With all of the options out there to publish, it’s pretty tempting to just point and click your way to a completed book. When print-on-demand first came on the scene around 1999, we saw a glut of books being pushed through the system, unedited, unvetted. When someone said “garbage in, garbage out,” they were often referring to self-publishing. Hence the stigma. If you’re new to indie publishing and you think that the stigma is the “us against them” idea, you’re only partially right. The history, albeit a somewhat negative one, started many years ago when authors thought their book was “good enough” to publish.
Cycle forward to 2013: We now have some 300,000 books published a year, the competition is fierce and the stakes are high. That number, by the way, comes from Bowker, which produces these statistics and readily admits that this number doesn’t include all eBooks or books that are published without an ISBN. You can imagine how high that number really is.
