Dead as a mackerel

At some time in our lives, most of us have fantasized about writing a great novel, getting it published, and using the royalties from the book to live a comfortable retirement.

Most of us are also smart enough to realize that we’re not destined to be the next John Grisham, who retired from a reasonably successful career as an attorney to become a full time author. Today, his net worth is roughly $200,000,000.

Another man who’s done well as a writer is Dan Brown.

After graduating from Amherst College, Dan Brown dabbled with a musical career, but eventually became an English teacher at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire high school that he graduated from in 1981. In 1996, he quit his teaching career in order to become a full time writer. His first novel, Digital Fortress, was published in 1998. Although he has only written five novels since the publication of his first novel, he has sold over 200,000, 000 books, making him one of the best selling authors of all time, which is why his net worth is approximately $120,000,000.

J.K Rowling created the Harry Potter series (the best selling book series in history), which allowed her to move from being a single mom living on welfare to become the first author in the world to achieve a net worth of $1 billion.

One of the main reasons that it’s very difficult for any of us to get our magnum opus published is the fact that there are roughly 2000 books published in America EVERY SINGLE DAY, which leaves blogging as about the only way to have our thoughts become more widespread.

As of 2012, there were 31,000,000 bloggers in the United States, and roughly 10 times that number in the rest of the world. Blogging CAN be very lucrative, as exemplified by the fact that The Huffington Post recently sold for $300,000,000. Since starting my blog roughly 5 years ago, I’ve had over 100,000 “page views”, in over 100 countries, and I’ve earned a grand total of $105.45, which came from ad revenue.

If you’re really dying to get your great novel published as an actual book, you now have a new alternative that will cost you next to nothing to produce.

The new venue is called CreateSpace, and it’s one of the many divisions of Amazon.com, the internet marketing giant that was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. As the testimony at the link below will indicate, it’s an easy site to use:

My experience self-publishing

I learned about the site from our friend and neighbor, William Snead, who has published 2 books (so far), either one of which you can buy from Amazon:

dead as a mackerel

The Deadly Doctor

A link to Bill’s website (and his credentials) can be found at the link below:

highplainsmedia

CreateSpace, naturally, is controversial for Barnes and Noble and independent book stores due to the fact that the retailer gets less money from the sale of the books published by CreateSpace. I’m of the opinion that Barnes and Noble is innovative enough to survive and prosper, but it’s still a tough business.

Borders Books and Music and B. Dalton booksellers were very successful “brick and mortar” book stores who didn’t progress fast enough to e-books. To borrow a phrase, Borders and B. Dalton are now both “dead as a mackerel”, but if you’d like to buy a book with that same title, all you need to do is travel to Amazon.com.

Your new book is just a few clicks away.