At least, that’s the speculation. According to an article in The New York Times, among other newspapers and news sites, since Amazon is in the process of opening more, and larger, distribution centers, can an Amazon physical retail presence be far behind?

Well, never say never, but it seems unlikely. Amazon is not only the largest vendor of books, but also a significant retailing presence for a wide variety of products, from shelf-stable grocery items to rugs and furniture and clothing.

Sure, bookstores sell more than books nowadays, things like toys, stationery, souvenirs – they have to, to cover the costs of selling books. But it seems that as digital sales of books themselves soar, Amazon would be foolhardy to open stores to offer all sorts of merchandise (or a carefully selected choice of all the merchandise it offers).

And Amazon sells so very many different things, a store would seem to be more like a crazy dumping ground like something you’d find in the sci-fi series Warehouse 13 than even the best-supplied Walmart. And does Amazon want to become like Walmart?

The discussion itself, though, reveals the interest in Amazon, as a kind of merchandising version of computer maker and seller Apple: seemingly all-powerful.

What does this represent for writers who are creating books (either for online or physical distribution), or building a platform to increase their audience?. Not much, really. As an author, your concerns are content, and distribution. As someone building a platform, you’re working on creating content and you’re building an audience to follow you wherever and however you distribute that content.

After all, the content is more important than the delivery system. And whatever Amazon does in terms of opening physical stores or not, it’s pretty likely that once you’ve built a large enough platform and finished your book, you’ll be able to sell it anywhere.

But you probably knew that.

Still, the latest figures from the American Association of Publishing show that while year-to-year sales for that month decreased by nearly 21%, e-book sales jumped by 123%.

So the increase in e-books more than made up for the decrease in hardcovers.

This is not great news for traditional publishers eager to shore up earnings in the face of shifts in book-buying habits. But it does show that people are still reading books.

Or at least buying them.

Which is good news for any author. Especially one who’s building a platform for his or her ideas and who wants to engage with a growing audience through that online platform.

Still, e-publishing isn’t the cure-all for any sales ailment the publishing industry might be feeling. It’s another option – albeit one that is getting to be a more potent one. The future is digital, as author J.A. Konrath notes in an excellent blog posting, “Franzen and the EBook Bubble”. And, bit by bit and perhaps byte by byte), the power is returning to the author as the creator of content, rather than resting with the publisher as its distributor.

You are more likely to make an impact, regardless of how your book is published, if you’ve devoted time to building your audience through blogging, social networking, interaction with your tribe and commenting on other posts.

But it seems to be an increasing likelihood that the e-book is the book that will be in everyone’s hands (via e-reader of some sort) in the very near future.

Apart from that, however, what’s important is that you still devote time to finding your voice and crafting your message. No matter what method of information delivery you choose, you’ want to be transparent.

Authors are entrepreneurs (and many entrepreneurs should be writers to increase their reach), and should act, not react. Embrace the platform concept, and move forward in finding an audience.

So much for the enduring nature of the printed word in book form.

Barnes & Noble has decided not to stock physical books published by Amazon. It will offer them online, but not in its brick-and-mortar stores . Comments from readers on the Galleycat.com, which had reported on this, were generally opposed to Barnes & Noble’s actions.

The thing is, how many physical books does this mean? Well, not many for now. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will distribute print books from Amazon Publishing, and that represents only a fraction of what Amazon offers in digital form anyway.

Still, what Barnes & Noble is doing in the name of protecting its interests – or in simply making a statement that it opposes Amazon’s increasing power – is limiting the choice of consumers. What Barnes & Noble is doing in the name of protest is saying that choice is important, but only when the retailer is doing the choosing for the consumer.

As more and more books are being read on electronic devices, the rejection of physical copies of books may not amount to much. But Barnes & Noble’s actions underlines the fraught conditions in the retail marketplace.

What does this mean for authors? At this point not much – unless you’re an author who will have a physical copy of your book distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and will need to tell your fans that they can’t find it at their local Barnes & Noble. Not likely, right?

But how authors distribute what they write is important. They want to be heard, to be read, to reach their audience, to make a difference. They have been building a platform to get their ideas across and their book is an extension of themselves. Even if one consumer is unable to find the book he or she wants because a retailer has decided against stocking that book, that consumer – and that retailer – suffer.

That shouldn’t happen.

Barnes & Noble has spent a great deal of effort in promoting its Nook e-reader, and even devotes a lot of in-store floor space to Nook boutiques. But, as Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble said, speaking at a conference on digital books, “The device is just an entry point at helping consumers do what they already do today, which is read great books and discover content.”

