Web publishing has empowered millions of people to express themselves and Smashwords makes it easy to self-publish, it's so easy you could have your own ISBN and your book on Amazon and iTunes in the less than a day. Pretty powerful! The web, and its ability to deliver content at little cost has supplemented the income of millions of people in the form of blogs, websites, self-publishing, and self distribution. The ability to self-publish and self distribute high resolution video content and reach a potential world audience with little distribution costs, little physical labor or material costs, and no costs in energy has already transformed many lives and revolutionized the publishing and entertainment industry.
I felt empowered when I published a short story I wrote for a writing contest and decided to publish it on Smashwords. I haven't exceeded my goal of 10,000 downloads, but it get closer to that every day. Not exactly Stephen King, but it was a great feeling that people actually took the time to download it on their e-reader and perhaps read the whole story, all 2,340 words of it! Here's a snapshot and link to my short story if you would like to learn more about Smashwords and how explore how it works, no better place to start than a word-of-mouth recommendation!
If you want to learn more, feel free to contact me through the contact form at my website or Google +. I had such a great experience I decided to publish a screenplay I wrote back in 2008 called "Fine English". You can visit the landing page for this full 27,000 word screenplay. Smashwords help you market and distributes your book to a network of over 100 million subscribers throughout the world. Here's the cover and link to the screenplay:
I unfortunately encountered a few formatting errors, which Smashwords is very good at helping authors rectify. They don't want your work showing up on iTunes and other digital libraries looking wonky. You can even set a "sample" portion to "tease" readers and allow them to read a little bit of your book to help them decide if they want to download it. Revenue sharing is a pretty fair arrangement, and the options for different readers to download your work in multiple formats for Kindles, iPads, etc are thorough and pretty reliable.
No more "middle-men" and publishing "gatekeepers"
Information and stories used to take so long to reach people because they had to be in physical forms and be physically distributed so they could be read. All that energy and time to put into making copies then packing them on horseback or put in ships that sailed across the vast oceans. It's amazing we humans ever bothered to leave the caves we lived in. Now, we complain when our Internet connection is slow so the latest movie we're streaming pauses to fill the buffer. Good grief, we're all such wusses now.The Internet has unleashed the individual, it has empowered them to bypass the "middle man". If you had enough creativity and guts, you not only can publish your book without dealing with an agent OR a pedantic publisher, you can produce your own movies and distribute them yourself without being beholden to distributors and agents and the other self-serving industry insiders who like to think their club is just too exclusive for the masses. Likewise, a book author no longer has to go through a publisher, they can just post their writing online. Many literary agents and book publishers are self-proclaimed experts and most of them, like all of us, are only human and subject to perceptions that are skewed, distorted and often too self-serving so they may think they're experts but in actuality they've lived too long in a bubble and aren't really in tune with what the plethora of markets ripe for paying readers. One more thing about publishers, they always say they're looking for specific topics, genres and material, so they don't bother accepting or reading anything out of their own comfort zone. Does this sound like a good business model? Doesn't it cost the same to print 320 pages of novel X as it does novel Y?!
J.K. Rowling was rejected over 6 times before a publisher accepted her work, enough said about the "wisdom" of the publishing industry. No longer do individuals and groups have to produce their creative vision to please these gatekeepers! It's been a revolution in the making that will soon reach its apex the first time a complete unknown, perhaps the next Thomas Payne, breaks the 10 million book download threshold for his (or her) masterpiece that will shape America's future and mold its destiny much like Thomas Payne's Common Sense did centuries ago. The miracle here will not just be the feat of obscurity beaten merely by the pure quality of one's writing, but the very fact not a single book will be physically printed and the book will manage to reach and impact so many people. Possible? You bet. Will it happen? I believe so, eventually.
