Continuous interest in e-books, print on demand and audio books led to a rising growth in the US self- publishing segment despite the slowdown in the general publishing industry.
According to “Forbes” magazine, In 2017, the self-publishing segment grew at a rate of more than 28% with the total number of self-published titles rising from 786,935 to 1,009,188, surpassing the million mark for the first time, said the latest report by Bowker, a ProQuest affiliate.
Self-publishing of print books also increased for the fifth consecutive year, due to a
50% increase at the popular CreateSpace, which was recently acquired by the self-publishing platform Amazon KDP.
In fact, self-publishing will continue to rise as a result of the popularity of CreateSpace in 2017, and because its customers will continue to move to the new Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
All signs indicate that self-publishing segment will not slow down and will continue to grow at a steady rate far beyond the traditional book industry whose revenues have been recording flat rates.
An annual report by the Association of American Publishers showed that the US book publishing industry generated a flat rate which is estimated at $26.23 billion in net revenue for the year 2017, representing 2.72 billion books.
With the anticipated continuous growth of the self-publishing segment, new opportunities have come up for entrepreneurs who can launch startups specialized in the very much needed related services by new writers and authors.
New authors need a variety of services including writing classes, editing books, design covers and marketing campaigns.
They equally need to understand how they can format their books for Amazon and organise and SEO the content so that buyers can find their books.
