wellswriting

Wal Mart vs Macy’s August 18, 2014

Wal Mart vs Macy’s, where do you shop for clothes? Probably at both or if you say neither, the stores you do go to are likely to be bargains for some fashion moods and higher end for others. So why can’t we simply have the same choices in publishing and be done with the fight for supremacy?

The state of the world of publishing right now has degraded into the business of bickering. On the one side are traditional publishers who want to go on charging the same price irrespective of the delivery method. On the other side is a large online retailer who is disguising their pursuit of profit behind the veil of democratizing the publishing world. Fact is there is a place for both and no place for boycotts or letter writing campaigns. In the end it is the consumers of literature who will decide what they want. People are not going to pay premium prices for electronically delivered content and people are not going to trust bargain based electronically delivered material if there is no way to be sure if it is a bargain or a bust. In the end I trust that it will be readers that find the happy medium.

If there is a book or series of books I particularly like, I want to have a quality printed set and I am willing to pay for it. But if I want to experiment on new stories, I don’t want to have to pay premium prices to try them out. Sometimes the bargains turn out to be really good just like a buy at Wal Mart turns out to be a favorite. But if you know what you are looking for, like a favorite author who always delivers a satisfying story, you are more likely willing to pay more; just like you know you can go to Macy’s for some quality brands Wal Mart just isn’t going to have. As a simple author who wants to tell stories without the fuss of meeting marketing goals or working with agents and publisher demands, I am realistically happy to have Amazon and Smashwords available as an outlet for my works. I’d like to think that people who try my works out for the Wal Mart price are happily surprised by the bargain they get. Maybe I’ll build up a body of works and a trend of readers one day to attract the attention of a publishing house. I’d welcome the chance to have my works edited and illustrated by the pros, and if I show the promise for profit, we would both win in that case. Win win. Hopefully the publishing world will relax into this happy medium one day.