Publishing has undergone a massive shift in the last few decades and it’s not always been good. In fact getting your work out has never been easier and yet getting it read is virtually impossible.

That’s not at all cryptic, the publishing industry at one time was the home of the elite. Writers were held in high regard as the interlectual superiors of modern man. If you had a book published you revered to have dome something remarkable and it was all because of your education and class. Working class people rarely wrote books that were published and so therefore if you had the interlect to write anything more than a school essay, you were considered special.

The publishing houses kept their gates guarded at all times and only the absolute best work was even considered and getting a book deal was akin to being Sissyphus, having to jump through all the hoops to submit your work only for it to be tossed in the bin months after submitting it.

Then came self publication. Now anyone could publish a book, in effect the gates had been hurled open for everyone regardless of talent and the outcome was that some very good work got swamped in all the dross that came with it. The remaining publishing houses saw their returns start to dwindle and where once they would market the hell out of the books they produced now left some of the work to the author. This was helped by the advent of social media. Publishers could cut back on their marketing budget by having authors handle the majority of the work themselves.

For an author with no experience in marketing this is a nightmare scenario. On the one hand you have this book that the publisher claims to have all this faith in, and yet they also claim not to have the budget to market it fully but they will gladly support any effort the author comes up with. Now to me that is a loss making strategy. To have an author contracted to you have their time divided from writing into the several layers of marketing in my mind is not showing faith in their work. To me it is showing they have the opposite. Why have an asset working for you work on something that is not producing content for them to sell. One argument is that while marketing the books the author is helping to produce revenue, but if they had someone already doing that the author could concentrate on writing another book and therefore keep the revenue flowing at a better pace.

The fact is probably that as times get hard and money gets tight, no one wants to take a chance anymore. No one wants to gamble on something that might pay off because its easier to paly it safe. There are no guarantees with books, you simply cannot force someone to like a book so I suppose I can’t blame the publishers for taking this stance. It is frustrating though as an author because all I want to do is write.