“JD Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye and then disappeared for fifty years. Well, the world doesn’t work that way anymore,” Melissa astutely pointed out at her eBook info session this afternoon.
Authors can’t afford to write a book and not promote it, and they can’t afford to not know about how to reach readers. It puts an additional layer of responsibility on writers, who have traditionally been more equipped to manipulate words and language, not Kobos and Kindles.
The language is new, the landscape is new, but really, people who read are everywhere. They are in independent bookstores, cafes, or walking down the street. They have paper books, but they also have portable devices, pads, readers, and phones, and have the ability to read on almost everything that can be held in their hands. It is now up to an author to decide how and where they will engage their reader. There is a Chinese menu of options. It can be confusing. But be optimistic. Here’s a video (The Future of Publishing) to help encourage optimism as self-published authors navigate the world of electronic “books.”