A Haven for Independant Authors

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Dear fellow writers,

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In the world of publishing, we are going through rather strange times.

One might wonder: “Nowadays, what is the real role of a traditional publishing house?”

Indeed, each of our experiences as writers seems to lead us to a deeper level of frustration.

In the “old days”, the roles of author and publisher were clearly defined: the author wrote — because that was their job; the publisher evaluated, published (or rejected!), printed, distributed, and handled marketing — which back then was called “propaganda.” And finally, the author received their meager royalties — which sort of made sense, since the publisher bore all the financial risks, mainly due to maintaining large inventories of printed books, plus advertising and distribution costs.

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But that was before the digital age. Now everything has changed!

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Not only are publishing houses no longer required to print astronomical quantities of books or maintain large inventories — thanks to modern digital printing, which can economically produce books one at a time, as demonstrated by Amazon’s POD (Print On Demand) system — but they also demand that we, the authors, take charge of marketing (social media, email campaigns, ads), to the point that a manuscript submission now requires the author to provide a marketing plan he/she must commit to execution. In other words, publishers are no longer doing their job! Except, rarely, when they stumble upon a golden goose... As for royalties, they haven’t increased one bit. And good luck if your book’s topic doesn’t target a popular demographic!

(cont.)