Self-publishing takes off for aspiring bestseller writers

SELF-PUBLISHING can sound like an easy step to bestsellerdom. American author Hugh Howey is the latest to fly from obscurity to fame with his post-apocalyptic hit Wool, which began as a digital ''novelette'' in 2011 and grew into a novel after thousands of online rave reviews from readers.
With 50,000 sales a month, Wool reached No. 1 on Amazon's science-fiction bestseller list as an e-book.
Twentieth Century Fox bought film rights, and Howey agreed in December to sell print rights to a traditional publisher while retaining electronic rights and profits - a first in the industry.
He joins Britain's E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy went from a free fan-fiction website to become the fastest-selling book in history, and American Amanda Hocking, who has sold more than 1 million copies of five fantasy novels since self-publishing the first as an e-book in 2010 and being picked up by print publishers.


In Australia, Matthew Reilly's international career as a thriller writer took off after a Sydney publisher spotted his self-published book in 1997.

Queenslanders Rachael Bermingham and Kim McCosker sold 2.5 million print copies of their self-published 4 Ingredients recipe book after publishers rejected them.

The rapid rise of e-books and e-reading devices, as well as print on demand, has made self-publishing easier and more affordable for anything from commercial fiction to business and self-help guides, private memoirs and family photo books.

In the US, 253,626 print and e-books were self-published in 2011, a growth of 287 per cent since 2006, according to data-collector Bowker.

Thorpe-Bowker's Australian figures show 2788 publishers released just one title in 2011, representing 67.5 per cent of all ''publishing entities'' and 14 per cent of titles produced. Many were self-publishers, they conclude.

''We've had more than a 50 per cent increase in the past 12 months in people who want to know about the opportunities and companies we would recommend for self-publishing,'' said Maree McCaskill, the chief executive of the Australian Publishers Association.

Self-publishing companies are proliferating, including offshoots of mainstream publishers and booksellers such as Amazon's CreateSpace and Dymocks' D Publishing.

It's easy to see benefits in publishing your own book: avoid the disheartening slog of proposal and rejection; publish your brilliant words without an editor's interference; keep the profits rather than receive a measly 10 per cent royalty.

More writers are self-publishing because technology and economic downturn have hit the book industry and made publishing companies more cautious. Advances are smaller and contracts harder to get.
Terence Tam, the founder of BookPal, a self-publishing company in Queensland, said ''99 per cent of manuscripts are rejected by publishers so we help weed out books and give them an opportunity to get published''.

However, self-publishing can still be relatively expensive, technically challenging and time-consuming. Commercial success is rare in a market crowded with amateur efforts.


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