I’m currently in Halle on Saale (for what I’m doing there, see here) and just saw a news report about the opening of the Leipzig bookfair (which is currently taking place barely thirty kilometers from where I am and yet I cannot go) on the nightly news. And among other things, there was a quite lengthy segment about self-publishing. And remarkably – particularly considering that it was the rather conservative ARD – it was unbiased. There was no mention of Amazon KDP, just screenshots of some German self-publishing platforms, but then ARD has decided that Amazon is a hotbed of exploitation and NeoNazi activity (that dreadful TV report of a few weeks back that I did not dignify with a link). I don’t have a link for this report either, cause I can’t find it in the ARD mediathek.
The report presented two German indie authors, Anna Kaleri, a hybrid author who self-published a children’s book (and a journalist working for an ARD affiliate in her day job, it turns out), and Marah Woolf, a self-published paranormal romance author, who sold a for Germany staggering 70000 copies of her trilogy and just won the indie author award of the German book fair (there is one?). Ms. Woolf also has an active blog here. They also interviewed a member of the jury for the award, who offered a cautioning voice that many authors only sell a handful of copies per months.
Still, this was a very positive report (except for the curious omission of Amazon KDP or Kobo Writing Life or any platform anybody actually uses) and made me even sadder that I won’t get to visit the bookfair, even though I’m only thirty kilometers away.
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