writing

Caveat: Have done technical writing professionally, but haven't yet had my fiction published. Aside from some ghost writing, I suppose.

Long-term, I've had my eyes on a hybrid of traditional and self-publishing, mostly from a purely business perspective. Self-publishing in order to keep the majority of my IP in my own hands, but also doing something in traditional publishing for the publicity boost. Assuming, of course, I write something they want.

I've always had my eyes on writing as a career, so I want to make moves that make sense from a business perspective, and it's pretty risky to put all your eggs in one basket.

Like, say you launch a career solely publishing on Amazon. Well, next Friday Amazon could roll out some change that breaks everything you built, and li'l old you as a one-person business isn't going to have pockets deep enough to get into any legal battles with them even IF they do something illegal. Best to spread out the risk between multiple platforms.

Same idea with doing a hybrid of self/traditional publishing...spread out career risk over multiple platforms.

One of the the old, well-known and long-lasting Sci-Fi and Fantasy imprints, DAW, was not too long ago sold to a publishing company based in China (Astra Publishing House).

That sort of stuff alarms me, because I know that companies in China, especially media companies, absolutely have to toe the governmental line.

So them buying an American imprint that publishes visionary, forward-thinking books (sci-fi and fantasy) by English-speaking authors looks predatory to me, given how censorship goes in China. Like...why did they want that? I don't think it's as simple as "money".

So I want to make sure as I build my career I don't have all my eggs in one place, be it with one traditional publishing imprint, or one distributor (such as Amazon), etc. If I have traditionally published books, I want to try to scatter them among imprints so if one goes under or is sold like DAW was, it won't hurt my income stream. Similarly, if I have self-published works, I want them available on multiple platforms.

Diversity is good.