Following up an earlier post with this surprising bit of the news. Chalk up another victory for The Man, man.
via The New York Times:
A Successful Self-Publishing Author Decides to Try the Traditional Route
“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Ms. Hocking said in an interview on Thursday. “People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.”
Publishers, weary of hearing about their disposability in an age when writers can self-publish their work on the Internet and sell it on Amazon.com, said they were vindicated by the news.
Matthew Shear, the publisher of St. Martin’s Press, said that he wanted “pretty badly” to win the auction for Ms. Hocking’s books and that he would be able to introduce her work to a wider audience of readers. He first heard about Ms. Hocking six months ago from an editor at St. Martin’s, Rose Hilliard, who pressed him to read “Switched,” one of Ms. Hocking’s novels. (They are for sale at online retailers like Amazon and BN.com.)
“I think a lot of authors are looking at self-publishing as a way to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later,” Mr. Shear said. “But a publisher provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda’s books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before.”
Akopos 