Since we're not discussing law, you're saying that either my point is worthy of discussion, or that there's no point in either of us having an opinion on the matter because ... it's impractical or academic...?

-there ARE *SOME* good unsigned bands. the rest should be put in a burlap sack and drown like kittens
-the self-publishing world is to writing what myspace is to panic at the disco
-bob dylan, while legendary, is highly over-rated
-people are much too hard on chuck palahniuk
-piracy isnt as bad for music as itunes
-kurt vonnegut is killgore trout and killgore trout is kurt vonnegut
-and my last point, which everyone should know......

distribution is king. if you're selling a book for a dollar and you make thirty-three cents a unit (the kindle conversation from a week ago, or whatever uses this number) and you sell a thousand books, because you're working on the avon, kid selling candy in grade school model.... you make.... 330 bucks, a conceivable outcome. adversely, if you sell that same book to a publisher who has distribution, and you make twenty-five cents a book, but you move 10,000 books because you have two copies in 5,000 stores (which is again, conceivable) your number jumps to 2,500 bucks. BUT, and this is where the fun starts, if those sell, the bookstores buy two more. if your book is good, and it gets a good review, or becomes a best seller, they might order two hundred more, and it might go to more bookstores and even supermarkets.

people who buy your self-published-vanity-book for kindle wont be buying more copies. theres no such thing as residual sales. especially if no one buys it. it wont be reissued in trade paper, you wont be able to go on tour and sell it to people who want your name in it. and chances are, no one will see it and think it ought to be a movie.

Not bad, Chuck, but a few caveats and counterpoints to consider:

-Distribution isn't complete until the finished product is in the buyer's possession. A truck that delivers two copies of your book to my bookstore doesn't complete the cycle. If those copies don't sell, they get returned and the publisher eats most of the costs instead of the store. Remaindered books don't bring author royalties. A book that was priced at $19.95 in trade paperback that you find on a bargain table with a big red dot and you buy it because it's now only four bucks is a loss for everybody involved in producing and selling it. But the bookstore isn't the sucker. They didn't pay even the full wholesale price and then take their lumps. The publisher absorbs the major blow. And the bookstore continues to trust what the publisher sends because it's arranged that way. Books that don't sell--at a certain point, the bookstore just gets to send them back. Titles that aren't selling often get liquidated from warehouses and channeled through the half-price places via the remaindering process before they've even taken up shelf space in a first-run store.

-When your first book is a commercial loss for the publisher, they typically drop you (like getting dropped from a record label) and no one in traditional publishing wants to publish your second book.

-It most likely took you years of developing your skills, a fantastic amount of persistence, time and money spent pimping your work to agents and making connections, and no less than a gallon of luck--to the average person's yearly allotment of a single drop--to get your novel traditionally published to begin with. When you'd cleared all those hurdles, you assumed you could finally put your feet up for a minute or two, at least leave the marketing plan to the people your publisher hires to be experts on that. But you were wrong. If you want to make sure that your traditionally published book earns enough to exceed your advance, earns enough to get reissued someday, earns enough that your second book will even get made, then you'd better be prepared to go on every radio show that will have you, to speak at YMCAs, to arrange your own appearances, to hire a PR firm that's better than your publisher's PR department, if possible. Some of these last points are more relevant for the non-fiction author who needs to build and reinforce a certain platform and inject him or herself into public consciousness as a subject-matter expert. But the core idea of how responsible you are for your own career largely applies to novelists, as well.

-If you sit around once the publishing deal is done, expecting your traditional publisher to do all the rest, you're sunk.

-Even if the publisher's lousy marketing plan, or the lack of real money they put into it, or the eclipse created by the latest Twilight series damaged your sales, they'll still drop you like a hot rock when your book doesn't bring the numbers.

-In comparison with a digital download, a traditionally published paper book must sell in fantastically greater numbers to be commercially viable. And as mentioned, distribution (just getting it into stores) doesn't do the selling. How good was the marketing plan? How much thought did the publisher give to the release date? How good was the cover art you probably didn't even get approval rights on?

-Not everyone selling self-published books is working on the Avon/ kid-selling-candy-in-grade-school model, where great aunts and next door neighbors and old friends from high school are the only people who will buy your shit.

-There are multiple self-published authors these days doing work that's meaningful both to themselves and to a large enough audience base that the author regularly earns as much as $30,000 per month.

-When you self-publish, you exercise total creative control. You can decide, for example, exactly what your cover should be and hire the artist who can do it. You can receive multiple bids and proof and reject any attempt that doesn't capture or exceed your initial vision. Final approval always comes back to you, because you're the publisher. Traditionally published authors have nothing close to this much creative control.

-Phrases like: "your self-published-vanity-book for kindle" are loaded with bias. It implies that all self-published authors have a moral defect that drives their efforts and taints their work.

