Self Publishing: Good or Evil?

good for self you get to keep a lot of your earnings because u distribute your own self, evil for the big coorparations who really used the artists and writers to thier own advantage, evil for self even though its 2010, a lot of people still dont have the current ipods or even a pc to download or be online so if the stores close down people who dont have and are not up on tech, how will they survive, radio? radio plays the same damn song 50 times within an hour. good for the big coorparations so who ever gets famous underground will have to deal with the big boys later on if they are not on thier business smarts and now u think they tax your pockets they would probably try to squeeze the money you made all the time you wasnt knocking on thier door trying to push your demo

No, we don't want rid of booksellers - B&N, Borders, Amazon - they are all wonderful. There are even booksellers who sell e-books, and with POD, hard copies of books can be distributed to any bookshop, just as any book from a major publisher is distributed. So booksellers are integral to the success of self-publishing!

iTunes largely killed off record stores.

Why?

Because it provided an entirely new distribution model. It was no longer necessary to go to a record store so people didn’t.

Netflix largely killed off all the video stores.

Why?

Because it provided an entirely new distribution model. It was no longer necessary to go to Blockbuster (and deal with their bullshit late fees too!)

PRINT media (comic books, magazines, newspapers, novels, etc) is poised to make the same digitized evolution that music made in 2001. Once print media can be bought and downloaded on iTunes – once an entirely new distribution model is created -- will Barnes and Noble survive?

More important that distribution will be creation. Look at how easy it is for musicians to put their music on iTunes and sell it directly to the public! No longer do we have payola or crooked record executives. Okay, yeah, we do still have that….but much, much less than what it was in 1970 and getting weaker by the day!

The stories of crooked record executives are legendary….but the PUBLISHING HOUSES are almost as bad.

Once print media becomes routinely digitized and routinely distributed through iTunes (or something similar) then what use will Publishing Houses be? No longer will freelance writers “need” Publishers to distribute their work. Once it becomes as easy to upload a novel to iTunes as it is a podcast….who the hell is going to need Random House?

Right now the reason print media isn’t routinely “sold” on the Internet is because there is no online store. Once iTunes digitizes most print media and puts it for sale….then it will be easy for anyone to upload their work and sell it!

Imagine being a young comic book artist/writer….in 1999 you would basically NEED to get a job at a publisher like Marvel or DC in order to sell your work. But in 2010 you could upload you digital comic to iTunes and sell it to people directly for $1.99!

http://mitziszereto.com

I think we're looking at a true revolution.

In the past the means of production and distribution were controlled by a very small handful of people. A few "suits" who only cared about making money and THAT meant only do exact reproduction of what made money in the past.

Which is why we now have literally 12,000 vampire love stories sitting on shelves at Barnes and Noble.

And why pre-iTunes almost all music sounded exactly alike. Everyone once in a great while you'd get a small breakout artists on a small label, but the norm was that the "suits" wanted every single band to sound exactly like what was currently popular...thus everything sounded like watered down shit.

but now technology has advanced to a point where everyone has access to the tools of production and distribution.

iTunes is the model. No longer do artists have to kiss the ass of the suits....personal computers are now powerful enough to basically reproduce most of what a traditional recording studio could do in 1960.

So more and more we're seeing artists and writers simply BY-PASSING the 50 year old executives and taking their product directly to the consumer.

The middle men have been cut out.

No longer do musicians or writers or artists have to beg and plead 5 grumby 75 years old to pwetty please invest in their products....now they have the technology to create their art themselves and the internet and places like iTunes can distribute their art directly to consumers at little or no cost.

This is a true revolution.

We saw how iTunes literally destroyed the music "business" and redefined what was possible. Self-publishing is doing the exact same thing.

Very insightful and well written, Mitzi! It's why I stay away from agents: Why should I give my money away?