New Gold City

This essay appeared in Talking Writing in April. Talking Writing is rapidly becoming a high-quality online source of information for writers and content-providers of all sorts.    By David Biddle for Talking Writing Imagine that a rigidly controlled country  you’ve always longed to visit suddenly undergoes a revolution and opens its borders. Its currency value is ridiculously low, making travel a bargain. Do you snap up airline tickets and book a hotel right away?  Or does the prospect of traveling in a land where laws and concepts of ownership are in flux give you pause? For me, that tantalizing country is The Land of Getting Published, now dominated by a digital publishing frontier. I no longer need an agent or even an editor to get me there (though some copyediting help is always useful). With my self-polished text and a decent cover layout in hand, I can publish my own work in just a few clicks through Amazon, Smashwords, Apple, Lulu, or any of several dozen oth...

Hopefully, a lot of you are thinking about the future of paper books these days. Books are objects. E-Books aren't (although the iPad and the Kindle reader, and many other electronic tablet type thingies, are pretty amazing pieces of technology). There's just no question that digital text is going to have a massive impact on the publishing world's business planning for the next decade. It seems pretty clear that paper-based books are going to shift in significance for people. By that I mean they're going to become more valuable and more meaningful -- although, it's likely that sales will be dwarfed by e-books. I predict that you're not going to be able to find 1st-Run books in paper form at bookstores and libraries by 2020, but once a book "proves" itself in the marketplace (electronically), you're going to be able to buy it as a hard copy in real space.  You're going to have two options:  1) a print-on-demand (POD) edition that may or may not ...