The Cooked Game

A man passing through a small town asks a cab driver if he knows of any poker games. The cabby tells him that just the hotel runs a game but it is crooked. Later that night the cab driver encounters the tourist exiting the hotel and asks him what happened.

“I played in the poker game and lost all my money.”

“I told you it was a crooked game.”

“I know, but it was the only game in town.”

This famous poker story is illustrative of the situation existing in the publishing and book marketing business. A few major publishers have gobbled up the small houses and they control what books are marketed in most bookstores. The mass market minded publishers spend a great deal of money promoting their books, the book stores have overhead, they all must make a profit and this expense is passed on to the customer who frequents the book store since “it is the only game in town”. But wait.

Technology has made self-publishing simple and inexpensive. Last year more than 82% of new book titles were by self-published authors. These authors are generally excluded from bookstores and traditional marketing venues. There is a myth that self-published books are necessarily of inferior quality. Let me dispel this misconception by naming just a few authors who have self-published: Mark Twain, John Grisham, L. Ron Hubbard, Walt Whitman, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, Carl Sandberg, Gertrude Stein, Deepak Chopra, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, Tom Clancy, Mark Landsberg and countless more.
Consider a revolutionary idea with me. There are millions of self-published authors. What if we avoid the crooked game by eschewing bookstores as well as books from the established publishing houses? We can support our fellow self-published authors by only purchasing each other’s books. It would not be long before we would have our own book outlets, reviewers and best sellers list.

Why support a rigged system? Let us start a new, clean game where the book buyer can deal directly with the author, cutting out the expensive middleman. Another self-published author, Benjamin Franklin, said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence “We must all hang together or we assuredly shall all hang separately.” Let us declare our own independence and let it start here at selfpublishersplace.com.