DO WE HAVE A CHANCE?

http://www.amazon.com/ADRIFT-THE-TIME-STREAM-ebook/dp/B004XZUY4U

We bloggers run the danger of ignoring the rest of the cyberverse.

Do we Indie Published authors see ourselves as the non-blogger readers see us?

Chad Orzell wrote a Wake-Up Post on his Science Blog:
10,000 NEW BOOKS BUT NOTHING TO READ!
http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2012/06/20/10000-new-ebooks-but-nothing-to-read/

"So, here’s the scenario:

my e-reader is a Nook, and if I buy books for it from Barnes and Noble directly, I can read them on the Nook, on the iPad, or on my phone, and it’s good to have that choice.

So, I went to Barnes and Noble’s web store, and looked at the SF and Fantasy page, because that’s the genre of most of my airplane reading.

(HERE IS THE KICKER!)

And then there’s the self-published junk, most of which is obviously porn.

Probably 70 of the 90 books displayed on that page are self-published works, most of them of vanity-press quality judging by the plot descriptions. The second page of results is even worse– probably 80 of the 90 are just garbage.

This is the problem. There might be a few hidden gems in there, but there’s no way I have time to read enough of it to judge, let alone money to pay for it.

If I want to find new stuff that’s worth reading, I have to sift through a huge mass of crap to try to find the few things I want to read. And, really, life is just too short.

So, the situation we have is that there are more books published than ever before, but it’s harder to find anything worth reading than ever before. The filtering provided by traditional publishers is a huge time-saver, and faced with having to essentially sort somebody else’s slushpile, I’m most likely going to just give up. There’s no useful way to browse new releases.

OUCH!!

We can do blog book tours, offer free ebooks, and visit one another. But we are merely singing to the choir if we cannot reach the non-blogging public!

1.) READERS WON'T BUY WHAT THEY CANNOT FIND.

2.) READERS WILL NOT BUY WHAT THEY CANNOT CONNECT TO.

3.) READERS WON'T BUY IF THEY DO NOT BELIEVE THEY WILL ENJOY WHAT THEY WILL READ.

How do we step out of the glut of books out there? Free books? How many free books are truly read?

When you go to the bookstore and pay hard cash for a book, you usually read it, then get another. Not with the ebook revolution.

And will bargain-hungry readers just wait for you to offer your next book free?

What do you think? What can we do to stand out from the crowd?