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If you are still fixated on creating a paper based book - get over it ! This is the new millennium baby and things they are a changin'. It wasn't that long ago that I told a group of budding authors that "no problem ... paper based books will be around for many decades to come". Boy, am I eating my words now. In just the past couple of years we have seen "digital books" making huge leaps in the market in terms of sales and acceptability with readers. Speaking of readers, from a couple of years ago when there were only a couple of, well ... not that great ... readers on the market, now we are being flooded with a vast array of dedicated readers and muliti-tasking reads, and of course there is still our computer screens that we can use to read books with too, but like paper based books, the computer screen based books are also slowly fading to more dedicated books like "How To" and instructional books. Most authors have had visions of producing a wonderful, great quality, hard cover book. If you haven't produced one of these by now, you probably won't - period. The cost of these can be horrific and unless you have instant sales this form of book is quickly becoming lost and here's why. Book distributors and producers are finding it is just too expensive to warehouse "paper" which is precisely what they are doing by having a warehouse of books. What is slowly taking over are the book printers who can do short runs of books ... 15, 20, 50 and so on. Then the distributors don't have to warehouse the books, they can even have them shipped directly from the publishers shipping dock. This fact ALONE is changing how publishers are looking a new authors, and making decisions on whether or not they want to even publish their works. The BIG eBook problem is ... ebooks are cheap to produce, easy to store, becoming VERY popular and they are like printing money. You have one file, you make 50 copies, send them out over the Internet ... get paid and ... Zip Bang! ... you are now in the eBook business. The BIG eBook problem is ... what format do I choose? The answer of course is all of them because we know every format we have now will likely be around for a long time so you will need to accommodate everyone's reader. The BIG eBook problem is ... how on earth do I sell my books? I can't just dump a bunch off at the bookstore and let them do all the work for me by selling my books ... now I have to do something. Yup, and that's the difference. With new markets come new ways of marketing, new ideas and new methodologies. The BIG eBook problem is not the digital books, it's the authors and getting them to think "new" and "different". The day of paper are behind us. Each year digital books will take over more and more. Brick and mortar libraries, filled with paperback books will very quickly become empty tombs of knowledge that nobody attends (some are now at that stage) and with all of this the paper back book will substantially fade from use ... at least in the capacity we have become accustomed to it. Yes there will always be a need a use for paper based books, but anyone who wants to forge ahead as an author of the future is already thinking digital ... what are you thinking? Copyright - Colin Knecht
bookmarkselfpublishing.com
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