Maybe Seth Godin is right about publishing

My first reaction when I saw that Seth Godin was forgoing a publisher to develop, market and publish his own books was this: That's fine for Seth Godin. He's a well-known, best-selling author. He has been talking about building tribes, groups of passionate followers for years. Now he's just eating his own dog food, as they say, but what about the rest of us, the unwashed masses without the audience of Seth Godin? Could it work for us too? You never know.

Godin's plan

Godin believes he has the power of his audience and he doesn't need the publisher to do what he's capable of doing on his own. It's a tempting proposition. Cut out the middle man and take all of the profits, but is it that simple?

Not necessarily. The publisher can provide valuable services to an author in terms of development, editing and especially marketing and distribution; but a recent thread to a list of technology writers I belong to--which includes many folks who are published authors--suggested that if you're not a best selling author like Seth Godin, the publisher gives you little support, no matter how well received your book may be. If that's true, and I have no reason to believe it isn't, then an author might be tempted to build an audience of passionate followers using social networking tools, and go it alone. If the publisher's not helping anyway, what's the point?

Might we be seeing the future here?

Could it be that Godin has stumbled upon something profound here? Self publishing is nothing new, of course. It's been going on for years and authors have had various degrees of success, but eBook publishing puts that reality even closer to the average author. If you don't have to worry about print and distribution channels, you take a lot of the publisher's strengths out of the equation and it becomes an easier decision to make.

What's more, with the growing popularity of devices like the iPad, Kindle and others capable of reading eBooks, it provides an easy sales channel for potential authors. The rest, as they say, is up to the author. Although, it's easy to dismiss a plan like this because Godin is so popular, it could be that it doesn't matter how popular he is.

Much like musicians who have had to find ways to go it alone without record companies--and many have found they have done quite well without that support--authors might have to go the same way. In recent years publishers seem to have forsaken development and support of new writers, even ignoring their middle tier writers, to concentrate their resources on their best sellers.

That was their prerogative, but publishers shouldn't be shocked when that approach comes back to bite them. If Godin has his way by going his own way, don't be surprised to see many others follow. If this approach caught on, it could leave the publishing industry in dire straights wondering what went wrong with its business model when, in fact, they'll have nobody to blame but themselves. - Ron