Deep Thoughts

When you buy a book especially on the internet, what do you look for? Is it the cover that attracts you? The reviews? The description? The key to selling books is to have all three of these as A plus’s. A good cover, good unbiased reviews, and a blurb that makes people want to look at the book. With ebooks, a consumer can’t take it off the shelf and feel its texture, skim through the pages, get a sense of the thickness and how long it will take to read. They must rely on the free sample pages and all the other fluff on the webpage to make their decision.

Ebooks are forever. Think about this sentence for a moment. You write a novel, get it formatted, have a nice cover made up, get an ISBN, and then download it onto Kindle, or Smashwords, or any of the hundreds of ebook distributors, and it’s available globally to anyone with an ereader. Not only that, it will be available until the end of time.

Fifty years from now I’ll be able to show my great grandchild one of my books, all they’ll have to do is type in the title and poof, there it will be. Talk about immortalizing yourself for all eternity. Isn’t that what art is all about?

 I’m very lucky to be living in an age where I can imprint myself onto the world and be remembered forever through my books. I do feel a little sad for all the paperback writers throughout the last decades whose hard work and effort only got them a six-week shelf life for their masterpiece and then their book would disappear forever, going out of print and into the paper shredder.

With ebooks I may still be getting royalties when I’m a hundred years old, I can write and publish what I want and let the worldwide public decide if the book is good, without being evaluated for the amount of profit the story might generate. One of my novels, DROP OUT http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FX0K7U has sold more than 4,500 copies and has seventeen 5-star reviews. The public has decided.

My novels won’t sit stacked on some shelf in the back of a dusty old bookstore (if bookstores still exist in five years). They will always be fresh and ready for download, ready to draw a new reader into my imaginary, noir, eccentric, thought-provoking worlds. It’s an incredibly comforting thought knowing my stories will be around forever, like the myths of ancient Greece or fables and folklore of olden times. In a way, ebooks will immortalize me and define me as a novelist until the end of humanity.