Self-publish versus traditional

publishers: Mesh-trend-analysis
applied to the publishing industry

Marc Torra
RMIT University
November 2016

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Abstract
This paper analyses whether it is preferable for authors to self-publish their own works or
instead access their audience through a traditional publisher. The research applies a
mesh-trend-analysis, a technique for exploring trends developed by the author of this
paper. The analysis concludes that self-publishing is preferable, however a hybrid between
the two it is also a viable solution.

Background
Self-publishing was not the preferred choice a decade ago. It was the last resort of those
who could not find a traditional publisher. Publishers were the gatekeepers. The only
option left for those who found the gates closed was to use the services of a vanity
publisher: a publisher that makes the skills, infrastructure and distribution network
available, with the author financing all the costs and thus taking the risks. The situation has
evolved since then. Indie publishing is not the last resort anymore, but now a first choice
for many authors. The main motivations: complete freedom and a better prospect for
making a living.
Estimated number of authors making US$50,000+/year 

from sales in the United States alone.

(Source: Authors Earnings 2016)

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This may explain why indie publishing is becoming more popular:

(Source: Authors Earnings 2016b)

This study is a research into the current trends affecting the publishing industry, in order to
determine who is in better position to face those challenges: indie authors or traditionally
published ones. It does so by applying a mesh-trend-analysis. This technique starts with
the identification of the four root-trends. Next, it is necessary to identify the direct effects of
those root-trends, and keep on identifying subsequent effects until finding the end-points:
those trends that do not produce further effects.
The result is a mesh with trends as nodes and the cause and effect relationships as
connectors. In this mesh, the trends with the larger number of connectors are called hubs.
Hubs are connected to other hubs, thus forming the mesh’s backbone. The end-points of
that mesh define the areas where it is best to act, thus providing the strategical
approaches.

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 Mesh of trends

Hubs

Root-trends End-points

Root-trends
A mesh of trends always has four root-trends, which are the result of combining a duality
and a complementarity.
Causation

Complementarity
Du
al
ity

The four root-trends place the mesh in a specific location in space and period in time.
Space and time conform the duality. And since the mesh is the representation of a market,
the root-trends also must reflect the complementarity between supply and demand. 


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 Duality

Complementarity: Space (the market) Time (present & future)

Supply A digital revolution is Amazon is leading the

causing a “radical” (root) way into how supply is to
change on how the market be provided in the future.
supplies.

Demand Books are a mature market Future demand is being

with stagnant demand. shaped by Generation Y

As a result we obtain the following four root-trends:

1. Digital revolution:
According to Brynjolfsson & McAfee (2012), director and associate director of the MIT
Center for Digital Business, digital technologies have become the most important driving
force in the economy today. This statement was in a book published with their own indie
imprint. No profession or industry seems immune to a technological revolution that affects
the way we process, store and exchange information. Some call it the third industrial
revolution. This study identifies four trends that, being effects of the digital revolution, are
directly connected to the publishing industry:

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2. Generation Y (also called Millennials)
Members of this generation are those born after 1980. They are the first generation to
have spent their entire lives in the digital environment and offer a window into future
demand (Bolton et al 2013). This generation is directly responsible for the following trends:

Mobile internet usage is becoming more and more common and is predominantly driven
by Generation Y, of which 21 percent are no longer using desktop computers to go online
(Dreyer 2015).

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The meteoric rise of social media started around 2006, when many of the most popular
platforms made their appearance.

(Chaffey 2016)
Ninety percent of Generation Y are users of social media platforms, which is the highest
usage of any other age group. Their preference is for chatting and exchanging video
content via smartphones.

(Chaffey 2016)

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2015 was the year in which people started spending more time a day watching digital
video (1:55 h) than in social media (1:44 h) (Walgrove 2015). Again Generation Y (and Z)
are the most avid consumers of digital video.

(Nielsen 2015)
Facebook quickly surpassed YouTube in number of videos watched thanks to its ability to
combine both: social media and digital video.

