Quote:
Originally Posted by GlenBarrington
New tech always encourages new players. In time, people will leave the market once they realize that there will never be enough paying readers to make the investment in time, effort and emotion pay off.
Then, people will make money again!
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I agree that changes in technology cause upsets in the status quo it's always been that way. Movie studios went to court when VCR's came out for the home in an attempt to keep people from being able to record movies off of TV for example. In time they adapted. I think the same will happen with books. It isn't a matter so much of less people making $ writing I don't think as it is a greater consciousness of that problem. At one time if a young ummarried woman found herself pregnant her family kept it quiet, now it's not so hidden and people wonder how it came to be so commonplace. The real fact is that it was probably always commonplace to a degree and people just weren't aware of it as much because families did keep it to themselves if possible. I think a similar thing is happening with books. In the past the author had to wait months for a statement of how well their book was selling and that was after waiting for weeks or months to see if a publisher would publish their book. Now everything is there with a push of a button. An author in LA can send their book to NYC in mere seconds rather than by conventional mail and know in short order if the publisher is interested. Likewise they can sell it at sites like Smashwords and get quick updates on their sales. The sales process probably isn't much different in that you still have to market the book to a reader, but you can see in an instant how well it is doing. So a book might be doing the same as a similar book might have done 20-30 yrs ago but you don't have to wait for months to see how it's doing and might therefore get an incomplete picture of how well or poorly it is selling.