According to this article in The New York Times:
Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, said publishers now trawl for new material by looking at reader comments about self-published books sold online. Self-publishing, she said, is “no longer a dirty word.”
The movement of indie publishing, following music and film, is starting to shed a lot of the stigma that has been attached for so long. Of course, it’s still an uphill struggle, and will continue to be.
“For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,” said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books. “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”
And she’s dead right. But, the fact that the public and the big publishers are starting to recognise that there is some quality out there in the indie publishing world is very heartening news. It’s up to us to make sure that those standards are consistently improved upon and that indie authorship continues to stride ahead.
(Hat tip to April Hamilton for spotting the article – read the whole thing, as it’s quite interesting.)
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