SelfPub3 E-Book

Alliance of Independent Authors

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Campaign Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 78

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

SelfPub3 is a concept and a publishing era defined by the concept: that any author (with the requisite skills) now has the means to establish a sustainable and scalable business.

It is also a campaign from the Alliance of Independent Authors (#selfpub3.0) that works with authors, readers, literary organizations, and creative industries to support independent authors in acquiring the three necessary skills: writing, publishing and creative business.

The SelfPub3 era, the era of author enterprise, began around 2018. In this era, writers are moving beyond exclusively signing all rights to a single 3rd-party publisher, or exclusively self-publishing with one platform or service, into true creative and commercial independence.

This short book outlines both the concept and campaign and aims to explain to self-publishing authors why SelfPub3 is important, the tools and techniques driving this trend, and how to take part in this movement that is enabling authors in more number than ever before to earn a living from writing and publishing books.

Leseprobe

Self-Publishing 3.0

Orna A. Ross

Alliance of Independent Authors

Contents

Introduction

About the Alliance of Independent Authors

What is Self-Publishing 3.0?

A note about pronouns

I. Author Income & Independence

1. The Enterprising Author

2. The road to Self-Publishing 3.0

3. Self-Publishing 3.0

II. Self-Publishing 3.0 Drivers

4. Direct sales

5. Publishing wide

6. ACCESS Marketing

7. Influencer Marketing

8. Author collaboration

9. Selective rights licensing

10. Author Special Sales

III. Self-Publishing 3.0 in practice

11. Developing A Fan Base

12. Business Models for Authors

13. Author empowerment

THE END

Review Request

Self-Publishing News & Advice

Acknowledgments

About ALLi

Notes

Introduction

About this book

About the Alliance of Independent Authors

Writing, Publishing, and Business Craft

Our organisation’s work is fourfold:

ALLi advises, providing best-practice information and education through a Self-Publishing Advice Centerthat offers a daily blog, weekly livestreams and podcasts, and a bookstore of self-publishing guidebooks and a quarterly member magazine.ALLi monitors the self-publishing sector through a watchdog desk, alerting authors to bad actors and predatory players and running an approved partner program.ALLi campaigns for the advancement of indie authors in the publishing and literary sectors globally (bookstores, libraries, literary events, prizes, grants, awards, and other author organizations), encouraging the provision of publishing and business skills for authors, speaking out against iniquities, and furthering the indie author cause wherever possible.ALLi empowers independent authors through a wide variety of member tools and resources including author forums, contract advice, sample agreements, contacts and networking, literary agency representation, and a member care desk.

Whether you are just starting out or are already an experienced publisher of your own work, ALLi aims to support you every step of the way.

Each individual self-publisher is part of a great contemporary flowering of creative expression in the literary arts. When an author, a group, or a company joins ALLi, they are not just joining an organization but a movement. A chaotic, kaleidoscopic, liberating, exciting, and self-organizing movement that is transforming authorship and publishing from the grassroots up.

If you’re an author or self-publishing service and you haven’t yet signed up, we’d love to have you join our alliance. Find out more at:

AllianceIndependentAuthors.org

What is Self-Publishing 3.0?

This book is all about today’s self-publishing authors. Their writing and publishing ambitions. How they make their books. How they reach their readers. How they build income and influence though creative enterprise. It is based on the work of the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi) and the experience of that association’s members, team and advisors—including my own.

I am an indie author and poet and in 2012 my co-director (and husband) Philip Lynch and I launched ALLi at the London Book Fair. It quickly grew to be a large global organization, with thousands of members all over the world.

The name ALLi is pronounced “ally” (al-eye), as that’s what the association aims to be: the self-publisher’s ally. Members are like the three musketeers in Dumas’s eponymous novel: each individual (“i”) working for the larger ALL. The experience of ALLi’s members and advisors is woven into everything our organization does and everything you’ll read in this book. Thanks are due to each and all.

When ALLi launched, we were not aware that we were an outgrowth of a publishing era, now called Self-Publishing 2.0, launched by e-book technology. Our experience in the intervening years enabled us to see where the self-publishing movement fitted into publishing history and what that meant for authors who (want to) publish their own work. You.

By the time Self-Publishing 3.0 was dawning, we could see clearly what was going on and what it meant for authors and publishers of all sizes.

So Self-Publishing 3.0 is both a concept and a publishing era defined by that concept. And it is also an ALLi campaign (see #selfpub3.0 on Twitter) that aims to support and accelerate any trends emerging in this era that are advantageous to authors.

