Maryan Pelland just sent me Chip McGregor’s 10/29/09 blog about personal stories no longer being viable in today’s book business.

He’s absolutely right–from an agent’s pov. Here’s my take: publishers aren’t willing to spend money on these books because the market for them is down since the Internet is indeed awash with such personal stories for free. But therein lies the rub: the public still wants to read them; they just don’t want to pay for them anymore.

Subsidy press, disguising itself as self-publishing service, is really the answer for almost all memoirs these days. I used to rail against it, but now accept its value in the changing landscape. Here’s the trickle down: as life becomes more and more virtual, more and more groups and organizations are springing up so people can physically get together, make new friends, network, or just enjoy live human contact (LHC). Most of those organizations and groups enjoy having speakers as part of that LHC experience. Hence, more and more Baby Boomers and young entrepreneurs are adding “speaker” to their resume and hitting the road, either locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally.

Whenever someone moves their audience, that audience wants to take a piece of them home; it’s a natural human response. Ergo, selling a POD (print on demand) title BOR (at the back of the room) becomes a logical and almost essential revenue stream. Will the speaker continue to get gigs and grow their reputation if the book does not read well? No. Negative reactions spread very fast. Ergo, those speakers need our ghostwriting and editing services.

Plus, using Chip’s advice, authors can not only sell a POD title BOR (back of the room), they can spin their title into a secondary advice book or Ebook. Ebooks are the wave of the present, if not the future. Since the cost is so low–the ability to create an XML file that can be tagged and converted to various readers, all of which is built into Word 7 (Vista) and above–the emphasis returns once more to a well-crafted manuscript which, in turn, promotes sale of the POD hard copy.

In other words, as the playing board expands, our services are in ever-expanding demand.

God Bless the computer age.

For additional information on making money with ebooks, check out Ellen Violette, The eBook Coach. I sat on a panel with her the other night, and she definitely seems to know her stuff.