Amazon, too, is aware of that, even with the success of its Kindle, and wants to ensure that content, even its own, gets to a reading public. The online retailer continues to offer a variety of publishing options and is a powerhouse Internet distributor, but has also inked a deal with Houghton Mifflin to distribute Amazon’s adult titles in North America outside of the Amazon.com platform.

Although many millions of iPads, e-readers and such have been sold (and will continue to sell), changing the nature of the reading and book-buying experience profoundly, it all comes down to what’s on the screen (or page). The distribution of content is evolving. The content remains key, though.

Even when a tribe contributes to the content. If you’re building a platform for your message, you will rely to a certain extent rely on what your audience tells you about your message when it responds to what you write. The creation of that content falls ultimately to you, of course. Books written by committee – anything done by committee – have a committee feel, that is, an unfocused point of view, as if something had been given so much market research that the sparkle that made people enthusiastic about it in the first place.

The point is, though, that despite the tools for market research, audience testing and distribution, the content of a book is the most important thing. Everyone wants to find an audience – even the seemingly all-powerful distributors like Amazon. Content is too precious for it not to find a home in the mind of a reader.

The latest comes from NBC News, which has begun a new electronic imprint, NBC Publishing. NBC had teamed with Penguin and the Perseus Books Group on enhanced ebooks. For this new venture, NBC hired as creative director someone who had previously worked at Perseus. (Publishing experience counts for something.) But NBC has considerable strengths as a media company, so this digital venture is not a big gamble: it can’t ensure that its books will be bought, but it can nevertheless promote them widely.

NBC is also taking advantage of its multimedia resources to offer enhanced e-books with videos. It’s also using its significant marketing platform, through which it can publicize whatever titles it releases.

This is a logical step for NBC News, since it can re-use its video content. And NBC is branching into an area that more and more news organizations are exploring. Books with timely content can be released much more quickly electronically than through traditional publishing, and for a news organization, this is very important.

The timeliness of content may seem to matter less to writers who are building their own platform, or to novelists. And if you’re weighing whether to self-publish or try to get your work accepted at a traditional publisher, the timeliness of a release my not matter so much to you. Traditional publishing operates more slowly because of its needs. It needs to inform its sales staff of what’s coming and these salespeople need in turn to try to sell bookstores on the coming works. Many authors rely on publishers to help get the word out about their books – and publishers do rally behind the authors whom the publishing sales staff seem to warm to. Such pre-publication promotion takes time.

And most authors don’t have a platform the size of NBC News. So they work with their publishers to help build awareness for their work. Of course, authors should be doing their own awareness-building. They may not opt for self-publishing via e-book, but they still should use digital tools to broaden their base and engage with their readers, well before publication.

NBC is in a position to jump into digital publishing, because it’s already laid the groundwork: it’s built a platform and it continues to build it.

Most authors aren’t yet in that position. If they choose to self-publish, as many are doing, they still need to do what they can to prevent being lost in an ocean of other digital titles.

What does that say about the state of books today?

That books are a mere part of the retail landscape.

But they always have been. What it really says is that retailers simply can’t rely on the sales of books to stay afloat. They often augmented their sales with things like trinkets or stationery, but the bookstore has become even more of a kind of mini department store. Even Barnes and Noble’s success with its Nook – which the company is considering splitting off – doesn’t offset the very real need to make money elsewhere. It really is like a recent New Yorker magazine cover that showed a bookstore that had toys, games, souvenirs, and other paraphernalia and one small shelf devoted to those old-fashioned paper and pasteboard constructions: books.

For several years, of course, retailers have been discovering what many authors have learned: that you can’t live by books alone. Sure, many fiction writers earn livings as teachers of creative writing at colleges (thus ensuring a continuing flood of authors onto a not-always-welcoming marketplace) while many nonfiction writers are entrepreneurs (and often college professors as well).

Books aren’t the goal: recognition for your ideas is. It’s the rare author who can make a living solely on the sales of his or her books. The books are a stepping-stone to other things (even for super-successful fiction authors who often realize more money through ancillary sales, such as rights to movie or television adaptations).

Even bookstores that rely on a steady flow of appearances by interesting authors – such as Rainy Day Books in Kansas City – markets these author appearances as theatrical events, selling tickets (which often include the price of the book), for authors who know how to speak to a crowd in an entertaining way.

