Fair Competition by Paul Smith - Wise Grey Owl

If the internet is to mean anything then it has to be about "empowering" individuals and levelling the playing field to give everyone an opportunity - that is equally true for the writer. 

Until the advent of low cost production and devices like Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iPad and Sony's Nook, the major publishing houses were gatekeepers to whose books would be published and who would be promoted.  I wish that I could say that they mandated quality too but that is blatantly not true for much in the market isn't worthy of publishing.  Like any business it is commercial pressures that dictates where the marketing budget is spent and, like in many industries, a "name", and the name equates to a brand in reality, will sell so it is the name that scores highly when deciding who to promote and who not too.

Yet, there are thousands of talented writers who never achieve the traction necessary to become a "name" but produce very high quality output never-the-less.  There's also the false truth that writers compete with each other - they don't because readers of books do so serially - they move from the current book to the next and the next book could be any author based simply on what they've heard about.  Of course, the media influences this and poor books are read because, sometimes, people act like sheep and follow the crowd.  That is just human nature and once the popular book has been read they may move on to one that is less popular - at least they are reading and that's the important point.

So where does this leave the unknown author?  Well, there are lots of avenues for promotion like twitter, Facebook and via sites like Kindle Direct and Good-reads but we believe that independent authors are much stronger together so we've created a site that allows writers to promote their wares and a site where readers browse genres without the high pressure sales techniques found elsewhere.  The lack of search features is deliberate - we want people to feel like they are in a library and stumble across books that interest them and, maybe, just maybe, buy one or two as many have done.  The site is run by Wise Grey Owl and we're there to support independent writers and we've had help from many writers, across the world - particularly Clancy Tucker in Australia and Mary Firmin in the USA.  We're not involved in the financial transaction so writers are free to sell their books via any channel, and this is especially important when listing on a site has restrictions, as is the case with Amazon's Kindle Direct.

If you are interested then please visit:

http://www.wisegreyowl.co.uk

Or contact us - you'll see our contact details on the web site.

Our thanks to Brit Writers for their help and support - remember, we're stronger together.