After various phone conversations this week and too many IMs to count, I reevaluated plans for the future. I’m remaining loyal to the publishers who’ve been loyal to me. Loyalty, as many of you would probably agree, works both ways. Plus, I want to continue sending manuscripts to publishers who seem to like my work, show their appreciation by paying their royalties when they are due, and don’t feel the need to constantly compare my work to the work of others. I’m me. I’m not going to change what I do overnight because it’s probably not a good idea after all these years.
With the aforementioned, I have been self-publishing some titles on my own and Destiny Blaine Productions will continue to release a few books at a turtle’s pace. Why? Well, some of my books do not meet publisher guidelines and I’m not about to spend a lot of time changing previously published work. It isn’t fair to my publishers because they’d still receive a previously published title. If a backlist title won’t be viewed as controversial or easily ‘fits’ somewhere, I’ll probably submit the manuscript to one of the listed current publishers, unless it’s been on the market for a long time.
At this time, Destiny Blaine Productions is only set up to handle my backlist titles, but we do have a couple of new titles coming soon. That said, do I plan to jump ship and be completely independent? Absolutely not.
Fact is, I’m concerned about our industry and last week, the conversations about the state of the book business and the reason for censorship, lower sales, and other industry changes seem to fall upon the heads of the indie authors so yes, I felt the need to explain my thoughts on why I published and will continue to publish some of my own work.
Anyway, at the risk of sounding off like a rambling woman this morning (sidebar—I’m in a hurry but really want to put this topic out on the table), I’ll close now and ask you for your opinions. Give it to us straight and I’ll come back in a few days and respond to all, if we have any comments.
Let us know the following:
How do you view the state of the writing industry?
What role, if any, did publishers play?
What role, if any, did independent, self-published authors play?
What role, if any, did Amazon or any third party bookseller play?
If you think the book industry is in trouble, what can be done to fix it?
If you think the book industry is fine, how do we keep it the way it is?
Any other comments?
Hope to hear from you!
Destiny
