Music sales today...

[R_of_G]

Yep it is exactly the same for literature as well...I just got another no thanks letter for my 1St book (400+ pages of fantasy adventure) and it was accompanied by a letter lamenting just these issues - these days it is a big risk to publish anything by unknown authors, ebooks etc. Are eating away readership and for an unknown author, the novel would have to be truly exceptional to warrant publication these days.

Well, Im gonna try and finish my second novel (scifi this time) in the next few months anyway...hopefully I can make that "exceptional", Lol...

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Perhaps you can eBook the first one and sell it for $1 and market the hell out of it on social media and through other means available to you via the internet. If you can build a readership that way you can demonstrate to a publisher that there is a certain demand for your work that might mitigate the risk of working with an unknown author. Either that or you can continue to publish them as eBooks yourself and just charge more once you've established a readership. Dunno. For a buck, I'd read pretty much anything once.

[tunghaichuan***]

Perhaps you can eBook the first one and sell it for $1 and market the hell out of it on social media and through other means available to you via the internet. If you can build a readership that way you can demonstrate to a publisher that there is a certain demand for your work that might mitigate the risk of working with an unknown author. Either that or you can continue to publish them as eBooks yourself and just charge more once you've established a readership. Dunno. For a buck, I'd read pretty much anything once.

+1

I'd look at publishing in ebook format for Kindle and Nook. Remember that most big-selling authors like James Patterson or Stephen King charge $9.99US for their ebooks, so you'll most likely have to charge a lot less. But you can make up for price in volume. A lot of people are willing to take a chance on a $1-$3 ebook.

Traditional print fiction is dead for new authors. Only established authors like the aforementioned Patterson and King still make money publishing that way.

Self publishing in print format for new authors is a risky proposition. I've worked with a local group of self-published authors and a great many of them have cases and cases of printed books they cannot sell. Electronic format is the way to go.

Also, I work in a library, and the person who buys books in my library will not buy self published books. It is too risky: most self-published print books get weeded out of the collection very quickly after low circulation.