What is a Good Read Worth? (Article) - 4/7/2013 9:32:42 AM
It's not the price of books that is the problem. Anyone can go to a used book store and buy classics for pennies on the dollar. The problem is POD publishers and the Internet. Everybody and his brother is now on the Internet writing to one another in e-mails and social networking. It takes no effort to set up a blog and start writing. There are also a great number of people retiring and finding that writing is a pleasure for them.
Before the Internet one could only be published by self-publishing (very expensive), a vanity press (expensive and you are left with a lot of books) and the publishing industry (very difficult to break into even if you were a good writer and had an agent).
With the Internet, everybody and his brother is an author. My first novel was a e-book only in 1999. Shortly after that, POD publishing came along. Most POD publishers are vanity presses, latching onto all the new authors out there, sucking them in making a buck. They all eventually become $.99 books through Kindle, etc. Most of these books are unedited (a POD publisher said that he edited two of my books, but didn't) and poorly written. Yet they're out there and being sold. I'm sure most readers have some sort of crap detector that allows them to find the good books to read. I have reviewed in the last year three very good books that were very well edited, but have very few sales. There are just too many books out there and that's a shame.
Ron
