Freedom From - Self-Publishing v. Publishers

I'm having a hard time writing as many posts as I would like because I am so focused on my next book. For that, I do apologize.  Still, the book is exciting because I am exploring different things than I had before.  Saturday was spent almost entirely on research about underworlds and gods of war.

The more I write and the more I see, the less interested in supporting corporate entities I am. Unfortunately, most publishers that can make you any money are very large corporations.  I am more and more convinced however I should go the independent publishing route for multiple reasons.  The first is that after initial fees for copyrighting information, I can put my ebook on multiple websites and have it accessible for millions of readers in minutes.  Second, I can cut down on overhead.  The amount of money that goes into my pocket (which might seem like only a little bit for each ebook sale, but is comparable to what royalties you might get with a large publishing house) is greater overall.  I'm not paying anyone's salary.  It's just the value a person associates with reading my story. 

Likewise, it is possible to go to a printing house and have a small run printed of your book.  You could even do a large run, and assuming you have a distributer, you can get your paper copy across the country with the proper amount of motivation.  My main concern about self-publishing is the paper copies.  I'm not sure how well that process can work for the individual.  You don't have the extra support you might have with a publishing house.  It's true I could publish an ebook and be amazingly successful and then have some publishing house come to me asking for print rights.  It's hard to tell what would happen at that point, and then I'm not entirely sure if I would even want them to have the rights.  I have mixed feelings about it.

The reason I have mixed feelings about it, is that so many corporations will copyright so many things that aren't really theirs.  For example, Facebook owns the rights to anything you publish to their site. So anything you put on Facebook which has never been put anywhere else is owned by them.  They can literally sell all of your information.  That seems wrong to me.  Your pictures should be yours.  Your random notes should be yours, but they aren't.  Intellectual property has gone to its illogical conclusion with even genomes being owned.  So why would I encourage this behavior by electing to have my creative products effectively owned and packaged by corporations? Granted, the guys who own genomes don't really get into literature, but the idea is the same.  I want to keep my food, my home, and my thoughts free from these corporate leviathans as much as possible.  It might make things a little less convenient in some ways for me, but in others, it's priceless.