Read an E-Book Week has begun for 2010, and this year promises to outdo all previous years by an order of magnitude. Rita Toews has been working her butt off, interviewing for periodicals and blogs, contacting and drawing in new participants and promoters and twittering until her fingers are hoarse!
As the list of partners and promoters of e-books has grown, the number of participating authors and publishers has increased enormously. On Smashwords, over 3,000 authors will participate in the promotional event. Blio, QBook, Diesel E-Books and Sylvan Dell Publishing have joined most recently. The event has been mentioned as far away as Poland and England and as close to home as the Huffington Post. And the exposure to e-books being created by the soon-to-be-released iPad is drawing even more interested parties in.
(Selfless promo: I am offering my novel, Chasing the Light, free for the download on my site.)
This is your chance as well, to get out there and promote e-books to those who may not have tried them, or wonder what the hoopla is all about. If you have a reading device, show it off. If someone has questions about how and where to buy, elucidate them. If someone is looking for new reads, tell them about some of the independents you’ve discovered, or the classics you’ve rediscovered, through e-books. And, of course, find some new authors and reads of your own!
For more information about REBW10 and what you can do, visit www.ebookweek.com.
Congratulations Steve and Rita. Read an eBook Week is a part of the history of our industry. It took longer than we thought, but all of a sudden, we’re the mainstream. I wonder if, in a year or two, people will look back and say, “How quaint. What other kind of book would they read?”
Rob Preece
Publisher
Rob,
Thanks for the congrats: But I’m just a cheerleader who helped make the site look good; Rita’s the driving force behind REBW. If it weren’t for her and her tireless work, there would be no Read an E-Book Week.
I don’t know if it will take 1-2 years, but I also expect that eventually, no one will remember why anyone had to “promote” e-books in the first place.