(Plesser 2014)
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Eighty-five percent of Facebook video is watched without sound (Patel 2016).
With mobile devices expected to account for 58 percent of online video watching
worldwide in 2017 (Rodriguez 2016), vertical video is also becoming the way to go.

(Baker 2015)

3. Demand for books stagnates

Nielsen reports on how in the US, the overall book market is stagnating, with an initial
increase in eBook that cannibalised the sale of printed books, but with accumulated sales
stagnating.

(Mooney 2016)
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This stagnation of the demand for books is causing the following two trends:

eReaders achieved their maximum number of units sold in 2011 and since then sales are
in decline.
Shipments of eReaders worldwide

(Statista 2016)
It also explains why the sales of tablets are declining:

(Statista 2016b)

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The stagnation of sales in the publishing industry is also making the market more
competitive when taking into account that the total stock of books is constantly increasing,
with new books having to compete with the ones already published.

4. Amazon leading the way

Three quarters of the eBook sales (Author Earnings 2015) and 40 percent of the printed
book sales (Author Earnings 2016) in the US are done through Amazon.com.

(Author Earnings 2016)

This research considers four strategies applied by Amazon Books that allowed the firm to
position itself as the leader in the emergence of indie publishing:

• Services for Indies: Print on Demand + Distribution

There is an increased number of services for indies, not just from Amazon (e.g.
CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing, ACX), but from others, too (e.g. LightningSource,
SmashWords).

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• Recommendations based on meritocracy:
Online retailers such as B&N, Apple or Kobo.com sell their front tables to those who pay
the most, and those who can pay the most are usually the big publishers. Amazon, on the
other hand, has designed an algorithm based on meritocracy, meaning that authors have
an equal chance to be in the top ranks for each book category. It also means that big
publishers are not just losing control over what books get published, but also over what
gets recommended (Gaughran 2013).

• Lower eBook prices

As the market becomes more competitive, eBook prices are diminishing, with large
publishers being the ones most resistant to lower the prices down.

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 (Author Earnings 2016b)

• eBook clubs and libraries

In this regards, Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited, a service that for $9.99 a month offers
unlimited eBooks and audiobooks. A similar service is 24symbols.com or the already
disappeared oysterbooks.com

The hubs
Hubs constitute the backbone of the set of interrelations. They are trends reinforced by
other trends, specially root-causes and other backbones. They are also responsible for
causing many trends, particularly end-points. This study has identified five hubs, which
are:

The five hubs are interrelated in the sense that the more people become creators and the
more popular social media becomes, the lower the overall attention span of people as a
result of not only being bombarded by information provided by corporations (ads, books,
magazines, movies, etc.), but also by that which other people create (video, ideas, self-
published books, etc.). This constitutes the negative loop of the hubs. However there is a
positive one: the increase in the number of people that are able to make their living from
their own creativity, which has further fuelled the emergence of indie publishing. Both loops
are making the publishing industry more competitive.

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1. Reduction in people’s attention span
Many scholars consider the information age as an ‘‘attention economy’,’ in which attracting
an audience is a prerequisite for achieving economic, social, or political objectives
(Webster & Ksiazek 2012 quoting several authors). Not surprisingly, this trend could be
considered as the core hub, since it is connected to 13 other trends.

Both research and common sense indicate that the quality of one’s output and depth of
thought deteriorate with multitasking, with Generation Y being the most inveterate
multitaskers (Wallis 2006). Hembroke and Gay (2003) quote five psychological and media
communication researches that indicates how our ability to engage in simultaneous tasks
is limited at best and virtually impossible at its worst. They explain how multitasking is
negatively affecting attention, learning, and memory. Lin et al (2011) have noticed how
mobile internet and social media are typically associated with multitasking.
It is not the scope of this study to go in detail over each of these interrelations, but mostly
centre on the connections between hubs and end-points. In this case, the reduction in
people’s attention span is causing an audience fragmentation as a result of people trying
to focus on that which is relevant and ignoring the rest.

