eating the seed corn

As frequent readers know, I strongly endorse self-publishing. That’s why I found this article cited at The Passive Voice interesting. Key quote:

No adult fiction title released in the January-through-June period managed to make the top 20 print bestsellers list in the first half of the year. In the first six months of 2015, two novels released that year, The Girl on the Train and Grey, held the first and third spots, respectively, on the print list and were #1 and #2 on the Amazon Top 20 Kindle E-books List.

I wondered in the past if publishers would have difficulty recruiting talent as more and more writers move to self-publishing. In the short-term that isn’t a problem for the publishers, but in the long-term, it’s hard to be a publisher when no one approaches you to publish stuff.

-JM