Traditional Publishing vs Indy, or Self Publishing

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah, lots of readers in this age of widely available books are waiting for the series to finish. But, lots of people don't. Part of this is that a lot of authors are self-publishing book one, not seeing sales or whatever, and quit. I heard from a lot of readers concerned about this.

 

[Mad Swede]

Yeah, I think the key is theft vs successful theft, as Prince of Spires says. Cheats and scum exist everywhere, and in the case of Amazon, I think it's the KU page reads that feed the cheats.

Movie rights are relatively easy to sell compared to the movie actually getting made. And, it isn't easy to get movie rights sold. Relativity sucks, heh heh.

Plagiarising a story, to the point of stealing it word for word, isn't a new thing and it has never been confined to self-published books on Amazon. The great Gardner Fox (he who created The Flash, Hawkman and Sandman, amongst others) had this happen to him when someone used the pseudonym James Harvey to copy/steal/plagiarise Fox's book Escape Across The Cosmos and publish it as Titans across The Universe and (under yet another name) as Star Chase. The advantage of having a publisher is that they usually have a keen eyed legal department to take of things like this for you.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Nothing new under the sun when it comes to frauds and thieves, but way easier to do in bulk and feed a mass of fraudulent page reads for cash, heh heh. Unless pubs have a collection of data from all books, this would be very difficult to catch with the sheer mass of books getting published. Amazon COULD achieve such a thing, but it would still probably be resource-intensive.

Plagiarising a story, to the point of stealing it word for word, isn't a new thing and it has never been confined to self-published books on Amazon. The great Gardner Fox (he who created The Flash, Hawkman and Sandman, amongst others) had this happen to him when someone used the pseudonym James Harvey to copy/steal/plagiarise Fox's book Escape Across The Cosmos and publish it as Titans across The Universe and (under yet another name) as Star Chase. The advantage of having a publisher is that they usually have a keen eyed legal department to take of things like this for you.

 

[Mad Swede]

Nothing new under the sun when it comes to frauds and thieves, but way easier to do in bulk and feed a mass of fraudulent page reads for cash, heh heh. Unless pubs have a collection of data from all books, this would be very difficult to catch with the sheer mass of books getting published. Amazon COULD achieve such a thing, but it would still probably be resource-intensive.

That wasn't my point. One of the services a good publisher provides in return for their cut is dealing with problems like this. The legal department will go after the pirates once they know about the problem, and that ensures that the stolen work doesn't stay on Amazon or in any book store. I'm lucky, it hasn't happened to me, but my editor tells me that the lawyers my publishers use can be fairly nasty when it comes to dealing with things like this.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

No doubt, something I kind of implied earlier. It would be potentially pricey to go after cheats on your own.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I do find it kind of darkly humorous that a Mormon Romance series was ripped-off and turned into something closer to erotica... Yikes! I'd rather have people steal my book verbatim, heh heh.

I guess the best defense might be to advertise and promote the crap out of your book; the more readers you have, the more likely it is one of them will find the copyright infringement. And Amazon does reimburse in cases of proven copyright infringement, although I'm sure that's a hassle.

I can see why romance would be the easiest target of this sort of thing... they all have the same plot anyhow! Ba-dum-dum-ching! Ooooh, I couldn't resist. I'm going to writer hell for that one. Who am I kidding, I've been on that highway for a long time.

EDIT: The theft that makes the most sense to me (so to speak) would be people grabbing OOP trad books and republishing them as their own. That seems a right down ripe place for fraud. Dead, OOP authors, a quick reskin, and bam...

 

[pmmg]

I do find it kind of darkly humorous that a Mormon Romance series was ripped-off and turned into something closer to erotica... Yikes! I'd rather have people steal my book verbatim, heh heh.

Just need to flesh out the story a little more.

well. Chemo infusion has wiped out an entire arm for me. Maybe out of the saddle for a week or so.

 

[ThinkerX]

Well...I guess it's good thing I've written all seven of the books in the first series. The first four are 'almost ready to go' - but the last three need rewrites. Rewrite for book seven might take most of a year. Plan is to release the first four this year, spaced six or eight weeks apart, then hopefully be far enough along with the rewrites to continue that next year. With the second series, I have two that are 'close to go' (need to look them over and make sure) - but the last needs written from scratch.

 

[Ned Marcus]

I guess it's good thing I've written all seven of the books in the first series.

I don't know how you have the patience to write seven books before releasing them! I'm not sure I could do that.

 

[ThinkerX]

I don't know how you have the patience to write seven books before releasing them! I'm not sure I could do that.

Well...originally it was supposed to be four novellas - and the first drafts of those tales do check in at under 40,000 words. They grew from there, but even so, the first three still don't hit 65,000 words, owing to the way their structured - and part of that came from folding previously written short stories into the text. Partway through the rough draft of book four, I realized there had to be a progression from there, which led to book five, which naturally fed into book six. Right up until I finished the first rewrite of book six, I thought I could wrap things up with a long epilogue - 20-30,000 words. Ten thousand words in it dawned on me that wasn't going to happen. Been a while since I added it up, but book seven checks in at well over 100,000 words - before the rewrite.

The other reason was consistency. I didn't want to write myself into a corner by having a pivotal event or custom or a prominent character turn up that wasn't at least mentioned in prior books. Spent a lot of time going back to earlier books and tacking in stuff like that - a nasty but legit candidate for the imperial throne, 'kick the ball' - aka 'soccer' or close to it, and a bunch of other stuff. Most recently, I decided that werewolves could exist, and threw in a few mentions of those creatures here and there.

 

[pmmg]

Saw this today, give a good list of places I did not even know where out there. I've no experience with any, but maybe some do. Mileage may vary.

10 best self publishing Companies.

 

[ThinkerX]

Well, 'Draft2Digital' did send me an email saying their 'Print Beta' deal was open for business (apparently for upwards of half a year). They did mention their 'Cover Creator' in that email release.

In another email, D2D informed me that Amazon no longer supports MOBI and is switching to EPUB.

That said, as far as the video goes, D2D seemed to have far fewer issues than most of the others.

 

[Ned Marcus]

I use 7 of the 10. I've had more sales on Google Play recently. And I've had fairly good results with Kobo.

They offer some similar and some very different services. It depends what you need.