Just as many movie actors are contractually bound to promote their film – their job doesn’t stop when the shooting ends – so authors, who are often eager to have a crumb of marketing from their publishers, should think beyond the book and into what their book represents for their careers going forward.

If you stick to your book alone, it’ll be a tough slog. Of course, writing a book is a great achievement, and to have written one or two or many books is the sign of a disciplined mind and a singular ambition. But the most savvy authors don’t stop with the writing.

Just as bookstores can no longer count on sales of books, neither can authors can’t on them – it’s the ideas, it’s the platform – it’s the opportunity to expand your reach.

It isn’t easy. But it’s doable.

Things are winding down at publishing houses as harried editors put aside manuscripts, rejection letters and agents’ calls and look forward to the Christmas break.

As for authors, well, authors are still writing. And if you’re an author who’s building a platform, then you know that there’s no downtime. People who read don’t take a break because it’s a time when magazines publish their best-of issues, or when television dwindles down to repeats and Hallmark holiday movies.

You’ve got a message to get out and, if you’ve been doing your job right, your audience remains hungry to hear what you want to say.

Any professional writer – and that’s what you are – knows that writing is something you do everyday, like going to work but without real holidays. Look at it this way, you never stop reading things, right? You’re always searching for news, for ideas, for comfort from the written word, no matter how you process it, whether it’s through a newspaper, an RSS feed or a smart phone app.

People don’t stop supplying information simply because the calendar says it’s time for a breather. And as you’re trying to build your audience, you’re not going to stop providing that audience with your content.

The thing is, as an author, budding or not, you should keep a schedule. Commit to writing three to four blog posts a week – and stick to it. If you think you’re going to run out of ideas, don’t panic – you’ll have plenty of fodder for your writing as long as you’re communicating with your audience, who’ll provide you with the feedback you need to inspire you to create more. But as someone who has committed to posting a message several times a week, you might want to keep a rolling file for offhand ideas that can also lead to inspiration.

You don’t want to go to the trouble of establishing your brand, and trying to build it, and not feed it. People are hungry for information, and they’ll be hungry for you if you continue to feed them your ideas.

Even when the rest of the country says it’s time for a holiday nap.

That being said, let’s start at the beginning. Here’s a few steps to writing a great blog post.

#1 — Pick Your Topic

Keep it small. Keep it simple. Keep to one point. We’re all busy, and a focused blog post will go a long way in building trust with your audience. Taking on a big topic from the outset is like carrying too many groceries at once — you’re likely to drop something. The same is true with a blog: too many topics, too big a subject and you make not make the point you set out to make.

#2 — Know Whom You’re Writing To

This might seem a no-brainer, but most people are confused at first about their target audience. The more clear you are about your target market is (right down to personality types) the easier it is to write to them.

#3 – Write From Your Heart

Over-thinking what you’re trying to say and finding fancy language in which to say it will likely leave you frustrated and ready to throw your computer against the wall. If you tap into your message from your heart and start writing as simply as possible – be yourself — I promise, it will flow much smoother.

#4 – Write, Then Edit

Go ahead and get your ideas out. Write and write, then edit what you’ve written. When you edit you’ll find you can string all the thoughts together in a much more organized manner. No writer writes perfectly the first time out. Editing is a vital part of the process. Write, walk away from it, then go back and edit. (It’ll take you a long way!)

#6 – Add Links

Now that you’ve written a post you’re proud of be sure to add active hyperlinks. Hyperlinks provide your reader with supporting evidence and answer the questions the reader is asking as they are asking them. It will build trust with your audience and they will know they can come to you for the information they need.

#7 – Add Images to Prove Your Point

Visual hints make it easier for your reader to draw their own mental image and get excited about what they are learning. If you’re telling a personal story, add personal images. If you need stock images, those can be found all over the place both free and paid. Keeping your posts lively with images will keep your readers coming back.

#8 – Ask an Engaging Question at the End

Keep it simple for your audience to interact with you. Always end with a call to action question that puts the conversation back in the hands of the audience.

As you write and find community through blogging I’m sure you’ll find it very rewarding. Following a simple template will help you keep the content flowing and have you on the top of rankings before long. Hope this helps you understand the pieces of a blog post.

Do you have a formula that works for you? Please share.

In some cases, e-books are more expensive than a paperback edition of the same title, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

Publishers are probably trying to make up for the income lost as sales decline of hardbound books, especially since even with the tremendous increase in sales of e-books (they could account for 35% of all book sales this year, and perhaps 70 percent in a couple of years), publishers aren’t making the money they used to make.

