Jonathan Fields
Blogger, serial entrepreneur, book marketer and author of Career Renegade
Writing in The Huffington Post: December 15, 2009

Everyone's clamoring about the rise of the Indie author.
Editors, designers, publicists, printers and even sales people can be hired. Real ones. Good ones. Often the very same ones you'd have worked with in house.

Couple that with blended printing and distribution channels, like LightningSource, who'll spank out print on demand books so fast, they'll let you remain listed as in-stock online, and you've got a recipe for Indie author world domination...maybe.

There are still a few major missing pieces of the puzzle.

1. Distribution. It's true, more and more sales are being funneled through online channels and ebooks are quickly growing into real elements of the bookselling mix. But, traditional publishing is still the fastest and easiest way to get your book on the shelves of the big box stores. And, those shelves, revered or reviled, still sell a ton of books every year.

Not that it's impossible to get books there yourself. Build a strong enough platform to push your book to the top of Amazon and bn.com for a few weeks or months and fuel an endless sea of people to badger local managers enough, you're very likely going to end up on the shelves. Slowly, but surely. It's doable. Witness Peter Bowerman and his still indie, yet widely distributed and always stocked Well-Fed Writer series.

2. Mega-Filters. Here's where one of the real value propositions of traditional publishing is right now. It may not be there tomorrow, but for now, a book that's out from a major publisher AND is on brick and mortar shelves is assumed to have been vetted and filtered. Meaning, it's worth the read.
Read Jonathan's full piece at The Huffington Post online.