With each new ebook reader, comes more excitement. Ebook sells for electronic press authors continue to climb. Big publishing houses now offer ebooks when ebooks were once snickered at by the higher powers that be in this crazy world of writing. And it is a crazy world. Believe me. What other industry do you see run by people who choose to make their living off of writers...I'm talking about big time publishing houses here....not the small press..but many houses operate under businessmen with zero writing skill. They hire agents and editors with college degrees, but many of them are not writers.....yet they make a larger percentage off the royalties than the writer. And this is true across the board. What other industry exists like this? Writers truly work for peanuts, generally struggling until a huge backlist exists. Don't ask me to break down a writer's time in pay per hour. I don't think those negative numbers exist. Yet there are those of us out there who plug away, writing day after day. Living more off the fan mail, the wonderful email sent from a reader than the all mighty dollar. We write because we can and we write because it gives us joy. Very few of us go into this wanting to make money..though a few of us make tons of it. We enter into this world to enrich our own lives, to share with others and to give the simple gift of a story to the world. This is what we must remind ourselves when the numbers get to us. Or when we tire of the same fifteen authors' faces staring at us in the book store from the back cover. We know there's more than fifteen authors out there. Right? That's why I love indie book stores, they carry a wide selection. The marketing, the politics, the jacked up royalties will all get to us at one point or another. Just do what makes you happy. Write.
~Alisha
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