alt Hacker NewsI hope The Martian becomes the template of a new publishing world. Andy Weir couldn't get any publisher's attention until he self published and achieved 35,000 sales in three months without their help. He succeeded by word of mouth and not publisher's marketing.
Almost all of the fiction I read comes by personal recommendations. Including from social media like Hacker News. I haven't stood in a bookstore browsing shelves and reading blurbs in many years but I read more than ever.
A publisher provides marketing, editing and distribution. Literary marketing is becoming better in the peer-to-peer form than the old business-to-consumer form. Distribution has become unbundled via self-publishing. Editing is no less important than ever, but it would be so much better if the value from such an individual art can be captured by those talented individuals rather than by corporate.
Long live literature, but may Big Publishing fade away into obsolescence.
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Completely disagree. That model means all you’re going to get are pop fiction and the five books trending that month. It leaves very little room for dense publications with more niche audiences.
The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then.
Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.