Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I really wish more people would stop glossing over the SELF in self-publishing. But, alas alack, that is a forelorn hope, methinks.
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I fear it is. The dominant emotion in the self-publishing crowd seems to be utter wishful thinking. I recently encountered a book aimed at that audience titled "Everyone has a book inside them!" Well, so they might, but whether it's a
good book is quite another matter, and whether anyone
else might actually want to buy and
read it is a question carefully not asked.
I had a go around on LinkedIn a while back with a chap up in arms about an AARP promotion. The AARP was looking for book ideas. The audience would be older retired folks, and what they were looking for was proposals for
non-fiction autobiographical works
by other older retired people detailing things they had done that were successful and fulfilling. The LinkedIn bozo was convinced the AARP would
steal his idea, pay someone else to write it, and publish it. Attempts by me to explain what the AARP was attempting to do and that they were a reputable outfit got nowhere. I hadn't
quite gotten to the point of saying "
What ideas? What makes you think you have anything
worth stealing?" (I'd seen no evidence he'd actually written and completed anything, let alone put it on the market or attempted to self publish.) But he decided I should be blocked as an enemy trying to sabotage his chances, and stopped talking to me. Of course, I was heartbroken...
There's an entire self-contained eco-system, with folks attempting to make money telling wannabe self-published types how to get rich and famous doing it, and lots of self-published types reminding me of the joke about the two Chinese trapped at the bottom of a well getting rich taking in each other's laundry. They are all busily pushing their works at each other, and are invisible to the wider audience.
The goal is to be able to announce "I'm a
Writer!" with some hope of being taken seriously. So you get things like folks who are self-publishing but doing so under a DBA and claiming they are "Indie" published, because they think that carries more cachet and confers higher status than being self-published.
I'm at the point where I say "Writers
write,
finish what they write, and put it on the market and
sell it to folks who want to read it. When you can point to things you have written and
sold to an audience beyond friends and family, come back and make the claim of being a writer again. Until you can do that, don't make the claim to me. I'll just point and laugh."
______
Dennis