Self-pubbed romance author, Jaime McGuire, lands a book deal with Simon & Schuster, under the “Atria” imprint. The book title is Beautiful Disaster.

And, this is going to be digital first publishing:

That book is currently ranked No.1 on our Self-Published Bestsellers List and has sold more than 200,000 copies. Atria will publish the eBook now with a trade paperback coming out in August. In addition, Atria bought the rights to Walking Disaster, the sequel to her novel.

Evidently, McGuire isn’t new to self-publishing. According the the article, she pubbed her fourth novel last May.

You can read more about McGuire and the book here.

What I find interesting is that McGuire decided to take a book deal after so much success in self-publishing. Speaking from my own experience so far with self-publishing, its advantages give authors a great deal of freedom to control and do the things they want to do…things they might not get a chance to do with a publisher.

But, speaking as an author who has worked with publishers for most of his life, I can’t knock the advantage of having a good publisher stand behind you. And when I read things like this I’m not only reminded of the constant changes we’re seeing daily happening in publishing, but also the new choices being offered to authors they didn’t have before. McGuire could have refused the deal and continued to self-publish. Other authors have refused book deals to do this. But she had a choice, and she made a decision that I’m sure was the best decision for her.

I also like the fact that SS is releasing the book in digital format first.

As a sidenote, I think the sentence below is more than interesting, especially after I read two more articles…once again…slamming “Fifty Shades” just yesterday:

Rebecca Watson from Valerie Hoskins Associates (the same agency that represented E. L. James for Fifty Shades of Grey) negotiated the deal with Atria editor Amy Tannenbaum.

Looks like we’re entering a new era of sorts, where big publishers (and agents) who’ve been apprehensive about not only digital publishing, authors published with e-publishers, and self-published authors are now taking notice that people are interested in reading their books. My only one big concern is where does this leave all the smaller e-presses who’ve been pioneering romance books and working on small budgets? Because there’s already plenty of competition out there right now just with small e-presses alone. If the big publishers start jumping into the arena with books like McGuire’s will small e-presses be able to continue to compete?

I have no idea. But it’s going to be interesting to see how all this turns out.