People are very frightened in publishing at the moment. Nobody knows what sells. More so now because the market's changing so fundamentally because of Kindle and electronic publishing. It's a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world.
Trees are being saved because of the Kindle.
Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs by elevators.
In my view, the ebook world for both established and new authors is a terrific new and exciting format. It is a format that will bring forth many new writers to publishing.
Books can accommodate the proximity of computers but it doesn't seem to work the other way around. Computers now literally drive out books from the place that should, by definition, be books' own home: the library.
If Google Books is successful, others will follow.
The original publication of 'The DaVinci Code' preceded the e-book era.
Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.
Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.
Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.
It's been more than a decade since I put that self-published novel, 'Lip Service', up on a website. Since then, many hundreds of authors have gone from self-published to traditionally published.
E-books present the greatest opportunity readers have ever had to find each other. It's a chance for stories written for paper to find new life and a chance for new stories to appear, freed from the constraints of paper publishing.
There's almost no author alive who isn't weathering the tumultuous changes in the publishing industry.
The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.
Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking come to mind immediately as authors who managed to build a successful following without the initial support of a large publisher.
'The Expats' would not exist without e-books.