-The term "Vanity Publishing" is best reserved to designate businesses that pose as traditional publishers while actually preying upon hopeful and unsuspecting amateurs; for example, there's a well-known poetry site that runs a perpetual contest where everybody is a winner. If you submit something, you're in. They'll send you a congratulatory letter and a proof to make any last minute emendations. Everything they say to you will communicate that your work has been selected on the basis of quality. But they accept absolutely every poem they receive. With or without corrections, all you have to do is approve the proof and your poem will appear in small print along with hundreds of others in a cheesy, over-sized volume of poorly edited work that will never appear in a bookstore and probably doesn't even get an ISBN number. The total market for these books are the people strung along and published in them. Fools willing to shell out 40 bucks or more because they've been severely misled regarding the selections process, the publisher's business model, and the attendant prestige. THAT is vanity publishing.

-Legitimate self-publishing is harder in some ways than traditional publishing. Lack of a big team, a sizable marketing budget, a legal department, established distribution channels, etc., force the self-published author to get creative in new ways. But it's such a complex and demanding task that anyone who approaches it with integrity deserves a measure of respect. And the high integrity self-published author who succeeds and succeeds at an impressive scale, well, that person has accomplished something that requires not only talent, but ingenuity and gumption. It might be good if the argument didn't lose sight of that. The apparent ease of self-publishing to Kindle grants easier access, for sure, but only the writers who respect their readers and build a loyal following will succeed at an impressive scale and for the long term.

-

Moot is such a cool word.

Sounds like really itchy sweater material.

Most people use it to mean:

▸ no longer important, because a particular situation has changed or no longer exists.

For example, we could argue all day and all night which company made the best buggy whip in 1845, but how do we verify it and even more importantly--who the hell cares? It's something of little relevance that we could argue about forever.

Hopefully, as so many writers congregate around this site, the topics of this debate are timely and relevant and a long way from the most common meaning of "moot."

As introduced in this discussion, the gist of what Big S was saying suggests that he more precisely wanted to accuse Tuffy of a faulty comparison, rather than a moot point.

distribution is king. if you're selling a book for a dollar and you make thirty-three cents a unit (the kindle conversation from a week ago, or whatever uses this number) and you sell a thousand books, because you're working on the avon, kid selling candy in grade school model.... you make.... 330 bucks, a conceivable outcome. adversely, if you sell that same book to a publisher who has distribution, and you make twenty-five cents a book, but you move 10,000 books because you have two copies in 5,000 stores (which is again, conceivable) your number jumps to 2,500 bucks. BUT, and this is where the fun starts, if those sell, the bookstores buy two more. if your book is good, and it gets a good review, or becomes a best seller, they might order two hundred more, and it might go to more bookstores and even supermarkets.

That is certainly some funny math with an awful lot of 'what if' variables.

You also might want to add into your equation that in many cases, word of mouth does you little good because the person who bought your book passed it off to a friend. You're also assuming that digital sales can't be equal to or greater than traditional sales. Something that, once again, the music industry has already proven can happen.

Alternately, you're missing out on pricing models that you simply can't do with 'real' book sales. For instance, the App-store model. Where a new app will often be released at a low cost like 99 cents, or even free. Then, after it gets some steam behind it, they raise the price to it's normal cost. Which might still be low, like $1.99. And guess what? You are instantly making twice as much profit.

Wow. Fuckin' ouch! I feel embarrassed for that woman.

It just occurred to me that this could be a pretty cool way to publish zines. Or at least a new format of a zine.

Yeah, I've already sort of been thinking about that, Kirk. I've had a bit of a pipe-dream for a while now: I'd love to start a pulpy noir style zine. Oldschool style. Illustrations and serialized novels etc. It's just one of those things that I really want to do, but know it isn't the right thing for me to start right now. Anyway, the whole e-book thing makes it a hell of a lot more possible. Maybe you could have monthly e-book zines and an annual print anthology. Anyway, pipe-dream.

There are a select few magazines and newspapers available through kindle and nook.

New York Times is one of them. It auto downloads the current issues. I've never subscribed to a magazine or paper this way, so I can't tell you more than that.

Yeah, really, you could also set up an app (not that I have any idea how one would go about that). The possibilities in this Newly developing book world are endless. It's time to start doing what we do best--using our imaginations. I'm really excited about the future of the book industry.

After all this takes off and it becomes the norm - then somebody can invent a physical version of the digital one. A book where you can actually... manually turn the page! And smell the ink! It's gonna be crazy!

I can't believe you guys are trying to tell me what i meant by 'moot'.

Don't let it get to you. It's a moot point by now, anyways.

Yeah, there's a few lit mags that already have Kindle versions of their product. Two that I've been reading digitally are Electric Literature and Crime Factory. If you're into crime and noir, and have a Kindle, I suggest you pick up Crime Factory. The guy that runs it, Cam, is a fellow Aussie. And it's only a buck for the electronic editions.

Article regarding e-book sales vs. print: http://cnnmoney.mobi/primary/_XtVtiF-itzSgbvdcP

KHANUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

khanu please stop spamming khanu? well khanu!?