21 Jul Bainbridge is Self-Publishing His Latest Book
As I discussed in a recent post, “the new age of self-publishing is fast approaching the world of legal scholarship. It will just take a few legacy scholars to create a norm cascade that will rock the world of legacy publishing.” Self-publishing is the new, new thing. We’ve already embraced it with blogging and SSRN, and now some prominent scholars are experimenting with self-publishing books.
Stephen Bainbridge’s latest book, Directors as Auctioneers: A Concise Guide to Revlon-Land has just been released as an Amazon Kindle Edition. Here’s how Bainbridge describes his experiment with self-publishing:
A while back, the Chancery Court issued the series of Revlon decisions mentioned above. As I thought about those decisions, it occurred to me that this was an ideal project to try self-publishing. I could update, expand, and augment older work on Revlon and offer up a new and improved analysis in a different package. I could reach a different audience than law review readers and make a few bucks at the same time. Hence, this experiment. I’ll be interested to get reactions to this new possibility for getting one’s ideas out into the market.
I’ll be curious how the experiment goes. My one suggestion for Bainbridge is that he price it at $4.99 or less, which seems to be the norm for e-published books, instead of $9.99. If the goal is more eyeballs, a better experiment would be to take full advantage of the pricing flexibility offered by self-publishing. (Notice that the author, not the publisher, gets to decide the appropriate price point for the book).
For those interesting in self-publishing ebooks, CNET editor David Carnoy has a nice summary here. You can also self-publish paperback books with print-on-demand (POD) services. Carnoy’s summary of that process is here.
BTW, what are the top-selling international relations books on Amazon right now? Two self-published ebooks by journalists, The Hunt for Bin Laden and The Instigators, both short Kindle Single edition books priced at $1.99.
New? I set up JEMBook Publishing (a sole proprietorship) in the early 1990s, and self-published “BETTER THAT 100 WITCHES SHOULD LIVE: The 1696 Acquittal of Thomas Maule of Salem, Massachusetts, on Charges of Seditious Libel and Its Impact on The Development of First Amendment Freedoms” and it’s done ok. Not a best seller, but it;s in circulation. And it’s been cited. It wasn’t done through a vanity press. I wrote it, set up the pages, dealt with the printer, etc. etc. So a for “The New, New Thing”? Hardly. Perhaps “increasingly visible” works.