But they won’t make that kind of money in this new publishing landscape anyway. Bookstores continue to close, many authors are migrating to self-publishing, and publishers themselves face a lot of work in making books available for electronic readers.

This last means that much of the money saved on paying for paper and printing is often spent on back-office electronic configuring of books for different e-book formats. One publishing executive admitted that many e-books are riddled with errors in formatting – including dropped paragraphs – because of the amount of work involved and the speed with which publishers are called upon to release books (sometimes in a couple of months rather than a year, as in the past). In addition to editing books (which, as many readers today have noted, is often haphazard) publishers must devote time to formatting.

But although formatting is a new task for publishers, their publishing models remain basically the same: spend money on an advance, take the author through the editing process, whatever that involves, release the book to the public and hope to earn back that advance.

Pressure from Amazon, when it introduced its Kindle a few years ago, led to very competitive pricing, with many e-books costing $9.99. Now books in electronic form can cost $19 or $20 – more than hardcovers often cost at Amazon, which routinely offers discounts of 50% or more. Sure, portability is a big thing when it comes to e-books, but a lot of the sales increase was also tied to the ease with which someone could download a new title. That could change as prices increase.

Higher prices won’t ease publishing woes. And authors who continue to think that a book will make them rich need to reconsider their own approach to publishing. A book is a tool in building your business or your name, not the be-all and end-all of your career.

Pricing is a sensitive issue, and it took the music industry a while to adjust to the new realities. Publishing is still trying to figure the new, real, world of books.

This year, Borders Books closed and shut down its approximately 400 stores. Some of that business has migrated elsewhere: to Barnes & Noble, to online retailers and to independent bookstores.

Recent reports have shown that this season, bookstores are reporting actually showing increased sales in the face of the e-book onslaught.

A controversial essay in the online journal Slate belittling the efficacy of independent bookstores has drawn widespread comment and criticism.

And the owner of a landmark Paris bookstore, haven to generations of writers and booklovers, has died at the age of 98.

For the moment the focus has shifted to brick-and-mortar retail rather than digital sales. Bookstores still mean something to readers and writers.

First, a New York Times story explored the surprising strength of physical books this holiday season. Expensive gift books – like a $75 edition of all of the paintings in the Louvre – are popular, and also available (Amazon can’t guarantee the item for Christmas).

Increased traffic, and sales, at bookstores is a good thing. But it may not last – even the storeowners realize that come Christmas when many people unwrap their new readers or iPads, consumers are more likely to download something online than stroll into a bookstore and spend money on a physical copy of a book. But the bookstores will take anything they can – even if it’s a temporary surge in sales.

Recently the writer Farhad Manjoo blasted booksellers, especially independent booksellers, for being inefficient and not really worth the time of an educated consumer. His essay on Slate has attracted more than 1,200 comments so far, with most remarks praising bookstores, even though bookstore employees lack the sophisticated algorithms of functions that tell consumers “if you like this then you’ll like that” or “what other customers recommend.” You get a more personal touch – helpfulness, snobbery, disdain, enthusiasm – at the bookstore that you don’t get online.

The essay was provocative, certainly, and had its points about bookstore markups, online bargains and such –one can indeed buy books more cheaply online. But bookstores, for all of their inefficiencies, do help to make neighborhoods more livable (if only the locals would shop in them rather than use them as browsing places before they click to buy something online). And while more readers may be migrating to the e-book, many readers and consumers like having an actual place nearby (even one they don’t always support). The fierceness of the debate may belie the reality – bookstore sales are in decline in general – but bookstores are not dead yet, even if the marketing of books is more of an online platform-building effort than ever before.

In France, at least, bookstores are doing well – even English-language ones such as Shakespeare & Company, named after the venerable store that first published James Joyce’s Ulysses and run by a booklover whose dedication to the written word extended to creating a place where writers could work and readers could linger.

The death of George Whitman, the American-born owner of the bookshop, does mark the end of an era, that of the bookstore owner as outsized personality, perhaps. Such a passing brings to mind the almost mythical importance that writers and readers assign to places associated with literature, with the literary life, with the romance and even the grandeur of writing, publishing, reading.

The romance of writing may be fading (though the writing of romance is still quite profitable) given the harsh vagaries of the publishing landscape, when publishers themselves don’t know what even the near future may bring.

Still, the debates over the importance of bookstores in a digital age, the importance given to bookstore owners who put a face to commerce, the passion for bookselling in general – these are good things.

They show how much reading still matters.