EXCITING TIMES TO BE A WRITER

The revolution has been a long time coming, hasn’t it? For the past few years we writers have struggled to stay alive in the faltering publishing business. Something is badly broken, and at times we’ve had to wonder if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe we ought to just chuck it and go to work for Walmart.

But then along came a huge surge in the digital or electronic age. For a while we scoffed at the idea that being published in the Ebook format was anything but a silly quest. It’s just a fad, we heard. It’ll never last. No one will buy into the craze. Just keep on writing and struggling against the huge tide of failures in the publishing houses, as one by one they were chewed up, until very few remained on which we could pin our hopes of publication.

For a while, Ebooks were scoffed at as representing the worst of writing. No good could ever come of this, we thought. Then Kindle rose from the crop of Ebook readers, many of them cumbersome, heavy, hard to manage. Soon, competition loomed on the horizon as other companies tried to keep up. Amazon clearly led the way, but others followed. We all know that the best thing that can happen is competition. Prices dropped and soon many people who would soon search for good books to read could afford to buy these readers, whatever their name.

Then a few months ago, Amazon announced that Ebook sales had overpowered the sale of hard cover books and they expected that trend to continue to explode. Writers figured it was time to get their bid in. Some began to publish straight to Kindle, others gathered their backlists and republished them to Kindle. Online businesses offered ways to do this such as Smashwords and listed services that would enable us to turn our books and manuscripts into viable submissions for publication to all E readers.

For more than a year I’ve told myself I needed to get published in this new market. Needed to get back into the fiction world I love so much. Finally I met an Ebook publisher at the Ozark Creative Writer’s Conference in Eureka Springs and, after a good friend urged me to, pitched two of my books. In January one was accepted, the other rejected. Not to be defeated, I celebrated the one and submitted the other to another large Ebook publisher. Last week it was accepted.

If you are writing and having problems getting published, you’d better embrace this new world of publishing. It was once called “getting in on the ground floor.” Probably something else now, but my advice. Try it. Make sure and do your homework, research the publishers, check out their sites, email some of their writers to see how they like working with the publisher. But most of all, publish your work. This is not a market that accepts shoddy work.

Soon you too, may celebrate a new publication.