African American Authors of books, poetry and prose need to embrace new technologies instead of waiting on publishing houses to pick up our books and publish them to a wider audience. When I wrote my first book, I wanted to get a big publisher house from New York City or Los Angeles, CA to publish and help me market my book. Instead of waiting on them, I decided to self-publish and get the book out there myself. This was easy and like all things, it ultimately needed marketing money to really keep and push the book out to the masses to make people aware of it. Everyone thinks it’s easy to write a book and people will beat down your doors to read it. This is the furthest thing from the truth.
My books were all written in the early to mid 2000’s. Would I do things differently now? Yes. In fact, I’m writing a book as we speak and the rules of book writing have completely changed. You no longer need to wait on anyone to build an audience and a fan base. You don’t need to write 3 mystery novels or street oriented novels to build fans. I have created a blog ( a customized blog site) and have generated over 25,000 fan readers in just 3 months. This is huge. For writers, blogs are really truly the way to go and I say this after having a blogspot.com website a few years ago that was riddled with spam comments.
Blogs have changed the landscape considerably for black authors. You really need to utilize these blog sites and keep writing and building your fans. I encourage all authors to keep writing but do NOT just think about your writing in terms of a physical printed book. In fact, printed books are somewhat passe. I would write a blog and make my book available on Kindle from Amazon. I would NOT put a book out in print anymore. Printed books are becoming like VHS tapes or 8 track tapes. Mark my word, in 5 years, no one will really pick up a printed magazine or book anymore at all and people will look at you like you’re crazy for suggesting it.
We help people get your professionally themed blogsite up and running. You must provide the content as an author but this should be easy for true authors and writers. Content is never our issue. We provide too much content in most cases. You must write your blog and make the web site PhP compatible so that people can read your blog on their mobile phones. This is media convergence and like it or not, it is already taking over the book industry.
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