Steven St. Sure Enterprises

In my last post I showed that writers were not making any money from me even though I am an avid reader. I believe that I am not alone in this. People that read a lot, unless they have a lot of money to spend, buy most of their books in used book stores and garage sales. Of course someone is buying them or there would be no books in those used book stores. My dad (when he was alive) and step mom, even though they had plenty of money came home from the library with arm loads of books. Westerns, and detective stories for my dad and romance for my mom.

I just did a little research about the baby boomers generation that is on the verge of retiring. Ten million will reach retirement age in the next six years. I am going to guess that 5 million of these will be like me, that is cheap or at least not much money in the budget for new books. Now a retired person can easily read two books a week. That would be around 100 books a year. Five million people reading 100 books each equals 500,000,000 (five hundred million) books. Now if each of these books sold for $3.00 in a used book store that would be 1.5 billion dollars in sales. A good profit for the used book sellers but nothing for the writers of all those books. If that money went to the top 5000 writers equally they would each make $300,000 a year. continue reading…

It has always bothered me how hard it is for writers to be published and earn a decent living for their effort. I do realize that so many people want to get published and that this in itself poses a problem. And just like those trying out for American Idol, most might not have what it takes. But there are more readers than there are writers and so it should be the readers who decide what to read, not some over worked editor in a large publishing firm. I love to read and I am always looking for new authors to read. My problem is that I do not have a lot of money to spend on books and do not live close to a good library.
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In my last post I directed you to Joe Konrath”s blog and an article where he describes the advantages of self publishing ebooks over traditional book publishing.  He made another post that you might find interesting making a case for ebooks based on those that don’t think ebook are the books of the future.  Take a look at his In Defense of Print

• It seems everyone who has written a book or made a musical CD wants to get discovered by a book or record publisher and sign a contract.  The chances of doing this is like getting on a major league baseball team.  Even if this is possible it is not all gravy.  You lose creative control.  You no longer own your work of art.  And your financial rewards will be low unless your book or cd sells millions of copies.  Check out the following  for one authors experience.      Self Publishing

With a slow economy and when people are losing jobs one thing is increasing and that is those out of work and looking for work have time on their hands.

Ok so we have more time what does  that mean?  Well we need to fill that time.  When we want to fill our time we want to be entertained. During the depression motion pictures and radio entertainment boomed.

Also with more time on our hands we can let out our creative juices.  So if we ever wanted to write a book or a song or create a musical cd or video now is the time.  With the advent of the internet publishing our creative work got easier to publish and can be done for very little money.

So if you want to entertain or be entertained keep an eye on this blog for advise and direction.