Arielle Ford: The Golden Age of Authors: Why Books Are Alive and Well
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'via Blog this'
The stats are in:
Americans, young and old, are reading actively in all print and digital formatsThis makes a great follow up to yesterday's post regarding the, to my mind misguided, war between Amazon.com and similar online platforms for publishing and distribution of print media and the old vanguard of big publishing houses and big bookstore chains.
The truth is showing up in the numbers but why isn't it just plain intuitive that if you have more of something available in more formats more people will use it? And if you have formats that can reach billions in seconds isn't it obvious more appetites will be whetted and sated?
One of the really amazing things about the web is the way those with similar tastes can find each other and in their digital fellowship know exactly how to provide the very thing that answers to their fellow fan's craving.
Once maybe a new author or artist needed the echelon of professional editors and promoters the big publishing houses provided because the tools required to do it well were expensive and often individually too large for the family garage let alone the family room. Now all of those same tools and techniques are available to anyone from the fourteen year old Junior High geek to the frumpy granny in gingham. All of them together fitting in junior's backpack or granny's handbag. As long as they have web access, curiosity and the willingness to learn they can avail themselves of all the same techniques the old bastion used to generate hype and create desires only they could fulfill.
The difference being that for them the cost of such promotion was so prohibitive they could only do it for a few and in order to profit had to create huge mass audiences for their fair. Not so for granny and junior. They can start reaping profit with only a few thousand fans/customers and yet if persistent can go on to create the tidal wave of want known as going viral that can put them on the map.
1 tell me a story:
I agree with you, about some stuffy suits and the web. I am loving doing school on-line and having the University library at my finger tips for doing study work. I happen to love using Amazon and good reads to get great book ideas and to purchase books to read. I sometimes think that the literature world forgets that it is the average Jane/Joe who purchases books and sometimes they are not as critical as you think they are and they just want it to be available to them and easy to access and to purchase and not have to go through a lot of channels and that is what Amazon and other places like that does. They should work with Amazon and not punch it in the nose. That is my opinion and I am the first one to admit that I am not a literature professor or some kind of genius when it comes to writing.
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