There was an interesting exchange on Twitter this morning. I retweeted a tweet from a talk by <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/MarshallBuckley" target="_blank">Marshall Buckley</a> who was listening a talk by the writer <a href="http://nicolamorgan.com/" target="_blank">Nicola Morgan</a>. It read,  'self pub mostly selling to other unpublished writers. That's great but unsustainable.'

Seemed an interesting comment. Certainly got some interesting responses. So is the current level of self pubbing unsustainable? Honest answer: no one knows. But there are questions to be asked. Here are some...

<strong>What happens when the material runs out. </strong>Let's be honest. A lot of the stuff going up there right now is old material. Backlist (some of mine there -- why wouldn't I?) Rejected manuscripts. Hastily-finished manuscripts seeking a new market. Nothing wrong with topping and tailing some old stuff and getting it into the system.

But that doesn't take long. What happens when the cupboard is bare and you have to write everything from scratch? Will you still manage to summon up the energy a year from now if the money's still just a trickle and the chances of a mainstream publishing contract seem no nearer?

<strong>Amanda Hocking. </strong>Is a great media story and totally atypical. What happened to Ms Hocking is unlikely to happen to any but a handful of people. Best to believe one of them will not be you. Oh, and Ms Hocking just signed a conventional pub deal too, which is very sensible of her in my view. Again... why wouldn't you?

<strong>Market saturation</strong>. There's a real flood of material at the moment. How do you differentiate yourself? How you make yourself known? Social media is seen to be the answer, with a flood of activity on Twitter and Facebook. But let's be honest: most social media only reaches a relatively small number of people, unless you're a big name already (and if you are then you're probably not self-pubbing -- yet anyway). It also takes enormous amounts of time and, frankly, isn't half as much fun as writing.

<strong>Standards and distributors. </strong>Smashwords, Kindle, iBooks, Google Books, Kobo, Nook... Yes, you can lay off your work by going to an aggregator but that doesn't solve all the problems. Is it worth the hassle? Does the public really care about all these different ways of buying a book? My prediction: it's Kindle's day frankly. Amazon have done their job so smartly in having their own hardware and apps for others devices. Though if Apple kick them off the iPad... sheesh. Is this the kind of turf war authors should really be involved in? Aren't we supposed to be writing instead?

<strong>Visibility. </strong>One of the ways authors get known is by appearing in public. Book stores are obviously out as are libraries. Which leaves literary events. Are self-pubbed writers going to get seats on the platform at festivals? One day I guess. But it's a tough call. Self-pubbers may think their exclusion is down to snobbery. And maybe sometimes it is. But I've worked alongside festival organisers and I know how very difficult their job is. Imagine someone saying to them: let's bring in self-pubbed authors. How on earth do you pick the ones allowed through the gate? And whoever you do pick won't the other still be hacked off. I wouldn't want to be the festival organiser dealing with that particular dilemma.

<strong>MP3.com. </strong>Anyone remember them? Huge during the digital music book of the late 90s. Lots of amateurs suddenly found they could upload their music, get it online, look professional, and end up with some money too. Except it petered out, as did the money. Why? The one musician I knew who used it got sick of the work involved and the lack of income and decided he'd rather be gigging and doing other things. True, books aren't exactly the same. But there are similarities. Lots of work, not much income.

Mp3.com <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com" target="_blank">came a cropper in the dotcom crash of 2001 and got sold to Vivendi for $372 million</a>. Vivendi got nowhere with the idea and later offloaded the logo and name to Cnet which now uses it for a very orthodox music site. And look who are the big acts on there today.

<a href="http://www.mp3.com/top100.html" target="_blank"><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-8154" title="Screen shot 2011-04-16 at 12.50.43" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-16-at-12.50.43-640x825.png" alt="" width="635" height="818" /></a>

Ah, right. The big names of yesterday.

Perhaps mp3.com says nothing about the ebook self-pub boom. I really don't know. Is it sustainable? We'll see.

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