I was heading to a baby shower on a normal Friday night just to enjoy myself a little bit after all the hard work I put myself through to finish my third book. I can't complain, I had a great time at the baby shower. In fact, the celebration was the best part of the night, it was when I got home around midnight that I turned on my computer to read some blog posts by my fellow Hybrid Nation members. I took a look at Grant's blog and an article caught my eye...

It was titled, "Where have all the readers gone? So with my instinct, I decided to take a look at the article and it mentions that in the past few months book sales have declined significantly. All I could say is, "Thank God I'm still selling books." As I read further Grant made some really great points about why book sales have gone down. Some of these I kind of realized already, others opened my eyes more deeply.

These are the three big reasons he came up with:

1. The market is flooded with lots of "99 cent" books out there. To put my two cents in this man's thoughts or add to it, many of these 99 cent books are of bad quality. This includes bad formatting, poor grammar and just overall a lousy story. Like Grant said, how can we "good authors" compete with this "Unethical" practice? To add insult to injury I see boxed sets for 99 cents and I'm seeing an epic book for $2.99, does that seem fair? Probably not, but there's not much we can do about it, we just have to live with it. 

 

2. A higher number of "free Books" out there. This is something I agree with Grant on as well, is the number of free books not to mention the poor quality that comes along with that has given the book market a bad name, which it doesn't deserve at all!

 

3. Just the sheer size of the amount of books in the market, which makes it harder for hard-working authors to break out and have people purchase our words that we worked so hard to write. We both agreed that this is the scariest theory of all the theories that Grant came up with and one that will only get worse as time goes, not to mention many authors are becoming even lazier. 

 

Now those are all great and valid reasons, but here's the problem. There's more! Yes take a look at the logo below:

 

 

 

 

Nintendo! How did this blog post go from books to a giant video game company?

The answer is simple, my theory is while yes there are many books in the market, many young people ages 10-45 prefer to play video games and rot their minds with unoriginal ideas, not to add the fact it exposes many kids to be violent, delinquent. and most importantly it encourages kids to never read a book in their lives. I'm guilty of playing video games, but I'm a grumpy man now and prefer to read a damn book! In my opinion, the rise of video games began the decline of reading and the numbers prove it. During the late 1990's video game sales outnumbered book sales by almost triple, that my friends is a very disturbing thing indeed and the book market was doomed at that moment. It's a simple theory, many kids just find it easier to fry their brains with video games that have the same damn idea over and over again, no originality! At least in a book, a writer can make stories outside the box and therefore much more enjoyable!

 

 

 

 

 

 

To video game geeks, Atari represented the near destruction of the video game world. For us, it represented an opportunity to regain readers that had been lost to video games. Honestly, sometimes, I wished the video game crash of 1983 became permanent and video games would simply die off. What Atari did to nearly save the literary world, Nintendo had to come in and "Save" the video game industry and bury us authors to a life of being poor artists trying to make an honest living! So next time you see Mario, think about it, he's a plumber who has never read a word in his video game life!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I never saw a generation do so poorly on reading tests and read even less than the generations of my parents. Sometimes I feel ashamed that I'm part of a generation that sees people like Drake, Justin Bieber, and miley cyrus as role models. A group of people who can't read a damn contract correctly and also the same ones who are corrupting my generation of people. No need to worry if I know you on Facebook, from the neighborhood or from High School I'm not talking about you. We're unfortunately the exception rather than the rule. So I urge everyone to ignore the media and pick up a book once in a while to see that you don't need tv or the media to be entertained! Now go out there and enjoy yourself a good book!

To read Grant Leishman's blog post about this topic click here.