way. and those fighting the are the more successful ones. >> another component to salles publishing success is the quality of the content. >> the best thing i think is from 29 until now, the quality of the book has changed astronomically. it's from another world. >> to organizations have contributed to informing the public about the quality of the self published writings. >> it is the world's largest online community for reading and sharing stories of. we come and not so many words used newspaper readers and writers. they can't go on to the wattpad and applaud their work for free, and then the readers can go on line and read them for free. >> at the moment we are sitting at 20 million users, and we are

a huge socially engaged community. it's a very positive community. a lot of the writers are using it basically to build a fan base to market their books. anywhere else on the internet, you cannot find 20 million people that are just looking to read on any other social network where they want to connect with the author, where they want to give constructive criticism, they want to give feedback. and, you know, is basically the perfect place for writers to be right now especially independent writers. >> it is a community of readers, mostly in the u.s.. there's been about ten other countries around the globe. all of them share a passion for reading. ordinary people, no literary

experts or professors of english. and it's a collective community of readers. and on the other side is self published authors who want to be recognized and get some degree of is my book good or not and where the conduct is between. as of the nominee the books to us, the authors and we send them to the readers and unfortunately nine out of ten times we go back to the author to say i'm sorry. one out of ten times we get a thumbs-up and we have a list of criteria probably not much different than any lottery expert without. it's the single most important thing that we ask the readers is this a book that he would recommend to your best friend and first and foremost is the copyediting spelling, punctuation, grammar and then you move quickly through the line editing of the story flow, the writing style comedy like the writer's voice, is at -- does each chapter and with a cliffhanger and affect to point you to the next chapter and then we get now down to the more

developmental things as who the characters are. we explain to their readers what we want them to look at, but in character that starts off bad, does he change, does she change? is there an appropriate amount of foreshadowing? so yes, that is the list. we don't want to turn them into professors of literature. we want them to look down and say that is a checklist. we want the average joe. so we are not going to ask a lot of that thing up front. they must be 18. they must have at least a high school it's went up almost 80% and most of a bachelor's or master's or doctor's it, but we didn't force that. we don't require them to live in the u.s., they have to prove that to less. beyond that we let them get in the pool. we send out five books. we don't do it nefarious, we don't send out a single ball,

but the track them and watch them so on average five to six people read any given book and the book clubs could be 20. if they are in sing with their tears it is not a red light is a green light. if someone says yes and five people say no, then we see the converse if there is no explanation we drop them for being a reader so it is post vetting. all the books we think are good. some are every bit as good as harry potter were gone with the wind or to kill a mockingbird, but those people deserve to have a voice and we are helping them find it. >> as indiebrag and others help writers find their voice, the self publishing bookexpo helps them find each other. >> it is a fairly solid terrie endeavor. when you traditionally public

you have an agent and editor and in the marketing publicity team for what it's worth, whether they do everything they say they are going to do. when uri self publishing sponsor, you know of that and i think one thing that this shows for these people is a chance to lonely -- if they self published let's say everything is gone on line, so they never get to see these things. so, to things to show for these particular authors one is to meet the people behind the company to actually look at the basis and go right to live with these people, so that's number one. member to come to go ytoy with each other. they never get to say i tried this spigot was awful. i tried this and i had great success.

so they can actually talk to each other. and that was also a goal for us was to be able to have these people that work and talk to each other so they could learn from each other. >> what is the future of the publishing industry from one that has known the traditional and self publishing world? >> as the number of books being traditionally published shrink, the right perfectly good books and maybe five years ago or ten years ago would have been picked up by a traditional publisher and still have the opportunity. so they are doing it on their own. i think with the rise of self publishing if he will continue to do it and do it right, what you're seeing now is traditional publishers. now a lot of them helped defeat to have self publishing art. they are realizing there is talent out there. they won the talent that is

established already because what happens is when you self published and if you do it correctly. alan dershowitz talks about becoming a lawyer in the cases that he has handled over the past 50 years. this program is next on book tv. [applause] >> welcome, everybody. it's delightful to see you all and remarkable in a funny way for the two of us to be here by

feel this is one of our many exams, which you used to do as you just heard, and i don't know how that can to be, but as you say in the book that you are a dreadful student until you went to college at the elementary school and secondary school you were a disaster, what turned it around? >> i don't know. i wish i knew. ellen and elementary school and high school i was a c and d student and have an actual photograph of my senior semester report card with a 60 and physics with a red circle, 50 in mat with a red circle, 65 in history, and i managed to squeeze out and eat and english so i had a 67 average and i was actually suspended from the far as the musk