Online publishing is growing in popularity among both writers and readers. Web publishing is making books more accessible and convenient for readers, and it is helping writers to find a home for works that might not be right for the offline publishing market.
Online Publishing Benefits
To publish online requires a smaller staff, a smaller physical location and no printing costs. Instead of the high costs of printing books and transporting them around the country, an online book publishing company needs only editors and a website team to handle the maintenance of the site. This means far lower costs in online book publishing.
With lower costs there is less risk to publishers. In online book publishing, books that don't appeal to enough people to be profitable in print form can still find their intended audience. Online creative writing can be more experimental than print books because of fewer financial risks involved.
The intense competition in print publishing has led most major publishers to require submissions to come from literary agents. In Web publishing, writers can get published without having an agent, even if the writer has never had a book published before.
Ebook publishers receive fewer manuscripts than large print publishers, giving them a quicker average response time than print publishers. While it's not unusual to wait three months or more to hear from a print publisher about a query, most online book publishing companies will accept a full manuscript query and respond within a few weeks. The time between acceptance and publication is also significantly shorter- often by a year or more.
Web Publishing Cons
One of the major downsides of online book publishing is that ebook publishers generally don't pay an advance to writers when their book is published. Instead, writers earn a royalty on the sales of the book. Writers can also expect fewer copies to be sold of their ebook than most print books.
Online creative writing still doesn't have the prestige of print book publishing. This alone often turns writers away from online writing.
Online publishers are generally small businesses that don't have vast marketing resources. The marketing of the ebook is largely up to the writer.
The small number of reputable online book publishing companies and the narrow genres that most of the publish make it difficult to place some book genres. While romance, erotica and mystery novels have many online book publishing companies to carry the titles, other genres are severely limited online.
Lizz Shepherd - I am a freelance writer specializing, for now, in Web writing. The Web is an enormous place and I have been carving out my own little ...
