In the pre-internet era news, products, and books flowed from the sources to the public through intermediaries. If you wanted to find out what was going on in government, you had to read about it in the newspapers. If you wanted to buy shoes, you went to the shore store, not the shoe factory. This was the way our distribution systems evolved.
The web changed that. We now can go directly to the source of a product, a process knwon as "disintermediation."
I've done that with Onion Heads, but face a myriad of problems in getting the public to purchase the book directly from me at LULU. For one thing, the publishing houses have done such a good job of bringing quality books to the public, books that any attempt at by-passing their filter is viewed with skepticism. Book reviewers, for instance, consider self-publishing to be a new iteration of the so-called "vanity press," where authors of dubious talent paid publishers to print copies of their books.
Publishers also have the edge in marketing. Recent articles, however, indicate that they are surrendering some of this advantage for all but celebrity authors. New authors have to serve as their own their own marketing departments after publication. In effect, they are being coerced into another career --salesman--to support their writing. So as a new author, my major disadvantage is not marketing. I can reach out to readers on the web in a myriad of ways. My greatest challenge is to overcome public skepticim that my e-book is an inferior product
LULU, the service I have used for the thrid edition of ONION HEADS, offers the first ten pages as a sample. Call it the hook. Will any of you book-loving fish swim close enough to the hook to sniff it? This is what I must convince you all to do: Go to LULU.com and search "McTague."
