I’ve been going back to craft fairs and art markets, which is exciting in its own right, but I’ve started to notice a shift lately. When I talk to people who come to my table interested in the books the first question is if I wrote all of these books. The second is if I published them myself.
The response is significantly more positive than when I started.
There have been a lot of discussions over the last decade of doing this where people have opined about how self publishing is not to be held on the same level as traditional publishing and I have largely learned to tune the think pieces out over the years. I’ve been self conscious about taking the easy way out in publishing off and on for ages and the discussions were ultimately not giving me any new information.
But the thoughts of the people who were actually reading the books, they were the ones I cared a lot more about. The majority of readers aren’t engaged in these online debates, though the hesitancy towards self published works was still definitely there at the start. That seems to be changing now, and the casual reader is a lot more willing to pick up something and give it a try.
Some of this might have to do with being a local author that they were able to speak with directly, granted. But overall, watching the change in attitude gives me a lot of hope. I know how much work I put into my stories, and it’s nice to see that it’s not going to waste.
