Yes it is, and I was never disputing the value of choice so I don't understand the relevance of that statement. What I was commenting on was the stupidity of the remark that no one buys books anymore. Clearly they do, with the UK book market alone reaching in excess of £2billion. Of that around £200million is ebooks, so the majority of the market, by a long way, still belongs to traditionally printed books but the ebook market is still not insignificant.

__________________
1990 Landcruiser H60. Full rebuild completed 2014

I will never tire of praising amazon for the number of authors who got a chance to publish themselves. I will certainly appreciate at least one of her books.

Very interesting thread!

From the sight of actual and future book sales I totally disagree that there is only place for an ebook sales market.

There are and there will be in future still 2 reasons why you want to buy offline: You want it right know in the moment and you want or need to feel the haptic experience. In terms of books that means you want to take in your hands (and yes, you want to smell it - I have seen this behavior a lot in bookstores!), you want to browse the pages and to snack a little read before you buy.

Equal where I have been in the world I recognized that every country has its own travel season and that book stores are bringing this season to the front windows and presentation desks. And in another seasonal event like the weeks before X-mas book stores are fully filled with books to everything which could be attractive as a present.

This kind of marketing - the presentation of the book itself and its promoting by the book store staff you will never create online as an unknown author. Thats why still a lot of famous and of course unknown authors go out for a reading event to local book stores everywhere.

You think you can substitute this through social media campaigns? Nope, you cannot because you won`t get recognize at all in the sum of uncountless influences which drop down to peoples social media accounts.

I think self publishing is an exiting and a relative cheap way to bring a book into a market. But especially in todays and future times you will need a clear strategy to be successsful. You will defintely need an online and an offline sales strategy to get noticed for creating your sales numbers.

This because why only having a printed or a digital book you are competing with the social video market known as youtube & co. Video is the new book! You don`t belive it? Believe it and check at youtube: "new books 2022" or "travel books 2022". Even the biggest publishing companies have to use video campaigns to promote and to sell!

I think there has never been a better chance in the book market than now for you as an unknown author to launch your product. The mass of consumers aren`t in buying and reading ebooks so far. In the age of 18-29 40% buy and read ebook. In the age 30-49 just 30% of north americans do. From 40yrs on people are buying much more paper books than ebooks!

It makes sense to combine offline with online: means you to have to have a paper book and an ebook and you need campains or a strategy to link both with eachother.
And for this you have to clearly know what you want to sell: informations or adventures or both together!

If you look to the well known travel video channels on youtube e.g. where travellers sell both in form of a vlog you will recognized that they start cooperations with the industry and with equal travellers, that they sell clothing with logos and that they offer informations to their audience. Sometimes its free, sometimes its costs because its behind a paywall in form of a pseudo academy or you have to be a paying patreon.

The marketing concepts these travellers use are often uniform but some of them are very clever how they do it. But the last thing they do to make money from the travel project is offering a book to their followers. Before they do this they have sold a nice amount of calendar showing their travel photos.

If you plan to sell a book equal made of trees or of electrons it will help you if you had fed social media accounts before to get noticed and to create followers as multipliers.

If you lost that opportunity than its an argument more to tackle the paper book consumer with your strategy the same way as you do it to the ebook reader. Because paper book buyers are and they will still in the near future the majority of your potential buyers.

__________________