Wake up call for writers and authors

I thought it was about time that someone started a blog that aims to awaken authors and writers from their 100-year slumber and takes them into the 21st century of publishing. There are thousands of writers support websites and blogs out there … somehow though I feel that most of them are stuck in the pre-Internet era. Although most of them make use of the Internet for communication (and very few of them for marketing their work) but when it comes to publishing all they talk about is getting that deal with a big publisher. And of course only hardcopies count – electronic publishing is hardly ever mentioned (apart from ebooks which in most cases are electronic copies of books that are in print).

All of this in a day and age when there are plenty of reasons to let go of the old paradigm of print publishing and look forward to the era of true end-to-end electronic publishing. For starters there’s global warming and water resource shortage. Surely we should start looking into making that shift from paper-based reading to e-reading for the benefit of the planet alone.  The technology to make this possible has been around for decades. Secondly the paper-based format is getting less and less appealing for certain target markets. More importantly if the Internet is about anything it is about disintermediation – in this case direct interaction between writers and readers.  Finally it’s a volume problem – there are simply too many people who love writing and want to get their book out and not enough people who are prepared to buy these books for the typical RRPs.

The solution is simple – don’t print and publish directly. What’s preventing the industry to do this? FEAR. Just like with the music industry it’s all about the middle man lobby and the scare tactics around IP protection. Fortunately the music industry has learned quickly that everyone will be better off with sites like iTunes. So they abandoned the whole Digital Rights Management issue (thank god). Most people want to do the right thing and buy their music – and it’s easy to do when a song is $1 and 3 mouse clicks away.

There is a fantastic opportunity now for the publishing industry to go through the same process (but faster). It will happen anyway – so embrace it rather than fight it.

Bookhabit.com is making a start – it’s a great service for unpublished authors. It’s a win-win, everyone on the planet gets access to fresh material and writers get 40% (!) of the earnings. Authors literally end up with about the same $ value in their pocked as with traditional publishing since the retail and publisher margins are huge (driven by unnecessary printing and distribution cost). Even the publishers win since the site works as a test platform for new authors. They can still decide to print a book that has sold 1000s of copies online for all those people out there who just prefer to hold that book in their hands.

Great!

-The Bookidol