Sarah, from Marketing Christian Books, has shared some new year self-publishing trends for 2018. There are five things to mull over and I think she’s right.

1. Independent publishing will continue to grow. But this is a mixed blessing. The number of books is growing like crazy, but the number of readers hasn’t changed much since 2012.
2. Amazon will continue to streamline operations for book publishing. There’s good reason to believe that Createspace will disappear and print books will become an offshoot of Kindle—everything going through Kindle. They shut down the Createspace online bookstore in October.
3. Online purchasing will outstrip brick-and-mortar purchasing. This is growing and will continue to accelerate. I can see a day when local craftsmen and women have the only brick and mortar presence.
4. Mobile Internet access will continue to increase. There are many reasons for this. I think many of them are prophetic, but that’s another article for another location.
5. Video will continue to dominate engagement on the web. But this has little effect on books. Most readers will quickly say that books are better and video is a poor substitute for the original book. But this does affect some of our output. My video versions of my two training books are doing very well. They are very different but use the same basic materials. You can certainly expect that aspect of things to grow a lot.

Some new year self-publishing trends for 2018 point the same direction

Traditional publishing is in real trouble. What happens when someone like Baldacci realizes that he really doesn’t need a traditional publisher anymore? More and more non-fiction books will be built off blogs, podcasts, and commentary columns.

A huge unGodly plan lies behind of all of this. We can work within the situation or be left behind. It’s a huge opportunity for self-publishers now—but who knows how long that will remain open?