There are many authors featured there who have never had a traditional publisher. Everyone is talking now about Amanda Hocking, who has sold more than half a million ebooks in less than two years. This is not the norm, of course, but it shows that one can become a bestseller.

I don’t know if trad publishing is the brass ring or not, but I know that I was always too frightened to self-pub before because I was given to understand it would ruin my chances at a “real” publishing contract. I’m not afraid of that any more. If you can sell enough books to live on, that’s the “real” deal. I have already seen many cases where big pubs are wooing successful indie authors. The question the publishers have to answer is what is the added value that they bring to an author who is already paying their mortgage with their writing.

Note, I don’t disagree about the crud. The majority of self-pubbed writers are not serious or realistic about it, and they would have been unlikely to have been successful in trad publishing either. They aren’t anything publishers need to worry about. If anything, the gobs of bad books probably drive readers to look for a trusted brand, a publisher.

But I am talking about writers who had or could have held out for traditional publishing contracts and chose to self-publish instead. Here is the paradox: the writers who will do well in self-publishing are the same writers it will most hurt publishers to lose: writers who are talented, prolific and savvy about marketing.

I know of a couple small pubs who are hurting because of authors breaking contracts to self-publish, or demanding their rights back. I don’t know if that’s been a problem for you, but in this market climate, I’d say it’s a danger.

In a year or two, all publishers may switch to selling ebooks, and it’s possible that once again there will be no advantage to self-publishing. Or maybe publishing will be changed forever. Honestly, I don’t know.

Science fiction has a hold over the imagination that is both obsessive and conservative. Star Wars, Dr Who, Star Trek all inspire loyalty in audiences completely disproportionate to their artistic merit. Deviation from the established formulae – the rules of the fictional universe in which the drama unfolds – is despised by the hardcore fans. Star Wars loyalists didn’t hate the Phantom Menace because the acting and script were so bad, but because it contained canonical travesties. It had scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo terms that were new. It created anachronisms that made nonsense of the film’s status as a prequel to the original Star Wars. There were things that were not in the spirit of the original. Likewise, the one-off 1996 Dr Who TV movie, starring Paul McGann, in which The Doctor is revealed to be part human, is loathed by real fans with a passion usually reserved for religious heresy. And why? Because, in a sense, it was religious heresy.

The successful science fiction series creates an alternative universe that can be grasped as a system. Any number of different stories might unfold therein, and all sorts of wild flights of fantasy can take off, but they must be justified without doing violence to the overall coherence of the system. Trivial details – the number of wrinkles on a Klingon’s brow – make up a body of sci fi law that is guarded, studied and debated by fans with the passion of Talmud scholars. In Star Wars as in any creed there are orthodoxies, schism and blasphemy.

But the appeal of the sci fi system to the ordinary fan lies not just in its orderliness, but in its finiteness. As with any holy text, the science fiction universe is knowable in its entirety. You can watch every single episode of Star Trek and learn everything there is to know about it. You can contain an entire universe in lists and DVDs. The kind of universe that is knowable by heart is much less threatening than the real universe outside, off screen, full of unpredictability and disorder.

It is my contention that the reassurance offered by a system of order, internal coherence, completability and collectability – a universe that can be put in alphabetical order – is particularly appealing to men.