[Richard Herley]

HarryT, you're right. About 90% of unpublished authors are unpublished because they can't write. The insidious thing about writing is that everyone thinks he has a "book in him"; maybe he does, but getting it out is the hard part. Writing is a craft which must be learned, predominantly through reading. Every writer I know has always read voraciously. Beyond reading, the mechanics of the thing require much skill, from the overall structure of a piece right down to the minutiae of the prose.

But the craft is the least of it. You must have an ear for language. It's like music. More than that, you must be born with an urge to tell big, fat, whopping lies -- otherwise known as stories.

It's as April says. If a writer is any good, he or she will succeed. Spelling and grammar are just one part of that. It's bad manners to present a piece of writing (any piece of writing) to another person without making sure you are communicating as well as you can. Thus if an independent writer tries to sell you a story which is riddled with elementary mistakes, you won't persevere and that writer will have lost your confidence and your custom.

As she also says, new talent is getting squeezed out by the economics of scale. When I started out, it was common for publishers to carry a backlist of most or even all of their authors' titles. No more. Lots of writers are so despondent, worn down by years of struggle, that they are just giving up. It's a shame, it's not right, and the new technology might provide a cure.