The advent of the internet has changed the way the world operates with the same powerful ripple that the printing press caused in 1450 and for the same reason. The average citizen could more easily find out that a lot of other people were thinking the same thing.
Finding out you’re not unique can fuel courage to get up and do something.
Librarians have known for a long time that books, even works of fiction, can transform lives no matter where the reader lives. They can teach us not only that we’re not alone but that there’s more than one way to look at any given situation.
The world opens up to a million possibilities and that business idea that your entire family hates suddenly has a receptive audience.
However, for the average author the advent of the internet at first looked like it might be the end of a viable career-choice and not a new beginning. Publishing houses were slashing their mid-list authors, the writers whose books sell reasonable numbers but never break out into the territory of bestseller. During the height of the Great Recession many houses closed altogether.
But something else was happening at the same time that was going to change everything. In 2007 the first e-reader, the Kindle from Amazon was introduced on the Oprah show by Jeff Bezos and writers got a new, economical way to deliver a book.
The book market was about to become a democracy with all of the loud voices, terrible covers, great new writers and unedited manuscripts that usually go with an open door to a lot of wannabe writers.
Fortunately, reviewers have stepped into the fray and become the new gatekeepers to help the estimated 12% of all U.S. adults, according to Pew Research who now own an e-reader, figure out what’s worthy of downloading. There were 14.7 million sold worldwide just last year and the numbers are rising.
That’s opened up an opportunity for bloggers who love to read and want to tell all of their friends about the new author they just found. Bloggers like Cathy at Kittling Books, www.kittlingbooks.com whose motto is “Fire burns. Birds fly. Dogs bark. I read.” Or Ana and Thea at The Book Smugglers, www.thebooksmugglers.com who explain right out front that they needed a healthy outlet for their obsession with reading and thought they’d share. All the rest of us are better off because they do.
There was a time when book reviewers were confined to newspapers or magazines and it was difficult for a new, unknown author to get noticed. A self-published author would not even get considered and it was assumed they were self-published because the book was turned down by mainstream publishing.
But e-readers eliminated a lot of the upfront costs and made it possible for some authors, particularly those mid-list ones, like myself to break out of the old system and try our hand at self-publishing where the profit margins are more decidedly in the author’s favor. There still needed to be a way to distinguish what was worth reading and how to find them.
Bloggers who review books are the other part of that equation. They make it possible for book clubs and other avid readers to notice a good book, regardless of how they arrived on the scene. Suzi, who bills herself as SuziQOregon from Portland, www.whimpulsive.com and Wendy, who’s also an author, www.caribousmom.com, and posts on her site that she receives 50 or more requests for reviews every week, have built large followings online reviewing books.
There are now hundreds of reviewers, most of them focusing on a specific genre such as romance or western, sharing what they loved as if we were all sitting in a giant, virtual coffee shop. None of them had to wait for permission from someone else to start their blog and many of them have watched their following grow into thousands of other readers. All of this is turning out to be a renaissance of reading and that has to be good news. More adventures to follow. Tweet me @MarthaRandolph about your favorite blog and visit her blog at www.marthacarr.com. Email Martha at Martha@caglecartoons.com.
 Martha’ Carr’s column is distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons Inc. newspaper syndicate. For info contact Cari Dawson Bartley at cari@cagle.com.