The Internet, with its zillions of amateur strippers, swappers, and sizzling sinners, is making it harder for XXX video producers to turn a profit.
They’re not alone.
Traditional book publishers are also struggling.
They’re competing against a tsunami of free content provided by amateur authors.
Many surprisingly capable writers are uploading content and diverting bookstore frequenters to their free wares.
Ezinearticles.com, for example, is a site that hosts more than 50,000 writers, all of them toiling gratis. Some of these scribes are submitting as many as 10,000 pieces, which is the equivalent of 100 non-fiction books.
Why are they, literally, giving away their work product?
Several reasons:
(1) They’ve been locked out of the traditional publishing game. Without a track record and established credibility or a special audience, they simply can’t get the attention of the brick and mortar community.
(2) Some are established authors who find traditional publishers are becoming vanity or subsidy presses. If authors promise to purchase thousands of their own titles, to hawk at speaking and seminar events, then publishers will be eager to serve as glorified printing presses. If authors can’t minimize a publisher’s risk in this way, they are often shunned.
(3) There was never much money in the traditional publishing game for most authors. So, instead of trying to hit the jackpot, they trade a few bucks, lots of marketing effort and humiliating rejections for a sure thing—getting their texts in front of at least some readers, and doing so quickly.
(4) Authors like to control their work products. They know their audiences better than most publishers, and they appreciate nixing the meddling intermediaries who insist on micromanaging titles, contents, and style.
(5) Authors, especially experienced ones, know that most traditional publishers are clueless when it comes to predicting which books will sell. Famously, the “Chicken Soup” books were rejected over and again by “the best and the brightest” acquisitions editors at big publishing houses before what was a tiny press, Health Communications, made an offer.
Most people aren’t going to weep over the losses suffered by pornographers.
And most authors aren’t going to shed any tears for a traditional publishing community that has had its head in the sand for the better part of the past 200 years.