A cheap Chinese iPhone? You realize iPhone is a brand name, right? A non-apple manufacturer has no business calling their smartphone an iPhone. There are plenty of competing smart phones on the market.
The choice of what medium to publish on is all about how to best market your product. There are no shortage of books to read. So the first thing a consumer will ask is "Why should I read your book?" It's not even a question of why they should purchase your book. You have to motivate them to want to read your book before you can ask them for money.
So the issue is, what was my business plan. For me, I posted my work-in-progress on Wattpad. It's been reasonably well. It's had 29.5K reads, 2K votes, and has gotten 1.1k comments. And most of those comments have been positive. It's been ranking in the "What's Hot" section of it's genre pretty much since a month after I started syndicating the chapters. I expected the rate of new readers would go down once I posted the last chapter, but instead I found I had readers who had started reading the book 6 months earlier pick it up and finish the book just as I posted the last chapters. And since it's completion, the number of new reads has been significantly going up. I get about 2K new reads each week.
If I were charging money for the book, this could not happen. In fact, I don't even think this could happen on Kindle Unlimited for me because it was really the fact that Wattpad is based on a social network model. My readers comment on lines. I internet with them and it builds a bit of a friendship with your fans. But even more importantly, is that some of those fans are other authors. YOu build friendships and ask the question of "Does this person right well?" If they really impress you, you recommend their book to their friends. And you create reading lists of books you like. So when someone is viewing my profile, the first books they see are mine, but then after that they see all the books I'm recommending through my reading list.
Now, there are all sorts of ideas circulating about how to move from Wattpad to self publishing. Some people say you need to self publish new material that you keep off of Wattpad. Some say your book needs to reach a million reads before you have enough fans to really support you into the transition to self publishing. But what I have on Wattpad is my work-in-progress. What I'll be offering my fans is a finished product. So what can I offer them that they might like? Well, I could put it on ebook, but that's not really offering them much. That's just saying "Look, I want your money now. Feed me." Instead, I'm offering them a paperback. If they loved my book enough to actually spend money, than now they can hold it in their hands.
Now I'm not going to be expecting to make lots of sales from this. I'll keep the work in progress up, and add a comment about the books availability. I'll mention it on my profile page. We'll see how it goes. Then I'll consider the Kindle marketplace. Then I'll take the time to format the product for ebook. By the time it's available on ebook, it should have reviews from my Wattpad fans. It will have been available for awhile. And Kindle users who have yet to hear about Wattpad may purchase it on ebook. I am still not sure about Kindle Unlimited though. If I put it on there, I'll only be able to post a preview of the book on Wattpad. I'm not sure if it's the best marketing decision.
But regardless, the point is that this entire journey doesn't promise me a whole lot of money. I have to ask myself what level of editing is cost efficient. And my readers will simply know that, yes, I'm a beginning self-published author. I shouldn't pretend not to be.
And mind you, I have Wattpad friends who don't post works-in-progress on Wattpad. They don't have books available to purchase, but they do have people copyedit their stuff before posting in order to build their fandom on Wattpad. I think this really does push them to have to rely on writing new material to sell rather than offering the final version on paperbook.
I don't think there's one right way to do it. But I do see a lot of people wanting to self publish and hire an editor, and when they read some of the articles online, they think they can't afford it. My idea is all about enabling the consumer to spend less money while gaining a better product. Because right now a lot of new copyeditors try to appeal to this market by underselling their work by charging too little per word/page/hour in order to complete a very large product. If we can divide the labor up and mentor each other along the way, we reduce our work load so that we can charge more, all while decreasing the overall cost for the author. It really isn't all that different from how publishing houses do it. They hire interns and have multiple levels of copyeditors.
There's an interesting article in copyediting.com about how the quality of copyediting may be going down hill because internships have disappeared and so many traditional publishing institutions are crumbling that they're laying off their employees. This is all about figuring out a new way to gain the experience we need.