Book Authors in a New Blogging World

The advent of the internet has changed the way the world operates with the same powerful ripple that the printing press caused in 1450 and for the same reason. The average citizen can once again more easily find out that a lot of other people were thinking the same thing.

Finding out you’re not unique can fuel courage to get up and do something.

Librarians have known for a long time that books, even works of fiction, can transform lives no matter where the reader lives. They can teach us not only that we’re not alone but that there’s more than one way to look at any given situation.

The world opens up to a million possibilities and that business idea that your entire family hates suddenly has a receptive audience.

However, for the average author the advent of the internet at first looked like it might be the end of a viable career-choice and not a new beginning. Publishing houses were slashing their mid-list authors, the writers whose books sell reasonable numbers but never break out into the territory of bestseller. During the height of the Great Recession many houses closed altogether.

But something else was happening at the same time that was going to change everything. In 2007 the first e-reader, the Kindle from Amazon was introduced on the Oprah show by Jeff Bezos and writers got a new, economical way to deliver a book.

The book market was about to become a democracy with all of the loud voices, terrible covers, great new writers and unedited manuscripts that usually go with an open door to a lot of wannabe writers.

For the rest of my blog post, check out my blog at http://www.marthacarr.com/wpmc/news/bloggers-in-a-new-book-world/

Thanks, Martha