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2. The rise of social media
Since this trend is also connected to a root, it has already been explained in the previous
section. This section of the study simply provides the wider set of interrelations:

3. People as creators
The three trends directly caused by the digital revolution are allowing the average person
to become creators. Social media and indie publishing are two of the arenas where people
can create written content. New formulas for licensing such as Creative Commons are also
introducing flexibility, further encouraging more creations. However, not all of the new
content that is created is written. Digital video is on the rise and those expressing though
writing shall not forget that an image can be worth more than 1000 words. This is why
writers need to consider video within their repertoire of modes of expression.

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4. Emergence of indie publishing
Along with the previously mentioned trends that are assisting in the emergence of indie
publishing, there is also the trend of outsourcing services. The internet provides self-
published authors with services that were previously only available to traditional
publishers, and provides them at very competitive prices. Indie authors are thus able to
contract those services over the net in order to cover all the set of skills required for
publishing and promoting a book.

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5. Publishing industry becoming more competitive
With the demand for books stabilising, the emergence of indie publishing, more free and
paid content available, and the traditional publishers losing control of the gates, it is not
surprising that the publishing industry is becoming more competitive.

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Traditional publishers are trying to respond to this trend by increasing their size through
the acquisition of small and medium sized imprints and by requesting global rights on their
published works. But traditional publishers are still resisting the pressure to lower the price
of eBooks, which they still sell at prices that provide them with larger profits as compared
to printed ones.

Source: News Corporation

On the other hand, indie authors are responding to this trend by taking advantage of their
small size in order to be quick, by being flexible and creative, and by lowering their prices.
These trends are further analysed in the next section.

The end-points
Related to marketing and promotion
Many traditionally published authors complain about the increasing lack of editorial and
marketing support offered by traditional publishers, unless there are reasons to believe
that the book is going to be a bestseller (Livingstoon et al 2013). Authors that do not fill this
category find themselves having to choose between publishing the traditional way with
only 10 to 25 percent royalty, no control over their work, and having to do most of the
promotion themselves; or publishing independently with a royalty between 30 to 70
percent, control over their work, and the same need to promote the book themselves.
The following end-point trends are related to this need for promotion:

• Audience fragmentation

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Social media creates small niches, such as Facebook Groups, which further fragments the
audience. The increase in content also creates niches, which occurs when people try to
focus on what is relevant to them. The digital domain is better suited to attend a
fragmented market. For example, while a brick and mortar bookshop can only define a
limited number of categories, an on-line shop can have much more. This has allowed
Amazon and other digital retailers to define an extensive number of categories and
subcategories. However Gaughran (2013) considers that many publishers do not
understand such systems and fail to use them to their advantage. This proves, in part, how
no-one can really replace the author when it comes to knowing who the audience is,
where to find them and how to target them. In this regards, indie authors are at an
advantage because they have no other option than to study the audience that they wish to
reach.

• Be accessible

Authors not only need to know their audience, but also be accessible to them as readers
now expect to be able to reach the author through social media. Unlike how this
requirement comes naturally to indie authors, it does not for traditionally published ones,
whom are beginning to see that despite their participation in royalties remaining the same
(8 to10 percent for printed and 20 to 25 percent for ebook), their audience (and many
times also the publisher) now expects them to additionally be accessible through the social
media.

• Democratized brand communication

Traditional advertising is not anymore the main strategy to create brand image. By being
accessible on the social media, authors can build their own brand communication (Bruhn
et al 2012). For example, the most popular author’s page on Facebook is Paulo Coelho’s,
with over 28 million followers. It was not a traditional publisher that allowed him to build
this audience, but his own effort. It also does not seem as though being published by a
traditional house has really helped him to build this audience. He built it in part by pirating
his own works (Flood 2012), something that an indie author can do without actually
pirating them, but by instead offering a free-run or distributing them under a licence that
allows sharing.
In comparison, the Facebook pages of the big 5 publishers do not enjoy even a fraction of
this audience. Penguin Random House has just over half a million fans, HarperCollins and

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Simon & Schuster around 125,000 each, while Hachette has not even reached 6,000. This
proves how the brand that sells books is not the publisher, but actually the author.

