Purpose

It is time to begin to express the work that I have been doing in a blog to give it a broader context.

I begin as a frustrated independent publisher. I have advice from two reliable businessmen that publishing on the internet is a marginal game. Publishing was my retirement plan for the last 25 years, so needless to say, I am not happy about this news.

My ambitions were modest, one author only D.K.Toteras, whose work has been entrusted to me posthumously for publication. We established Nine Muses Press aka 9muses.com in 1996 with the publication one book, but circumstances prevented us from pursuing that project fully.

According to Bowker of Books in Print, in 2010 there were 316,480 industry-published books, and 2,776,260 print-on-demand books, over three million total. That is just print books, not including ebooks. Not so long ago the amount of industry-published books was a relatively stable 50,000 titles per year, and vanity/self-/independent publishing was relatively little. So it takes considerably more work for less return than previously, and the question becomes, is it a good investment? For me the answer is no at the present time, because I have no confidence of enough return that I can even cover the expenses of producing a book.

So I have taken up the investigation of the problem of publishing on the internet, which turns out to be a problem of the internet in general. My initial purpose with this blog is to share what I have learned and explore it further.

My thanks to Nigel Scott of Excapite and David Cole of Bay Tree Publishing for forcing me to reckon with my fate.