After months or years of writing and rewriting, editing and revising, reworking and polishing, you’ve finally done it—you’ve completed your novel! You have your manuscript in hand, substantial in heft, ready for the next step. Now what? What is an author to do with a completed novel manuscript? These are the pros and cons I can think of. The Options Independent (or “Self-“) Publishing Pros I keep my rights....
Publishing is undergoing disruption. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen introduced the world to his analysis of technological changes in his seminal “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” where be coined the word (and idea) of “disruption.” Long standing firms (incumbents) suddenly lose the power and dominance to disruptors who enter the market either at the low end, or in places that the incumbent does not serve; then the disruptor gets a toe-hold, and starts to move up the food chain where the profits are better....
Few serious writers who self-publish their books spend any more than a book or two before realising they have to farm out these critical aspects to external professionals. There are two problems I have with this statement: The grand generalization he makes about what “serious writers” do (and by extension if you don’t do these things, you’re obviously not serious) are right up there with the self-appointed pundits he satirizes in this article....
Sales forecasting In business, the practice of sales forecasting is an essential component of management. At its most basic level, the math is quite simple: ( gross size of the deal – costs to execute ) * odds of getting the deal = weighted value of the prospective deal In traditional publishing, there are some long odds to consider. Odds of getting an agent. Carly Watters says that the odds she will accept your manuscript is 1/2000, or 0....
This data provided one piece of a complex puzzle. The rest of the puzzle hit my inbox with a mighty thud last week. I received an email from an author with advanced coding skills who had created a software program that can crawl online bestseller lists and grab mountains of data. All of this data is public—it’s online for anyone to see—but until now it’s been extremely difficult to gather, aggregate, and organize....