• Vertical, Short, Soundless, User Generated Video

Together with social media, video is becoming another important medium of

communication. A video going viral on the internet can be a great opportunity to promote a
book or an author. In this regard, Burgess (2008) surveyed 4,300 popular YouTube videos
and noticed that they are usually not traditional media content. The most common traits
she observed were “oddness” and “amateurism”. The popularity of live streaming is further
adding to this rise of amateurism.
This “amateur” component of virality means that an indie author with talent and creativity is
in a better position to produce a video that goes viral than a traditionally published one
relying on a publisher contracting a promotional video to an advertising company.

• Audiobooks in demand

The audiobook market is also on the rise, mostly propelled by people spending more time
using smartphones, a device too small for reading an eBook but ideal for an audiobook
(Maloney 2016). Indie authors willing to take advantage of such trend can easily turn their

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books to audio and have them sold on portals such as Audible (Amazon), meaning that a
traditionally published author is not in better position that an indie one.

Related to strategical approaches

This section considers the optimal strategical approaches to respond to the current trends.

• Be flexible and creative

With accelerating technological change, the publishing industry becoming more

competitive, and piracy on the rise, it is of paramount importance to be flexible and
creative. Some examples are: offering books in a Pay What You Wish basis, choosing
formulas for licensing other than the traditional copyright, providing free-runs, etc.
This study considers that indie authors are in an advantageous position, since they are
free to test those new formulas to see which ones work best, while those published the
traditional way find themselves limited to the traditional approach: fixed price, copyright
and no-free runs.

• Be small and quick or big and powerful

In order to face the challenge of the publishing industry becoming more competitive and
the trend for eBooks to get cheaper, the two possible strategies are either to be small and
quick or to be big and powerful.

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The first strategy comes naturally to indie authors since they are small and quick to
respond to a more competitive environment and to accelerating technological change. The
second one is applied by the large publishers, with the trend to merge into larger firms and
also to be bought by one of the large media conglomerates.

Big Five Publishers Media conglomerate that owns it

Simon & Schuster CBS Corporation

HarperCollins NewsCorp

Penguin Random House Bertelsmann and Pearson

Hachette Livre

Holtzbrinck-Mcmillan

Both are good strategies for responding to a market that is becoming more competitive,
but being small and quick is better suited for an accelerating technological change than
being big and powerful.

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Conclusions
This research started with the identification of the four root-trends currently affecting the
publishing industry. Their direct and derived effects were then identified, thus creating a
mesh of trends. From the analysis of this mesh it can be said that:
For best-selling authors who want to exclusively focus on their writing instead of diverting
the attention to all the other tasks required for self-publishing, the easier choice is to go the
traditional way. However, it is best to go hybrid by self-publishing some of their works
because with accelerating technological change and the industry becoming more
competitive, it is too risky to rely exclusively on traditional publishers.
For the rest, self-publishing is the way to go. These are those who would like to go the
traditional way but find the doors closed and those who want to be in control of their work
who do not mind complementing their writing with all the other set of skills required for self-
publishing and who wish to have access to higher royalty rates.
In any case, authors will always have the option to choose because of the creative nature
of their work. They will always have this option because neither technology nor money can
produce wisdom and creativity. They can help in the process, but only the human psyche
enjoys such potential. Therefore, whether traditionally published or not, the author’s role is
irreplaceable. All the rest, those who stand between the author and their audience, are
replaceable.
Although the power is currently shifting from traditional publishers to new firms such as
Amazon, tomorrow those new companies may also become too slow and rigid to adapt to
the challenges to come. When this happens, the creativity and wisdom of those able to
convey a meaningful message or a captivating story will still be needed. They were
needed at the dawn of the present humanity and they will still be needed when this
humanity ends and another emerges.

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