Mark Coker: Do Authors Still Need Publishers?.
excerpt:
The Future of Publishing: Risk, Reward and Power Shift to Authors
The power center in publishing will shift from publisher to author, and the traditional line between the two will continue to blur. Authors will become their own publishers. Commercial publishers will become service providers.
Commercially successful authors will have greater leverage to negotiate higher royalties and advances. They may also demand to retain digital rights, since the means of ebook distribution are now available to any author at no cost.
Some commercially successful authors will go indie. It’s only a matter of time before New York Times best-selling authors, including those on the level of Stephen King, Dan Brown, James Patterson, and J.K. Rowling, realize they can self-publish their next book. Such a prospect should chill the spine of any publisher whose business is based on big hits.
Unproven authors who aspire to commercial publication will need to prove a market exists for their product before a traditional publisher will consider them. Self-publishing will become a vast farm league for commercial publishers. Publishers, including many new indie publishers, will compete against one another to identify, recruit and publish the most promising indie authors.
