Website design By BotEap.comThis morning’s New York Times features an article about how today’s pornographers are experiencing a recession, perhaps the first of the electronic age.

Website design By BotEap.comThe Internet, with its millions of amateur strippers, swingers, and red-hot sinners, is making it hard for XXX video producers to make a profit.

Website design By BotEap.comThey are not alone.

Website design By BotEap.comTraditional book publishers are also struggling.

Website design By BotEap.comThey are competing against a tsunami of free content provided by amateur authors.

Website design By BotEap.comMany surprisingly capable writers are uploading content and entertaining bookstore patrons with their free products.

Website design By BotEap.comEzineArticles.com, for example, is a site that hosts over 50,000 writers, all working for free. Some of these scribes are shipping as many as 10,000 pieces, which is the equivalent of 100 non-fiction books.

Website design By BotEap.comWhy are they literally giving away the product of their work?

Website design By BotEap.commany reasons:

Website design By BotEap.com(1) They have been excluded from the traditional editorial game. Without an established track record and credibility or a special audience, they simply can’t catch the attention of the traditional community.

Website design By BotEap.com(2) Some are established authors who find traditional publishers becoming vain or subsidized presses. If authors promise to buy thousands of their own titles, to sell at conferences and seminars, then publishers will be eager to serve as glorified printers. If authors cannot minimize a publisher’s risk in this way, they are often rejected.

Website design By BotEap.com(3) There was never much money in the traditional publishing game for most authors. So instead of trying to hit the jackpot, they trade a few bucks, a lot of marketing effort, and humiliating rejections for a sure thing: show their texts to at least some readers, and do it quickly.

Website design By BotEap.com(4) Authors like to control the products of their work. They know their audiences better than most publishers and appreciate turning down nosy middlemen who insist on micromanaging titles, content and style.

Website design By BotEap.com(5) Authors, especially experienced ones, know that most traditional publishers are clueless when it comes to predicting which books will sell. It is well known that the “Chicken Soup” books were rejected time and time again by “the best and the brightest” buyout publishers from the big publishers before what was a small publisher, Health Communications, made an offer.

Website design By BotEap.comMost people are not going to cry over the losses suffered by pornographers.

Website design By BotEap.comAnd most authors won’t shed any tears for a traditional publishing community that has had its head in the ground for most of the last 200 years.