Business Post: Musings on the Future of Publishing (Patreon)

Some of the bigger players in the indie world are watching the changes happening in FB/AMS/Amazon, along with the increasing volume of works that are available / being put out and believe that breaking out for new writers are getting harder and harder. 

Unless you slip into a genre that is underserved and hit it big, the need to do promoting (and often, paid promo) is going to favour older / more established writers and publishers. 

Which is why, there's a belief that small-mid sized publishers are going to come back, people who have specific publishing genres, specialisations and focus who have the newsletter lists, the branding, to hit these specialised sub-genres well.  

At the same time, I am seeing a lot of people pushing wide, taking advantage of Patreon, RR, Kickstarter, their own sites to avoid the big $ amounts that these media companies take, while not giving back anything to the authors, etc.

Meanwhile, micro-subscription services like Ghost, Substack, Patreon, Kofi, etc mean that people can subscribe, pay a bit and support people, making it viable to make do with smaller audiences.  

I think, seeing those two aspects - a service that ties in stuff so that you can leverage systems across groups would make sense.

For example, I've got a Shopify store, if someone else has Shopify in my genre, somehow being able to connect this and others into a massive store without more backend problems would benefit us all; while keeping the customer data on my side. 

Or say, subscription services so that interesting newsletters come to me, showcase a few other new /interesting people curated by someone I trust; but with me giving a single $ amount and place instead of having to subscribe to a dozen different sites.

So, yeah - similar idea to what we're talking about in terms of social groupings, etc. becoming more formalised; along with publishers doing the same thing.