Two things caught my attention over the weekend. The first was a Washington Post article on the e-book gold rush. Romance novelist Nyree Belleville was dropped by her publisher because her twelve books had only earned $21,000. As a writer, she goes by the name of Bella Andre. The publisher felt that she wasn't ever going to be successful. They dropped Belleville and gave her back the publishing rights to two of her novels.

Belleville decided to see if she could self publish, going though the long process of getting one of her books, "Ecstasy," on Amazon's e-reader. She finished the process and forgot about it. A few weeks later she checked her Amazon account. Belleville had sold 161 digital copies for a total haul of $281.

Well, as you can imagine, the other book that the publisher returned to her soon went on-line; but not just using Amazon's e-reader. She now formated the books for all the other readers out there. If you've ever considered writing a book, read the article. Spoiler alert: Belleville has made a lot of money self publishing.

The democratization of publishing, both for written works and the music industry, has taken some time. The idea of buying a physical CD or a book today is becoming more and more antiquated. It's not that people are reading or listening to music less; quite the contrary. It's the delivery system. With that, some may argue, the centralized control of a publisher is becoming obsolete. What's really needed today are businesses to do the artwork and promotion.

The article does emphasize, that just because you have the ability to write a sentence, doesn't mean that you can write a book. Belleville is an exception. The vast majority of books with digital delivery don't sell a single copy. Like all industries, there are the star players. Often those stars still sign with a publisher. The nice thing about the self publishing world is you can see if the book you've been considering writing is any good and if you have any talent. 

In the video world, my wife Liza did a documentary on beauty called "Beauty in the Eyes of the Beheld". It's about what it's like to be a beautiful woman. Although she was able to get a distributor for the education market, there was no one to step  up for the commercial market. Liza decided to sell them herself - on ebay. They sell. She makes money for her work.

The other article, also about writing is from the Oberlin College Alumni magazine. It's titled "We Are All Writers Now" by Anne Trubec. Twenty or thirty years ago many teens just zoned out in front of the TV.  Today,  with the technology available, being a TV couch potato becomes passe'. Although book sales are down, there's plenty of reading and writing, albeit shorter concise Facebook and Twitter and email posts.  Trubec believes we're actually in the middle of a writing revolution.

I did a video about a year ago on Motion Comics - how the paper comic book is being replaced by iTunes downloads. Motion comics use rudimentary animation, but add music, dialog, and sound effects along with the cartoon "word bubbles." The thing is reading the cartoon bubbles are not really necessary to get the story. Could this be the end of reading for kids? Actually no. Kids still read - just other things that they find on-line.

There's a lot of hand wringing over technology. Everyone's becoming fat and going to die because no one ever gets out of a sitting position. No one can concentrate on a single task because there's so much information rattling around. Everyone is buried in smart phones. So much so you're unaware of your surroundings.  Let's not even talk about when robots become self aware and become our overlords. The one thing we may say is reading and writing is still alive.