The Self-Publishing 3.0 concept is that any author (with the requisite writing and publishing skills) now has the means to establish a self-directed, digital business that can be successful, sustainable, and scalable.

The Self-Publishing 3.0 era, the era of author enterprise, began around 2018. In this era, writers are moving beyond exclusively signing all rights to a single third-party publisher, or exclusively self-publishing with one platform or service, into true creative and commercial independence.

The Alliance of Independent Author’s Self-Publishing 3.0 campaign works with authors, readers, literary organizations, and creative industries to support independent authors in acquiring the three necessary skills: writing, publishing, and creative business.

The aims of the campaign are:

To alert authors to the full implications of digital publishing and creative business—which go way beyond the much-discussed “choice” between self-publishing versus an exclusive contract with an individual trade publisher.To encourage independent authors to publish widely in as many formats, platforms, and territories as possible, while selling directly to readers and collaborating with other authors.To advise author representative associations and agencies, creative industry bodies, and literacy and cultural organizations across seven key territories (Australia and New Zealand, Canada, EU, South Africa, the UK, and the USA) on the needs of independent authors.To educate readers on how best to connect with and support independent authors and their books.

Self-Publishing 3.0 requires a major attitudinal and behavorial shift for authors, and for other players in the publishing ecosystem who traditionally view writers as content providers to third-party publishers.

The impact of Self-publishing 3.0 will be defined by the number of authors who take up the opportunity to develop the requisite publishing and business skills and the quality of their work.

This short book outlines why Self-Publishing 3.0 is important for authors and how to take part in this movement that is enabling writers to earn a living from writing and publishing books.

A note about pronouns

The singular “they”

Like all ALLi guides, this book uses they and their as singular pronouns, rather than he and him or she and her, a style choice based on common spoken usage, inclusivity, lexical elegance, and long literary pedigree (good enough for Shakespeare and Jane Austen, to name but two).

ALLi supports the movement to give this pronoun usage contemporary authority. You can read more about that movement and its history at: ornaross.com/singular-they

Part I

Author Income & Independence

Chapter 1

The Enterprising Author

Every era has seen entrepreneurial authors attracted to the process of publishing and authors’ business skills and acumen have been expressed in a variety of ways across centuries. To name but three: Jane Austen’s father offering to pay a publishing house to issue the book that would become Pride and Prejudice in the 18th century; Charles Dickens making the equivalent of millions in today’s money from his stage shows, repurposed content, and multiple streams of income in the 19th century; Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s setting up Hogarth Press in the 20th century to publish their own works and those of their friends. For the majority of authors in the age of the printing press, however, the investment of time and money needed to publish effectively was a deterrent.

Then digital publishing technology arrived, in the early 21st century, , changing everything for authors.

Digital publishing does a number of important things that are very good for authors interested in self-publishing. It does away with “out-of-print,” making books continually available in three formats: e-books, audiobooks, and POD (print-on-demand). It provides a global readership instead of confining publication to specific territories. It takes away the necessity for intermediaries like agents, publishers, wholesalers, and distributors.

Most wonderful of all, it gives readers a point-of-purchase at the very moment they first hear about a book that is of interest.

Of course technology in itself is not enough. Publishing success today depends, as it always has, on good writing and good business skills. Writers can write for their own pleasure, but publishers must please the paying public and turn a profit. This doesn’t change when writer and publisher are one.

What has changed is the variety of options available. Today, trade publishing is just one way to get a manuscript into print. Bookstore distribution is just one way to reach readers. Amazon KDP is just one way to self-publish.

Variety and choice create their own challenges, but as Self-Publishing 3.0 unfolds, authors are working within a more open, equal, and merit-based publishing system than ever before.

Traditionally, the few publishing slots available to authors meant that the majority of aspiring authors were offered scant opportunity.

While individuals working in publishing are caring booklovers who value and honor authors, as we’ll see in Chapter 3, the system itself is indifferent, even harsh to most writers. Disrespectful language like “slush pile” is used to describe manuscripts sent in by authors. Contracts license a wide sweep of rights without any clear plan to exploit them. Signed authors are given only token input into key decisions about cover design, positioning, and placement of their books in the marketplace. A long and convoluted supply chain sees authors paid last and given the smallest percentage of everybody involved. Income and royalty statements are all but unreadable.

The inequality baked into traditional publishing arrangements has been revealed by Rebecca Giblin and Joshua Yuvaraj’s exploratory study of publishing contracts.1