Indie Music vs. Indie Publishing
Last night I went to see Brandi Carlile and the Indigo Girls in concert (it was awesome... a warm night, lawn seats, plenty of snacks and wine, and a full moon). At one point the Girls mentioned they have a new album coming out in early '09, and that it would be on their own label.
"Our old label dropped us," Amy said. "It was awesome."
She didn't say it ironically. It was more like: gee, we could have won the lottery but something better happened! The people bringing our art to the public decided to wash their hands of us. Yippee!
Can you imagine an author saying that?
"I've got ten titles with Big Name Publisher X," they'd say. "Thank God that's over. Two decades of hell. I'm self-publishing from here on out. Screw the big publishers."
Say what you will about self publishing. But if someone's gone the route of conventional publishing and done very well with it, I can't imagine they'd be thrilled to get traded to the other team.
But this is something you see with big names in music, sometimes. They talk about artistic freedom, lowering the cost of music for their fans, and being done with "the suits".
I thought maybe this had to do with volume: that far fewer albums are released per year than books. If that was the case, maybe it would be easier not to "get lost" if you go indie, on the music side. But it's the opposite. A quick (and possibly inaccurate!) Google search says that about 39,000 albums are released each year vs. less than 15,000 "literature" books in the US. Seems to me that musicians have to fight just as hard as self-pubbed authors to get their art out there.
What do you think? Any chance that future big authors will "go indie"? Perhaps as digital book distribution gets easier AND more common, this will start to happen. Or perhaps the two industries are just very different beasts.
"Our old label dropped us," Amy said. "It was awesome."
She didn't say it ironically. It was more like: gee, we could have won the lottery but something better happened! The people bringing our art to the public decided to wash their hands of us. Yippee!
Can you imagine an author saying that?
"I've got ten titles with Big Name Publisher X," they'd say. "Thank God that's over. Two decades of hell. I'm self-publishing from here on out. Screw the big publishers."
Say what you will about self publishing. But if someone's gone the route of conventional publishing and done very well with it, I can't imagine they'd be thrilled to get traded to the other team.
But this is something you see with big names in music, sometimes. They talk about artistic freedom, lowering the cost of music for their fans, and being done with "the suits".
I thought maybe this had to do with volume: that far fewer albums are released per year than books. If that was the case, maybe it would be easier not to "get lost" if you go indie, on the music side. But it's the opposite. A quick (and possibly inaccurate!) Google search says that about 39,000 albums are released each year vs. less than 15,000 "literature" books in the US. Seems to me that musicians have to fight just as hard as self-pubbed authors to get their art out there.
What do you think? Any chance that future big authors will "go indie"? Perhaps as digital book distribution gets easier AND more common, this will start to happen. Or perhaps the two industries are just very different beasts.