NYT Pokes Publishers, Again

As Publishers Lunch noted in the Times coverage of Sara Nelson’s layoff and is underscored by today’s article, apparently until further notice all NYT publishing pieces will be pitched as death-of-traditional-publishing stories. Self-publishing has been an interesting and quirky growth story for years now (it’s a “trend” piece!) that has little or nothing to do with the rest of the business. (As the article does note, “self-publishing is still a fraction of the wider publishing industry. Author Solutions, for example, sold a total of 2.5 million copies last year.”) And there are a lot of nuanced questions about what happens to this business in tougher economic times and where the opportunities for continued growth and potential overlap with traditional publishing will come from, but that’s not covered here. Instead we get such speculation as “during an economic downturn, books tailored to such narrow audiences may fare better than titles from traditional publishers that depend on a more general appeal.”
Read the article here:
NYT

Of course, Morgan James is fairing well, but we glad we went ahead and launched our new Self-Publishing imprint, Persona Publishing (www.PersonaPublishing.com).