MediaFuse

Consider the metamorphosis of self-publishing. For decades it was dismissed as the desperate refuge of authors rejected by publishing houses, wannabes who paid a fee to a musty vanity press that would dutifully typeset their words and transform them into a few boxes of books that the “writers” could hand out to their friends. Today, thanks to ebooks and Amazon, self-publishing is a global phenomenon—an independent route intentionally chosen by more and more authors—that has spawned not only mega-bestsellers like Fifty Shades of Grey, but also hits in other realms, such as the movie version of The Martian. Ebook self-publishing has become a $1 billion industry.

A burgeoning ecosystem of supporting services has sprung up to serve independent authors. There are companies that handle one step—or all of them—along the way: editing, marketing, design, distribution, and publicity. Increasingly, an array of digital operations has popped up to execute the oxymoronic process of publishing a self-published book. There are now digital publishers, “hybrid” publishers, “assisted self-publishers,” and even literary agencies acting as publishers. Call it the Kindle effect. Amazon opened the floodgates in 2007, the same year it released its first e-reader, when it launched Kindle Direct Publishing, allowing anyone to upload, publish, and sell his own ebook for free. | The Kindle Effect

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