Living room publishing

I write a lot about DIY author tips on my other blog, but the idea of creating a publishing house and managing it from home is happening in a big way. This can mean anything from learning how to create your own ebooko from your living room to creating your own publishing company as an LLC.

So, what does this mean for publishing as an industry?

50 years ago there were a handfull of big publishers in New York City, and if you wanted to get published, you needed to write something that they liked and thought they could market. These days, all you need is a computer and a Microsoft Word install and you're good to go.

To me, this means we're going to continue to get a whole lot more crap for a while.

We are in the midst of a deluge of everyone who wanted to publish a book for the past 50 years but was shunned by New York publishing those books. We have online marketers going crazy with new books about how to use, you guessed it, online marketing tools. Everyone who ever wanted to write a book knows that he or she can publish it themselves. Those who are truly motivated are taking advantage.

But things stabalize. This pace can't go on forever.

For that reason, it also means that we will end up better off!

We will figure out what makes money, what opportunities pan out to be real opportunities and which ones are snake oil, and whether there is a viable platform for new authors to climb on rather than the old agent-publisher system. 

And we will have a route for people who are motivated and talented to build themselves up on their own, in full public view, and have a community follow and support them from early on to the end of their career. It could mean following a best-selling author who starts out as a teenager and publishes all the way until she or he turns 82. That would be amazing.

What do you think? Is it a good or a bad thing that we can all be our own publishing company?

Image source: striatic via flickr