Readers, what do you think of the state of book publishing?  Do you feel the book publishing industry serves you well?  Honestly, self-published authors don’t have much faith in the the conventional book publishing process – which is why they decided to self publish.  But let’s try to look at it from both sides of the book publishing situation.

With nearly everyone having a word processor on their computer, a larger percentage of the public are able to write a book.  In decades past, a manuscript might need retyping too many times to permit anyone without a dedication to the authoring craft to write a book.  The publishers were able to read though all submissions to select the ones they would publish.  Now, they can’t because the sheer number of submissions is astronomical.  So the book publishers generally only accept and read submissions from known agents.  This inserts an extra step in the book publishing acceptance process that was not there in the by-gone eras.  And frankly, that’s where the biggest problem to self-published authors and any author hopefuls as well.

Even getting a manuscript in front of a reputable book publishing agent is nearly as impossible as having a book publisher see it directly.  And with a swelling number of aspiring authors to ‘feed on’, a number of nefarious characters pass themselves off as reputable book publishing agents – in order to bilk money from authors.  The author – literary agent – book publisher track is littered with the broken dreams of countless would-be authors.  It’s a deplorable situation and one has to wonder: certainly many of the casualties were not really publishable books, but how many were actually gems that fell back into obscurity?  That is a waste of human talent and the fault really lies with the book publishing industry.

Instead of farming the filtering process off to agents, perhaps a reader review process should have been implemented long ago.  (But it’s never too late).  Here at Click My Lit, my long range plan is to attempt something new.  But I’ll talk about that when I’m further into it.  My only goal for now is helping self published authors to get their work read by readers – despite their having been shunned by the book publishers and the book publishing agents.

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