Happy New Year.
Yeah, that's just how I feel. I am
happy for the first time in my life. Everything is falling into place
and I like that. The thing about being a writer is that you spend
much of your time alone, in a chair, tapping on the keys of a
laptop, computer, typewriter, trying to make your voice heard. That's
the thing, you have to be a solitary man to do this (or woman), and
you have to give up a lot of life to this art if you want to be taken
seriously.
I know, all the successful writers out
there have the opposite to say, some never had a difficult time in
making it to the top, but they are the exceptions to the rule. That's
the funny thing about life. There's always another recourse to
follow. But I can only give you mine. Writing takes time, and it
takes a devotion to the craft. You may never get noticed, you might
be noticed right away. But whatever the case, things are moving fast,
and the fastest are benefiting from it. And the slow...well they are
just slow and don't deserve the worm.
I work every day on my craft. I work
hard and diligently. I want to be taken seriously. I don't want
people to hear that I'm a writer and say to me, oh that's just a
hobby. It's not a hobby and I work hard to prove that. That's just
the way that it is. I think that hobbies are fine, and some people
have turned their hobbies into writing riches, and some have been
plugging at this all their lives and are still not published. The
beauty of it all is Legacy Publishing is on its way out. Every day
they bleed until they are bled white. Sad to say, that's the case and
it's a passing that is, in my book, long deserved.
Many writers claim that there will
always be the Legacy Publishers. They will co exist side by side with
the new wave of indie publishers, just like the music industry is
still strong even though indie musical artists are proliferating. My
question is why do they use this business model to compare to the
publishing model? They are not the same. The music industry still
holds sway over the key ingredient to the masses. Radio. As long as
Djs don't go out there and play indie music, the average person will
never know of them. The music marketing machine has a lock on radio
and magazines. Local indie bands don't stand a chance of being heard
over all this background noise. The music industry's dwindling
profits come from the digitization and proliferation of their music
without having a hand in it. They are losing in sales, not in
marketing.
Unfortunately, for Legacy Publishing,
they haven't been real marketers of books by even their own lesser
known authors. When it comes to marketing anything but their top ten
bestsellers, they could care less. What little they could do for them
is all that they do for them. They want their new authors to go it
on their own, and they do...they have to, because they have to sell
scads of books to see any kind of profit, since the publishing
company is taking the lion's share of the profit.
Social media is the new word for
authors now. Also Search Engine Optimization and Virtual Book Tours
and personal reviewers are spouting up like weeds in a forest and the
big publishing companies are still using television, radio and
poster/billboard campaigns to spread the word. The Tyrannosaurus Rex
is far to stupid to realize where all the food has gone. It didn't
follow the migration, but instead is loitering around at the same
ponds, rivers and high weeds where it's prey used to feed. It missed
the boat so to speak.
Yes, I'm saying it now, as the Legacy
Publishers numbers shrink the proper business model to compare the
current upheaval in the publishing business is that of the business
model of the dinosaur....
Extinction.
Gregory
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