Few of us say it out loud. Instead, we say we’ll be happy if our writing touches the right person, just one. Or we talk about how thrilled we are or will be when we hold a copy of our book in our hands, be that hardcover, paperback, or e-book, and say it doesn’t matter how much we ever see in royalties.
But nearly all of us have a larger goal we don’t like to share, that we seldom whisper to ourselves, much less say out loud. That goal is The New York Times best-seller list.
For some of us, that little dream has been one of the reasons we haven’t self-published to date. Don’t get me wrong; for many people, I’m a proponent of doing it yourself. Today’s authors in the main end up doing their own marketing anyway, and if you’re a non-fiction writer with an easy-to-define audience, you’ll probably make more money that way, if that’s your goal. Fiction, I’ve always said, is a different animal. You need that bookstore distribution. In fact, that’s kept me from self-publishing what I think is a pretty dandy edgy Christian novel.
But I’m looking at today’s Publishers Lunch, and I’m wondering. Twelve self-published e-authors made the NYT list in 2011 with an original work, according to Publishers Lunch; just one was a non-fiction author. What about that all-important bookstore distribution? It certainly doesn’t seem to matter as much. Some of those eleven novelists’ covers are less than compelling. They’re not all big names. They just worked it, worked it well and hard if their accomplishments are any indication.
And somewhere inside me, a small voice is whispering, “Give it a shot. What do you have to lose?”
