Good summary of publishing options

The point here is that rejected manuscripts fall into three categories:
1. Those that simply don't have an audience at all because of their quality and therefore do not belong to the sample space of comparisons. The vast majority of that 90% of slush belong to this category.

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And those are not included in the average sales of trade publishing.

However, people upload crap like that all the time to KDP and they are included in the average sales figures--the ones that say the "average" author on KDP sells fewer than 50 copies.

That's apples to oranges and it makes it very hard to really gauge the power of these new mediums.

At the bottom of all of this is my firm belief that I'm not a good writer and that if my partner and I can make thousands of dollars, anyone can.

Not "average," typical. The average is skewed considerably higher than the mode by the best-sellers.

If you have a thousand books, one of which sells 1,000 copies while the rest only sell one copy each, the average sales are nearly two hundred copies. The typical sales, however, are one.

What no one has ever been able to explain is how a wonderful book that thousands might read with pleasure somehow makes it out of the endless mudflats of KDP without invoking pure blind luck or miracle.

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James D. Macdonald said:

What no one has ever been able to explain is how a wonderful book that thousands might read with pleasure somehow makes it out of the endless mudflats of KDP without invoking pure blind luck or miracle.

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I wrote a long, detailed reply to this. I'm moving it to a separate thread where discussion of all or any of it will be on topic.

James D. Macdonald said:

Out of how many hundreds of thousands?

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How many of these hundreds of thousands are quality writers with multiple books following the best practices for selfpublishing success?

Let's see if we can swing this conversation back round to the original topic, shall we?

And in the meantime, if everyone could please remind themselves of logic and fallacies, and how they work, that would be great.

I thank you.