The Author Guy Blog

 6th November 2024 Hello out there, Welcome back. Writer’s Digest (WD) magazine has been around for eighty-five years and is one of only a handful of publications I trust implicitly in a publishing industry replete with scoundrels, mis-information and disinformation. Sounds a bit like our national political scene, doesn’t it? In the magazine’s current issue can be found a couple of things I felt worth of sharing. The first one is disheartening to authors like me clawing their way in pursuit of a reader following. My research over the past ten years indicated that somewhere between 750,000 and a million books are added to Amazon’s virtual bookshelves – the place where the preponderance of books sales, at least in the U.S., occur. Without quoting a source of the data, WD has now revised this estimate upward by 100% -- to two million new books being added annually by Amazon. WD’s other less-than-good news is that the tradition of mainstream publishing houses sticking with and nurturin...