Smashwords has published its year-end review. As of the end of the year they have published 5,979 original books and are publishing and distributing the works of 2,700 authors and 100 small independent publishers. By contrast, at this time last year, after 8 months of operation, they published 100 authors and 160 titles. A bit of an increase!
They have a list of priorities for next year, but one of the things that struck me is that, as they say, “… we’ve received essentially no press coverage from the mainstream media. Smashwords has never been covered or even mentioned by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, Associated Press, Time Magazine or Newsweek.” One wonders how relevant mainstream media are nowadays if they don’t cover changes in the landscape and cover it correctly. I notice that every single article I’ve seen in the New York Times on ebooks gets something wrong.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media articles are plenty relevant… because potential customers are reading them, and therefore being filled with disinformation that has to be replaced with accurate information later. And it’s always harder to replace bad preconceptions with good information in the mind than it is to put in good information first.
Hi Paul, thanks for the mention! I’d agree with Steve that the mainstream media remains relevant. It’s all about reaching multiple audiences. WSJ and NYT, for example, each reach about one million readers a day, and their influence reaches much wider. From my perspective, there are millions of unpublished manuscripts languishing in dresser drawers, dusty attics and hard drives, and those authors may have long ago given up on their dream of publishing. I want to reach them! I expect they’re consuming mainstream media, so once MM starts writing about the indie author revolution, and the free tools available to publish and distribute ebooks, it will accelerate the inevitable. Even without MM coverage, the word-of-mouth flywheel is in full swing, so we and all other ebook enthusiasts have much to look forward to in the next couple years.
Who was it that said, “Those that don’t read the newspapers are uninformed. Those that do are misinformed!”
I think the mainstream only serves the interests of the big publishers. They are basically selling news right? And what better way to do so than to promote the big boys. That’s why I don’t buy the papers anymore when I can get them from the web.