Is this the last stand of the paperback writer/publisher??

Written by William L. Seavey

For the first time, Kindle electronic book sales have zoomed past hard copy sales through Amazon, and the writing appears to be firmly “etched on the wall” or, to turn a new phrase, “downloaded on the tablet” for the printed book. The future appears to be digital books you can't really touch, bookmark or stack on a shelf, but they sure are cheap and instantly accessible.
So what is so good about having something made out of dead trees anyway, as a venture capitalist I met on a plane said to me recently? 1,052,803 books were published in 2009 (latest available figures) and amazingly,

76.3 percent of ALL titles sold fewer than 100 copies. Of these, 764,448 were self-published.
Assuming that most books selling badly were from self-published authors like me, it hardly seems worth the bother. Still, to the right readers, who's to say what the intrinsic value of even a small self-published book is?
And authors have to start somewhere. I fondly remember my first tome, a self-help guide to "resourceful living" self-published back in 1977, strip bound and type “set” on an IBM word processor, that somehow managed to garner a review in Library Journal. I was, of course, thrilled, even though the review was middling. Orders poured in from librarians all over the country and I sold perhaps a couple hundred. That was about as far as it got. I transitioned into producing advertising-supported tabloid recreation guides and a merchants' newspaper in Eugene, Oregon that at least made me a basic living.Some 40 years hence I have seen one book published by a major publishing company, Dearborn Financial, called Moving to Small Town America and another by a small press in Washington state and I went the extra mile two years ago to produce what I'd hoped to be a bestselling Great Recession-intervening work called Crisis Investing and Entrepreneuring (Ten Innovative Strategies to Help YOU Achieve Financial Success and Solvency in a Down Economy). Thirty agents rejected it on the basis of it not being enough of a "platform" so I invested nearly $5000 to produce a polished product that once again made it into a few hundred libraries, sold on Amazon and Barnes and Noble websites but not in bookstores, and got great reviews among those who were willing to review a self-published work--and not many are. I did incorporate for the first time a Print On Demand strategy, using the printer Lightning Source. The whole effort eventually stalled after selling somewhere under 1000 copies as the perception the subject matter had become dated, as according to the United States government the recession ended in 2009.During the course of my publishing career, I have produced a small technical manual to help people do budget small-scale solar power in their homes; I rode the early Google Adwords wave to sales approaching 10,000 copies. Three years later, just before the housing crash, I produced Home Dreams for Hard Times, which spelled out in detail nearly two dozen viable alternatives to mortgaged housing. Neither had ISBN numbers since they weren't thick enough to have spines, but the reviews were terrific.
More recently I have been at work on a memoir, Confessions from Generation Woodstock, which will include my previously unpublished pix of the famous 1969 festival, and a book of stories tentatively titled This Land Ain’t Your Land from the trenches of those who have been threatened with homelessness and/or have lost big trying to re-populate the rural countryside.
Over the years I've heard from readers here and there who have suggested I sell eBooks--there is no question some of the material I have produced and packaged electronically could have made much more money than I could have achieved mailing out hard copies. However, I have in fact enjoyed the process of sending out my little paperbacks, and responding to readers personally.
Clearly I could be missing the boat which long ago left the harbor. John Locke has written a primer titled How I Sold 1 Million E-books in 5 Months. He sells digital "dime" novels, for 99 cents actually, at Amazon's Kindle store, and some have suggested they aren't even worth THAT price. I have a friend with a Kindle who has said to me I should package my materials as eBooks, but he admits he downloaded one that was so awful it wasn't worth the $2 or so he shelled out for it. At those prices most people wouldn't insist on a refund -- my printed books have always been sold with a full money-back guarantee, which includes me sending out a real check in the mail if a reader is dissatisfied, which rarely happens.
I love printed books and have a library full of them, as millions still do. I admit I don't own a Kindle or Nook, not because I am against technological advancement, but because it really just comes down to the fact as a writer and small publisher of my own stuff I don't really read that many books myself. I often buy books I think ought to sit on my shelves, even if I rarely get to them. And nothing is going to ever stop me from doing that, as long as I continue to have the shelf space. That market must still exist out there for printed books, to some degree, and coffee table books aren't ever going away.
Writers write and small publishers publish for all kinds of reasons. I don't really do it for the money, just the satisfaction of seeing ideas and information packaged into something worthwhile. Writing has led me into a plethora of interesting subjects, and having mastered them in the process of anticipating a book project, I can argue I have achieved a sort of Renaissance Man status with the books as clear testimony.Could this have happened if the words were to get lost in cyberspace, or if the electric grid went down? What if disk storage eventually goes through another transformation?
Maybe, maybe not. It's something to think about, anyway.
William L. Seavey has a degree in journalism from the University of Iowa. Many of his printed books can be found at TheCoolestIdeas.com. He will be attending the Central Coast Writer's Conference at Cuesta College September 16-17, followed by the Central Coast Book & Author's Festival on September 18. For more information call (805) 546-3132.