Wading Through Self-published Work

If authors are allowed to self-publish, how will be able to find the really good stuff? Won’t there be too much to process?

I hear this question a lot, and I wanted to comment on it.  First a few stats. In 2008, there were over 275,000 books published. These books were published from more than US 75,000 publishers.

Now, you might argue that this number includes all sorts of books–textbooks, travel books, medical books, etc. This is true, but look how many fiction books were published–over 47,000.  This means you would need to read roughly 128 books per day to find the really good ones.

So let’s say e-books open the floodgates (assuming that 47,000 books don’t constitute a flood already), how do we sift through all these books today to find the ones worth reading?

One way is by walking into a store and just looking around. Publishers buy prime bookshelf space in Barnes & Noble and customers just happen upon books. Prime bookshelf space doesn’t mean the book is good, but it’s an indicator that the publisher thinks it is good enough to sell well, which is why they bought the shelf space.

Another way to find books, and I’d argue a more effective way, is by word of mouth. That word of mouth may be from a critical review, it may be from a friend, it may be from a stranger on the internet. Maybe we don’t really pay attention the first time we hear about a book, but the fifteenth time somebody talks about Book X, our curiosity may be piqued.

The books that move us get talked about, and the books that get talked about get purchased. There is no reason to think that this can’t or won’t happen with self-published e-books.

This idea is reliant upon a concept called the wisdom of crowds. I’ll write more about this in a future post, because I think it’s a critical idea to understand when dealing with large amounts of information.