Well...let's examine why this is happening.
(1) If gun books were selling, people would be lined up to publish.
(2) Most books - gun books or otherwise - are poop. The art of writing has gone downhill greatly. Additionally, their content is also lacking - short on facts or compelling text, long on rambling opinions.
(3) Good books are driven by subject matter waiting to be told.
(4) So is publishing falling apart because of the internet or because the content has gotten so middling?
GregSY: (1) The problem is that books, in general, are not selling and publishers are going or have gone out of business; gun book distributors like Discount Books of WV went out of business; big gun show dealers like Tom Rowe don't attend gun shows any more. Big box stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble are going down; they order books to fill their shelves, let customers take them to their in-house Starbucks to dribble coffee on them while they rest on sugary goo from fat bombs, and then return the damaged goods to distributors who back-charge the publishers...things ain't what they used to was!
(2) There are good and bad books. Books that had to survive a publisher/editor's scrutiny in order to be published are quite different than self published books that get into print simply because the author has the $$$ to do the deed. Most gun book authors do not have any professional qualifications as writers and simply rely on a knowledge of the subject matter to see them through. The problem is that if the budding author gleaned his knowledge of the subject matter by reading the last several books on topic, he doesn't add anything to the body of knowledge.
(3) "Good books are driven by subject matter waiting to be told" sayeth GregSY. A best-case example is
The Parker Story, where the authors obtained the long-sought Parker factory records, spent almost a decade putting the info into two volumes, had a readership base of almost 3,000 current and former PGCA members, ran (as I understand) about 3,000 copies in 1998-2000, and Dan Cote was still selling them (personally) at the Yooper.
The Parker Story has benefited from constant full-page advertising in the
DGJ since as early as 1993. No gun book author(s) could possibly justify the cost of such constant advertising...yet, looking at a recent
DGJ, I notice that Cha's Semmer is still advertising his
Remington Double Shotguns in a 1/4 page ad and after 15 years his Signed Ltd. Ed. of 300 is not yet sold out. This has gotta be a labor of love.
(4) The "culprit" is the Internet and websites like this, plus Blackberries, FaceBook, Twitter, cell phones, and all the instant gratification venues that siphon away time from the waking hours,thus, making a path of least resistance away from hard-copy books, newspapers and magazines. I do not subscribe to any magazines anymore; We do not have a newspaper delivered; I do not need the
WSJ to keep up with the markets. The first thing I did as I got up this morning is turn on the computer, then I got a cup of coffee, checked out the Yahoo! home page for the news, checked my Mail Box, clicked Yahoo! Finance for the markets, and here I am wasting time blogging when I could be reading a book. To paraphrase Pogo, the possum of comic strip fame, who famously said, "I have found the culprit and he is me." EDM
