Self-Publishing TikTok

[Ed Simnett]

If you can get to New York Times content (free with registration I think) this is quite interesting on TikTok- how they are already selling books and potential plans to be a publisher.

TikTok Sells a Lot of Books. Now, Its Owner Wants to Publish Them, Too.

As ByteDance launches a publishing company, many in the book world wonder if it will create an uneven playing field by boosting its own authors at the expense of others.

www.nytimes.com

I think one observation is that for people/companies who already have an audience, selling books is a way of making money from that audience. It is less clear that it make sense to create an audience as a starting point (so if you have audience then you can monetize via books, but you can't obviously start from books (i.e. the audiences don't identify and aggregate as "book buyers")). That might be a bit different for focused genres, but I doubt you could start a (for example) romantasy audience, from zero, with a first book or so. You'd need some other reason for people to be your audience.

This suggests to me publishers should be doing deals with audience owners (like they used to do with serializing books in popular newspapers?)

 

[E G Logan]

(like they used to do with serializing books in popular newspapers?)

I worked, at first as the most junior member of the Fiction department, in women's magazines back when they used to serialise novels by big authors. Usually timed alongside hardback publication.

I must admit I never could see how it would work for the publisher: we never normally published fewer than 8 weekly episodes – maybe 6 for a shorter book – and I can remember 10 once for a biggish book we'd paid a lot for. In a serialisation like that, regular readers have pretty much the entire book. Why then buy it?

I suppose buy the book as a gift for someone? Or rush to buy the author's next book? I still don't know.