Not long ago I wrote a blog about how authors were the gatekeepers of publishing, and I still think they are in that they control the quality of the writing, but the ultimate gatekeepers are readers. The ones who buy books. No author can survive without readers. They pay our bills. They are the arbitrators of success by investing their time and, more importantly, their money.

With all the confusion going on in publishing right now (the NY Times just had an interesting article on how Amazon is a quickly growing presence), it comes down to this simple equation that has been ignored for decades in publishing (note how the Amazon exec says almost the same thing): Writers produce the product, readers consume the product. At Who Dares Wins Publishing our motto is: Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.

Publishers for too long focused on distributing to consignment outlets, aka bookstores, rather than selling to readers. Now that they no longer control distribution for eBooks, that’s changed drastically. Readers are free to find whatever books they want and could care less if Random House published it or Godzilla. They care about the quality of the writing and the quality of the book. No reader ever walked into a bookstore and said “Give me the next Random House.”

The bottleneck now, as I noted two blogs ago is finding the writers and books that readers like. Placement is critical. A good author that a reader can’t find, isn’t going to last long.

With this in mind, a group of authors who have had the acknowledgement of readers via sales (the ultimate determiner), by selling at least 100,000 eBooks, and most having had great success also in print, have banded together to form Readers Rule.

Right now we have bestselling authors:

J Carson Black

L.J. Sellers

Joe Nassise

Ruth Harris

And moi, Bob Mayer.

We’ve put together a web site that we’ll be expanding soon with bells and whistles such as giveaways. Right now though, you can quickly get an idea of what each author writer on their individual pages which also have direct buy links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

This is just a beginning of the rise of the Author. We know how valuable readers are.

In essence: Readers Rule.