out in such a vast crowd?"
What does this mean in terms of the future of the industry? According to David Montgomery of Publishing Technology:
“ There isn’ t one book market anymore: there are two, and they exist in parallel. One continues to be dominated by major publishers, and increasingly uses agency pricing as a strategy to support print book sales. The second publishing market is almost exclusively made up of e-books, and is driven by Amazon-published and KDP content sold at a substantial discount to the product produced by traditional publishers.”
And he foresees a growing divide in 2016 between the two markets. Yet the success of Meredith Wild and the other authors like her suggests that something else might be happening: self-publishing could be encroaching in a territory that used to be seen as exclusive to legacy publishers.
Time to celebrate? Not yet. There is a caveat and it’ s a big one: only 40 such authors are likely to bridge the divide. In fact, writing is a poor man’ s occupation. As Publisher’ s Weekly noted in an article published last year: the majority of authors earn below the poverty line. The statistics are grim:
Given that a single person earning less than $ 11,670 annually sits below the poverty
33