Marginal Revolution: New trends in self-publishing shares some disturbing facts about self-publishing:
Forty percent of all self-published books are sold to the authors, and most of the other sixty percent are sold on-line. One company, iUniverse, has 17,000 published titles. 84 have sold more than 500 copies, and a half dozen have made it to Barnes and Noble shelves.
Putting your book in print is the easy part. Getting people to read it is the hard part.
This caught me totally off guard though:
By the way, here is one self-published memoir which I love, the author Thelma Klein was the mother of well-known economist Daniel Klein. Yes they still have copies if you want to buy one, and they only cost a few dollars.
Dan was my Econ 101 professor. (OK, I think it was Econ 23, but same idea.) I’ve had pizza and beer with the guy. I should probably check out his mom’s book…