Thursday, January 14, 2010

Novelists

I'm scouring the internet for news on the publishing world. What was common place just five years ago is now taboo. It seems that one good thing that came out of the economic down turn is there were more new novelists born in 2009 than any other year on record. Now that the books that were written last year, including the thousands of titles written in November for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).

The changes don't stop there. "Publishing is not the same".

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Walden Books are just a few of the big names in book selling. They were supplied by publishers from around the world, new authors fell under the spell of their first literary agent, the manuscript was sold and printed and available from these mega book dealers.

Today the landscape has changed for publishers, retailers, wholesalers, and writers. "Writers have more options than ever before to bring a book to market." They have those choices because the consumer is changing their buying habits when it comes to the purchase of original works, books that is. The consumer is driving more content into digital format because it is cheaper to buy, easier to buy, comes from one platform, and an impulse to buy makes it more profitable for the writers who self publish. There are more pay to edit publishers than ever before and the numbers of new release titles will skyrocket for the foreseeable future.

My own first work is available to be read (at least a good portion of it) right from its fan page on Facebook. "Marketing has come to the author in a big way."

Before the internet, at least before amazon, writer's who have to go from bookstore to bookstore pushing their words. Conventions and speaking engagements gave writer's a place to market themselves and their books. Now, Facebook, and Twitter dominate. It's like a virtual convention whenever you turn on the computer. If you don;t have at least 50 friends to tell your story to, then you haven't met the internet lately, and as an author, you are doing yourself a disservice. Get your name, your title, your story online and you might be able to stop worrying about what publisher is going to pick up your next work. Maybe you can do a better job of promoting yourself and your book and now you really have the tools to do just that.

Facebook

"I'm not going to tell you how to use Facebook but I will tell you that you can do more with that site than make your own personal profile page. There are fan pages that you can make for each title you have, or make a collection page that people can come and follow. Pay for adverts that will bring in more followers and readers will follow that information to your point of sale.

"Now where is your point of sale?"

"Put it on your own website and sell it to your network." Do it like that and you keep everything. While publishers will cut you a royalty percentage, imagine if you could market yourself well enough to drive traffic into your own site, sell the digital copy through email or digital reading script, .pdf, or bound and covered through the mail. You get the best returns but you have to be the one driving sales.

"You can have your cake and eat it to with the right combination of virtual publishing and marketing combined with in store sales of your titles in bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, and the other popular book stores. Online and off, you can get a bigger return on investment when you do as much of the work yourself. It ensures you of the best percentages, you get to keep the most rights to your works, and you will be able to see a future in royalties with the digital text industry booming into 2015.

So, write a damn book if you're out of work. Publish it yourself if you're so inclined. Get the story down on paper and then turn it digital to take your earnings into the future with every new title you write.

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