Self-publishers Flourish

The publishing industry is changing, there's no doubt about that. For yet another look at how, there's an interesting piece in today's New York Times: Self-publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab. There are some interesting figures in the article about the numbers of books published (a big jump in 2008 over 2007) and the numbers of titles that some of the larger self-publishing companies handle. That's great, but caveat emptor:

Diamonds in the rough, though, remain the outliers. “For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,” said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books. “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”

I've seen some of those.