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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
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