Publishing 3.0
Are you ready for the future of publishing?
In the beginning there was the Word. Then there was Dickens, then there was Colleen Hoover. And now there’s you.
Okay, so it’s not quite that simple, but there’s no question that book publishing has gone through huge upheavals over the past decade – and the changes keep coming. Substack is growing, BookTok is currently king, but AI is knocking at the gate, threatening to turn everything on its head once again.
Not so long ago, there was only one way to get your book out into the world: get an agent, get a book deal, the end.
Self-publishing got rid of the gatekeepers. You didn’t have to get the nod from an agent or publisher to get your book out there - just a professionally polished manuscript, a little bit of marketing spend and some entrepreneurial savvy.
Publishing 2.0 - harnassing the power of the internet - arrived in 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle and that early wave of self-published authors like Hugh Howey, Bella Andre, Marie Force made a fortune by going it alone.
The indie-publishing revolution allowed a lot of people to make a lot of money by having a new mind-set - that of the creative entrepreneur.
But the downside of the success of indie-publishing is the sheer volume of books out there now. No-one really knows how big the book market is - because the size of the indie-market is difficult to quantify (indie-books don’t have to have ISBN numbers - the method used to track book sales across the industry.)
It’s made discoverability even harder and unless you have a cracking marketing plan or go viral on Tik Tok how can a new author - or even an established one get noticed?
In the dawn of Publishing 3.0 we have to shift our thinking again. Here’s what I think we must do to have a successful writing career in the 2020’s and beyond.