Today, authors are free. You can publish in any way which suits you, because book publishing changed forever in 2007 when Amazon released its Kindle device.
Suddenly, midlist authors, who’d watched their careers die, had an option. They could self-publish.
What’s the “midlist”? Midlist books were once the majority of published books — bread and butter books which made a small profit for a publisher.
In the 1990s, publishers consolidated; fewer midlist books were published. Instead, publishers focused on “frontlist” books: those books which were (they hoped) bestsellers.
Establishment publishing killed the midlist in the 1990s
In 1994 I interviewed the CEO of a major publishing house about consolidation and the death of the midlist. From a Publishers Weekly article in 2011:
With consolidation, the big players began swinging for the fences, focusing on acquiring big bestsellers (or at least books they thought they could turn into big bestsellers), abandoning a model in which they could make small amounts of money on books for audiences of varying sizes. Now, as a result of these changes, the sea of authors who sold modestly at the big six are increasingly being turned away.
