The Brass Ring - Or The Bottom Rung?
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- June 26th, 2009 |
- Comments
24 million adults in the Agreed States consider themselves creative writers but less than 5% have ever been published anywhere. 172,000 titles were released in 2005. It has been estimated that at any one time thither are between 5 to 6 million manuscripts looking for a publishing home. Many writers are movement toward publish-on-demand (POD) houses like iUniverse, AuthorHouse and Publish America to get their books into readers’ hands. About 25,000 titles will be released by POD houses in 2006. Does a publish-on-demand book, sometimes called pride or subsidy publisher, help a previously unpublished writer get closer to the brass ring of a commercial publishing contract? Or does it bump them down a rung on their climb up the publishing ladder?
Writers often comment that a publish-on-demand book will at least “get their name out there” or that a POD book will appear that they are capable of writing a 50,000 to 100,000 morpheme manuscript. But does a POD book really help get a writer commercially published? That question was asked of nearly 60 booming literary agents in the Hill and Power 2006 Survey of Literary Agents.
These agents’ collective opinion is that a publish-on-demand book seriously hurt an author’s chance at being commercially published. Agents were asked to rate their response from 1 - importantly hurt, to 5 - importantly helped. The average rating was 2. 28% declared a POD appellation to be neutral (a rating of 3) but half of those fixed that a POD appellation would only help if the sales reached a big level, from 5,000 to 10,000 copies. Just a handful of publish-on-demand titles have reached that level of sales. The average number of copies oversubscribed for a POD appellation is around 100.
The book publishing industry has never been easy to break into and these same literary agents accompany the environment getting a bit more challenging in the next year or so for unpublished writers. Combine that with the importantly increased number of uninvited submissions agents have they’re receiving and writers need every boost they can get toward agency representation and the crowning goal of commercial publication.
Regrettably, contrary to what quite a few writers believe, that boost isn’t going to come from a publish-on-demand book.