When I started Dream Dancing
Dream Dancing was published in 2007 after many years of re-writes, edits, and false endings. The publishing world was different then and a lot has changed since the first publication. The next series of blogs will be about the sights, sounds, and stories that went into Dream Dancing.
The publishing world.
Dear Pen Pal came out in 1998. If you wanted a copy, you went independent bookstores or libraries for books. I wrote about Encore Books back on the December 8th 2015 blog. There were also Waldenbooks in the malls in the area. Barnes and Noble were building their stores, but they hadn’t edged out other places yet.
Major publishing corporations were merging and that scared some writers. If the chances for publishing were limited, where would all the dreamers and storytellers go? The price to publish a book had gone down so smaller publishers sprouted. They published only a handful of books per year and had smaller print runs. The small stores like Encore would stock these books. Barnes and Noble or Borders would buy a few when a book signing may happen. It was tough to make a name for a small print publisher.
Publishers that charged a writer to print their books were around. They charged thousands of dollars and a lot of times, the finished book didn’t look like thousands of dollars went into it. There may have been good books, but the reputation was bad.
Around the late 1990s to early 2000s the POD (print on demand) publisher arrived. They didn’t print books in bulk, they only printed a book when they had orders to. This cut down on original costs to authors and potential losses. Even Barnes and Noble had a part ownership in Iuniverse.com publishing.
The books were still available in smaller stores and could be bought by the author when they had book fairs and the such. If you ordered straight from the publisher or if the store ordered with the publisher, then the book would be printed.
As with happened with music stores and movies rental places, smaller independent stores were losing ground to giant corporate stores. Back in the early half of the 1980s, there were small video stores that stocked one or two big movies, but a ton of obscure titles and older movies. These stores eventually closed because Blockbuster, Palmer Video and Hollywood Video took more of the marketplace. Small music stores lost ground to Sam Goody or The Wall.
The publishing world was getting bigger and more opportunities were opening up.
Bookstores were losing ground to Barnes and Noble and Borders.
The link to Dream Dancing:
Next Week: Iuniverse.com
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