A lot of people nowadays think the rise of e-publishing is destroying the publishing industry.
Many people believe that e-publishing, particularly self-publishing, is diluting the quality of literature and turning the publishing industry into a sludge-fest full of the cheapest, poorest, most worthless trash available.
Everyone who knows anything about the publishing industry realizes by now that legacy print publishing is dying a slow and painful death.
Legacy print publishing has taken a massive nosedive since the rise of e-publishing and self-publishing in particular.
This trend is likely to continue.
Those who decry the decline of legacy publishing probably think we’ll end up with a market flooded with worthless tripe that isn’t worth reading. These people probably think we already have that.
I don’t agree—and today I’m going to tell you why.
E-publishing is a delivery method just as print publishing is.
One delivery method does not change the quality of the work.
It’s true that more people have access to publishing than ever before.
Someone who has never written a book before can churn out the first thing that pops into their head and publish it without even getting it checked for spelling mistakes.
The time lag between someone writing a book and readers reading it is much shorter than it was before.
The difference here is that we no longer have an entire industry of editors and publishers deciding what we can read and what is and isn’t good literature.
Now the reader gets to decide whether a book is good.
Someone can churn out the first thing that pops into their head and publish it without even getting it checked for spelling mistakes—and many people are doing exactly that.
These people will only accomplish one thing by doing this. They’ll destroy their reputations as authors.
Reader will see right away that the person doesn’t know what they’re doing. Then these readers will obliterate the author in the comments section.
Within seconds, everyone else on the internet will know that this person doesn’t know what they’re doing.
It takes a lot to come back from a ruined reputation like that.
It’s true that we have a deluge of poor-quality writing on the market right now.
This only makes the high-quality writing more valuable. A good writer can make headway more easily simply by separating himself from all the charlatans out there.
The rise of e-publishing doesn’t affect the quality of writing at all. It simply makes it more accessible regardless of whether the work is good or bad.
I remember when I first read, The Man Who Would Be King, by Rudyard Kipling.
Reading that book was a mind-blowing experience for me. The book inspired me to improve my craft so that I might possibly, one day, get to be somewhat marginally close to the author’s level of skill.
And do you want to know the most interesting part? I read this book on my phone.
That feeling of being absolutely floored by another writer’s skill did not diminish just because I used an electronic device to read the book.
It was the same book, whether in print or on a device.
I was raising three children under five years old at the time. I would not have been able to read the book any other way than on my phone. The phone made the book available to me in ways a print book wouldn’t have been.
There is a wonderful scene at the end of Hermann Hesse’s, Steppenwolf, where the protagonist hears beautiful Mozart music played on an ancient Victrola.
The Victrola interferes with the playback by causing pops, whistles, scratches, and static, but the music is the same. The static doesn’t make the music less beautiful and awe-inspiring.
The same is true with print vs. e-publishing. You can split hairs all you like and argue whether print media is the Victrola or an e-device is the Victrola that interferes with our ability to appreciate this art.
The fact remains that both are delivery methods for the same content.
Imagine hearing beautiful Mozart music playing on an ancient Victrola.
After a while, you wouldn’t even hear the pops and static anymore. All of that would disappear until you only heard the music itself.
All delivery methods do this.
An e-reader doesn’t do anything to prevent the reader from getting immersed in a story. Only the writer’s skill can do that.
Our job as writers is to keep the reader immersed at all times—to make them forget the outside world and to make the book impossible to put down.
This can happen just as easily on an e-reading device as ifthe reader is consuming a print book.
If the book is terrible, it will be just as terrible on an e-reader as it is on paper.
I personally think e-publishing and self-publishing are the greatest things that have ever happened to the fiction market.
They have removed the barriers of entry for a whole lot of terrible writers to flood the market with their terrible writing.
Now everyone can see who the terrible writers are and who the good writers are.
The sooner readers see that, the more quickly they’ll be able to move on and find the good writers. They will be the ones who succeed while the bad writers fade away into oblivion where they belong.
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