Working in software, not hardware

I came across this comment in the British Science Fiction Association's Winter 2013 edition of their magazine Focus.  William King makes the point that, until recently, publishing was about producing hardware.  Books were printed, shipped off to booksellers, put on the shelves for an impossibly short length of time, then remaindered or pulped.

He makes the point that indie publishing is more like creating software.  The file of the book sits on a server somewhere until somebody buys it, when it is either sent as a digital file to an e-reader, or a print-on-demand paperback is produced.  This means that you can fix typos, and if you get negative feedback about your cover, you can change that too.  

But the most important point he makes is that this is now a long game.  We don't need to spend a fortune on one push of advertising the week the book is released like the major publishers do.   They have do that to lure buyers into the bookshop and buy the book before it's pulled from the shelves.  But indie publishing is littered with stories of the long tail, or books that had been out there for two or three years before they got noticed and sales began to take off.  

As writers that gives us much more power, and allows us to relax a little. Our book isn't going to disappear if it doesn't sell well in its first month.  It's not going to go out of print.  It can find its readers slowly, adding more as each new book is released by the author.  Mark Coker, the Smashwords guru, thinks one of the best ways to build awareness of you as a writer is to write a second book... and a third one, and a fourth one.

It also means we can write what we love.  I've always had a struggle with this in SF.  I don't write twisty plots with gimmicky writing.  I write straightforward stories that generally proceed in an orderly fashion from A to B.  Many times I've felt my stories are too simple, not glossy enough from the genre.  Now I'm just putting my work out there in the form I want it in.  I'm writing what I love in the way I like.

Time will tell if I build a large following for my work, but at least with Panthera : Death Spiral I have a book I'm proud of out there for people to discover.  And Panthera : Death Song will be joining it shortly, to prove that I'm not a one-book author.  And towards the end of the year the third book Panthera : Death Plain will join them.  And then I plan to take a break from those characters and do something completely different.  I wouldn't have that freedom if I was traditionally published, I'd be being pressured to produce another series book.

Working in software has many advantages.  I suspect that, in the not too distant future, traditional publishers will have to alter their business models to something more like indie publishing in order to survive.