The traditional route to market for a novelist is to write an excellent novel, send it to an agent, sign an agreement with a publisher, and have your book printed and available in all good bookshops. Of course I am trivializing the situation, but there are a few key points in this route this highlights.

In this route to market your book is approved by an agent and publisher. These people believe the book is good enough to sell and make a profit from the printing. It will go through various edits to improve the writing and standard of the piece before it reaches the shelves. By the time the customer is buying the book in their local bookshop they are reading a refined work that has been written and rewritten and has a certain level of quality implied.

Not long before you reach the shelves your book will be sent to various newspapers and magazines to review. Your book will then sit on the shelves of the bookshop for customers to peruse and consider buying.

As a customer you head into the bookshop, go to the section of the shop that is of interest and look at what they have on offer. The saying might go “never judge a book by its cover” but many do and it’s a key part of the marketing – an integral part of your customers are impulse buys that may have never bought your books before.

All this is set to change and necessarily. With the recent recession, bookshops are closing. This can hardly be a surprise; for a long time the industry has struggled to compete with the stock level or sale price that the internet suppliers offer. The medium for books is changing as well with audio books increasing in popularity and digital books being released for download for the Amazon Kindle and Sony’s Reader. Consumer demand is moving away from the traditional high street suppliers and with it, browsing and looking at different authors is increasingly a rarity.

One of the traditional marketing routes is also struggling to survive. Magazines and newspapers, some of the traditional places where books would be reviewed, are beginning to close ranks. With decreasing readership due to the ease of information on the internet, combined with a reduction in advertising spend as that also moves online the print media as a whole is needing something of a revolution.

The only logical solution must be to go where your customers are going and to move all of this process online. The book reviews, book shops and book media can, and must, all be available online at the click of a button. This solution is a terrifying one for the publishers and the industry as a whole.

The open access that anybody has to publishing on the internet makes people less inclined to browse book reviews and scan review sites for something that might be of interest. The rate that popular review and news sites must be updated makes it less likely that people will read reviews except of specific products they are interested in; there is less chance to attract a new reader this way.

Impulse buying is reduced as well; there is no more need to visit a bookshop and see books from other authors that you might be interested in. On a screen you cannot present anything like the number of books you will see in a single glance at your local bookshop. Most likely stores present other titles by the same author as suggestions for your customers. This means less new customers for authors and makes things particularly difficult for the new novelist.

The open access of the internet allows anyone and everyone to publish their work, version one, no edits required. Because of this same technology, new talented novelists trying to bring quality work to the marketplace will find it harder than ever to break into the market and gain a following of readers.