You’ve never heard of the author before, and the cover looks like it was drawn someone who flunked out of art school, but it’s the number one book on the Amazon Best Seller list, even outselling Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. And it’s completely self-published.
It’s called ‘The Rabbit Who Wants To Fall Asleep’ and it’s by Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin, who promises the book helps children fall asleep at bedtime. Though its success may say more about the state of parents’ desperation for sleep than its quality, what fascinates me is that this humble book is now a bestseller, the first time an independent author has taken the number one position on the Amazon print books chart.
Ehrlin told the Guardian that he has been contacted by publishers but has so far turned them down because he believes he has “found a good strategy to succeed without other publishers.
“In Sweden, I see a trend that the books that sell best are often self-published. There’s a new era growing in the book business where people who are active in social media become the new bestsellers.”
And why not? In a previous life, when I dreamed of being a best selling author, I worked in a small publishing company that accepted open submissions from authors. We were a very small company, no big name or prestige, but the amount of manuscripts that were submitted was staggering, and in my time there (almost a year), we accepted only one. Yes, some of them left a lot to be desired and a handful were simply unreadable. But many of them were probably very good; they just didn’t attract the attention of the open submissions editor that day. Writing a thorough story on the importance of military uniforms during a specific battle during the American Civil War? Sorry, not my topic, so on my day it went straight back on the slush pile.
But there is surely an audience out there for that Civil War story, just as there is likely an audience for most of the manuscripts that sat languishing on that desk. The audience of exhausted parents who brought Ehrlin’s book is certainly larger than usual, but still, an audience is an audience. And I think that most authors set out to write not necessarily to make millions (though that is always a plus), but to reach and touch people.
We’ve seen this kind of transformation already with the music industry and the newspaper industry, with creators bypassing the major industry brands and making their material available directly to the public.
You may not reach the millions you could through a major publishing house, but in the Networked Society, you have the chance to tell your story, and isn’t that the most important thing in the end?
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