Thursday, October 25, 2012

Self-publishing becoming mainstream in USA, UK

Pakistan News & Features Services

Self-publishing has continued becoming mainstream as suggested by the new figures revealing the number of do-it-yourself books published in the US has exploded, tripling in the last five years to reach almost quarter of a million titles in 2011. 

An analysis from Bowker, which issues ISBNs for books published in the US, shows that the writers are jumping into self-publishing at an unprecedented rate. 

The number of self-published books in the US grew by 287% to 235,625 books between 2006 and 2011. Self-published ebooks make up 37% of that total, with 87,201 released in 2011, and are the fastest-growing sector, up 129% since 2010, with print growing 33% in the same period. 

"This is no longer just vanity presses at work as self-publishing is out of the dark corners and making its way into the mainstream," Bowker's Beat Barblan revealed, adding that earlier this summer, four self-published authors had seven novels on the New York Times ebook bestseller list. “In 2011, America's 148,424 self-published print books accounted for 43% of the total print output,” he added. 

"It feels as though the ground is shifting at the moment. It's quite liberating. Some sort of transition was overdue," author Polly Courtney, who returned to self-publishing last year after publishing three books with HarperCollins, stated. 

She was unhappy with the way the publishers aimed her titles squarely at the chick lit market. "The growth rate is amazingly high. The UK is considered to be a couple of years behind the US but I think it's going the same way here too," she thought. 

According to Bowker Market Research's Books & Consumers UK survey, self-published books accounted for around 11% of all ebooks purchased by UK consumers in the first half of 2012, and just over 1% of volume purchases of print and ebooks overall. 

Adam Croft, whose self-published thrillers have hit Amazon's bestseller lists, suggests that ‘self-publishing is increasing massively in the UK, too.

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