You know, its actually confusing to me that, somehow, Ive ended up being on nodding, chatting, and in some cases friendly terms with a fair number of, and pretty wide selection of, published (and some, as yet, unpublished) writers of varying genres all over the world - in fact, now that I start counting, make that *quite* a number =-O - and I think Larry Correia is pretty representative of the ones I know, with respect to the Huffington Post article hes gently ripping to shreds here, and how they view other, more (or less) successful authors. For them its not about someones stealing *my* readers/bit of the pie; rather, it *is* about What did they do that *I* can use to improve my writing &, maybe, get more readers reading my books? Im reasonably sure that *all* of the authors I have more than a distant readers contact with have *worked* darn hard, for many years, to get where they are as writers. And yes, they *still are* working darn hard... Because, to keep their readers, they have to keep *writing* the *good* stuff. The publishing business is hard! Its incredibly hard, as a newbie writer, to get published by the mainstream publishing houses; and with the advances of technology, its no wonder that so many authors are self-publishing these days, like Sarah Yoffa or Chris Nuttall - if you want a shock, have a look to see how well Chris is doing in the Amazon charts. Even established authors are self-publishing, like Sarah Hoyt - check out her blog at accordingtohoyt for *lots* more discussion on the publishing business. Its not easy for the smaller publishers either - even the successful ones, the flexible ones, like Baen Books (baen) - who may want to publish more books each year, but are battling against the marketing might of the big publishers to get shelf space in the bookstores, and superstores (who have an incredible amount of buying power); or whose books are distributed by larger publishing groups, meaning they have to set their scheduled number of published books years in advance. And thats just the tip of the iceberg. Lets be clear here... *most* authors, across all genres - fiction & non-fiction - are highly unlikely to ever get the chance to do it full-time or *make money* doing so. The ones who do - yes, like Larry, Sarah, John Ringo, Charlie Stross, David Weber, Terry Pratchett, J K Rowling et al - who are published by mainstream publishing, and the growing numbers of full-time self-publishers like Chris, and part-time self-publishers like Sarah Yoffa, are a tiny fraction compared to the vast majority of people who write in the spare moments that they arent working, eating, dealing with families (and possibly, maybe, even getting some sleep); who are honing their craft, working hard, and praying that what they are sitting writing will, somehow, *be* published.
Posted on: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 02:47:22 +0000
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