The Society of Authors 'Futures of Publishing' Event

I have been a long time mem­ber of  the bril­liant, Soci­ety of Authors. For a start it's great to get out of our stu­di­os and writ­ing desks and get togeth­er with oth­er authors and illus­trat­ors, once we've remembered how to speak and social­ise that is.

There is plenty of advice on offer, be it income tax or con­tracts etc., the soci­ety also organ­ise events where authors and illus­trat­ors talk about their par­tic­u­lar expert­ise. One such was the 'Futures of Pub­lish­ing'.

I've often thought about self pub­lish­ing using eBooks, to bring back to life some of my books that are now out of print and oth­ers that I am cur­rently cre­at­ing. But where to start? Ive read a lot about self pub­lish­ing on the inter­net. But it's great to hear in per­son of the exper­i­ences of  these five tal­en­ted author/illustrators.

Cast, in order of appear­ance: Sarah McIntyre, Gary North­field,  Nana Li, Jam­ie Smart and Alex Mil­way.

I have always relied on my income as an author/illustrator from either com­mis­sions or selling ideas dir­ectly to pub­lish­ers, who then go ahead and print and sell. The idea of doing loads of art for free dis­tri­bu­tion on the web, just doesn't sound great to me. My main reas­on being, I do not want my work copied and sold by some­body else! If any­one is going to make any money out of my work, I would rather like it to be me!!

But it seems to me from what the fam­ous five were say­ing, they all have one thing in com­mon: They all star­ted small, print­ing their own work, in very small runs, get­ting out there and selling loc­ally. Doing exactly what I am wor­ried about doing, shar­ing their work on the web, and look at them all now. All extremely suc­ces­full and they don't  look as if they are starving!

Simons Cat is anoth­er huge suc­cess story and again he star­ted post­ing his anim­a­tions for free.

So their audi­ence will start lik­ing, fol­low­ing and shar­ing their work and build­ing up a fan base. They will then start char­ging for their work and people are happy to pay for it.

Unfor­tu­nately the even­ing went too quickly and there were many more ques­tions I wanted to ask, espe­cially regard­ing the soft­ware to pro­duce little touch anim­a­tions and sound to my pages. Per­haps one of you will know?

So that is the answer, there is cer­tainly a lot of ama­teur rub­bish pos­ted out there, maybe I should have some chance.

Lookout for samplers of Miko's ebooks in the near future, where I'll be ask­ing for your edit­or­i­al con­tri­bu­tion.

Both Helena Pie­lichaty and Sarah McIntyre have cre­ated some inter­est­ing posts about this event. They are cer­tainly both very well worth check­ing out, take a look:

Helena Pielichaty's Futures of Pub­lish­ing post

Sarah McIntyre's Futures of Pub­lish­ing post

PS: Thanks Helena Pie­lichaty and The Soci­ety of Authors for the pho­to­graphs.