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ifellalot3 karma

Not OP, but here goes. Backlist is all of the previous work you've published. So you can depend on a fairly regular income, even if its small, from a large collection of previously published work. Also, if you publish a book and someone reads it and likes it, they can turn to your backlist (other published works) and buy more.

Basically its saying once you have a lot of books published you'll consistently make more over time.

ifellalot3 karma

Personally, I can't. I'm a currently unpublished author who is almost ready to try and go for traditional publishing. I'll fall back on self publishing if I can't make it work in the traditional world, so I've done some research, but not enough to answer that.

The thing is that some people make it really big from self publishing, like Andy Weir, who wrote the Martian. He self published and sold enough to be noticed by a big traditional publisher and got a wicked movie deal out of it. (That was his first full length novel, btw) Some take a book or two to get big and some never get big big, but have enough of a following and a backlist that they make a fair amount of money from their work.

You could try asking r/writing, there are some self published authors there, but there is a fair amount of stigma attached to self publishing as some see it as a way to get your book published if it wasn't good enough for traditional publishing (not entirely true). There are tons of online forums for kindle and Amazon specific authors as well.

Hope that helps, even if I didn't really answer your question.

ifellalot1 karma

Trad publishing also provides a lot of services to authors, such as quality editing, cover artists, etc. Many self published authors don't put the money and effort into these steps so the quality can be lower than what Trad is coming out with. There is no quality control for self publishing.

However it is totally true that amazing authors with cool ideas and quality writing can get turned down by big publishers for one reason or another. Perhaps they don't think the work will sell well enough as it has a very niche market, or perhaps they just published a couple similar works and feel that the market is saturated with that particular type of book.

Even JK Rowling had a hard time getting publishers to take the first Harry Potter. She did however already have an agent, which is a different can of worms, but it goes to show that her potential was already noticed by someone.

Point being, self publishing can be an easy way to get a book out there but it also allows some people to be lazy. Terrible writers can publish as easily as amazing writers, so there is that to wade through bas well. And some times, traditional publishing just isn't the way to go for a certain book. It is becoming a more and more viable option, however.

ifellalot1 karma

Thanks! It'll be a while yet. Still have half the book to do final edits on and some beta readers to go over it and see if people like it. Writing is certainly for the patient.