I'd like to save the publishing industry

It's a lofty statement, isn't it? I make it after realizing that I probably picked the worst time in the past five hundred years to become a published author. Why?

Oh, dear, God, here's why:

This.



This

This

This

This

This

This

And an entire stream of bad news on Google.

I'm not an entirely bright individual, I'd like to make that clear before I go any further. I mean, yeah, I'm published and a lot of people aren't, but that doesn't qualify me to be able to predict what kinds of apocalyptic scenarios might or might not happen as publishing goes through an incredible transition. To what, I have no idea. Fewer young people are reading. Hell, fewer grown-ups are, too. The Interweb is filled with so many gloom and doom stories about how the book industry is trouble that it's often difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I do, however, have a theory and you know what? If you think I'm on crack for putting it out to the universe, send me a comment and tell me so, it's totally cool. But I was just thinking about how we spend our time and how new technologies compete for our time every single day. We're distracted, we bring work home, we eat in front of the TV, we check our emails, we text message, we hit up Facebook, we go to the Gym, but we're not necessarily devoting a specific time of day to reading books ... or are we?

See, I think that most of us read at bedtime if we're reading at all. Outside of making babies or watching Conan on our bedroom big screens, those of us who read don't have a lot of distraction when we hit the pillow. I read every night and it helps me drift off - a great way to end the day. But those of us who read at bedtime are readers, aren't we? It's the other people who aren't reading that maybe, well, if we could get them to pick up a book and just freaking read for ten minutes at bedtime, well, maybe if enough did it, they'd buy books. Maybe they'd even buy my book.

I'm not a snob, either. I don't care if they're reading me in print or on an electronic device, I just want my words (and the words of FARRRRR better authors than me) to be read with some measure of regularity, at bedtime. If enough people did it, I suspect they'd buy more books. If they bought more books then more publishers would be in a better financial state than they are right now, more undiscovered voices would be found and literacy rates would increase dramatically.

So I'm just thinking that we can save the publishing industry if we read at bedtime, that's all. Just ten minutes a night - feel free to read for longer if you're so inclined. And I guess I'd like to start promoting this simple idea and see if it spreads. It might, and it might not. I'm not a bestselling author - just a yutz from Saskatchewan who likes to write about zombies and magic and things that go bump in the night.

Anyway, there you have it. I'm attaching a lame little graphic that I made to this blog post and if you'd like to save publishing by reading a book at bedtime, I'd really appreciate it because all this talk of publishing meeting its doom depresses the hell out of me.

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