Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
All the authors that I am personally acquainted with (and there are several) DO treat their writing as a "day job". They have a rigid routine of going to their desk and writing for a fixed number of hours a day. Anyone who writes professionally will tell you that that's pretty much the only way to do it. One difference between a "pro" and a "wanabee" is that the pro author churns out a pretty-much fixed number of words a day, regardless of whether they are "inspired by the muse" that day or not. You have to - you have a contract to deliver a book of a certain length by a certain date; you can't only write when you feel like it.
Publishers are not "going away" - whatever gives you that idea? I suspect that the majority of people who've never written a book don't have the faintest idea of what a publisher actually does. Virtually all that work applies equally to paper books and to eBooks. Books still need to be professionally edited, advertised, sold to retailers, and so on. The simple fact is that the majority of people who "self publish" do so because they aren't good enough to get published professionally. Self publishing is not going to replace "real" publishers any time in the foreseeable future, believe me!
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I find it disheartening that you would defend the old models, and as to myself, I have a writing routine whether the muse comes or not (luckily I put on my magic hat and it arrives instantly). Four hours every single day, 7 days a week (barring illness). Does that now make me a professional? Does my lack of faith in the publishing industry and my desire to be independent somehow make me a "wannabee"? If it's sanction you want, and quality you desire, then I fear you're out of luck. One only needs to browse the row upon row of garbage that is currently in the best-seller charts. Infantile, regurgitated, unsurprising series featuring the same dour, uninspired protagonists. The same serial killers being chased by the same detectives. The same independent women who somehow need a man to make 'everything right'. The same eighth generation Tolkien ripoffs. The bloated, meanderings of genre authors who somehow think that writing 1,500 page tomes makes them important, oh and who always, somehow, get to mention their car crash in everything.
Not good enough, you say? Publishing has never been about quality, its about marketing, about the bottom line, the least offensive, the most passive. For the most part what we see is pablum, uninspired, unflavoured, unremarkable escapism written and published in the hopes of appealing to the most readers. Every once in awhile a book might jump out of that pale soup and surprise, but it's not too often, and it's a risk that publishers take less and less these days.
You argue for the status-quo, the old instead of the new, the fixed instead of the fluid. You argue against a tide that is unstoppable, a culture that can no longer be restrained. For the gatekeepers instead of the lock-pickers. For the shackled instead of the free.
I've already got a boss. I already have to go to meetings with people that annoy me day in and day out. I already tow the line to get my paycheck. Why in Hell would I want to do this with writing? Why would any new author? Because, somehow, maybe, if the gatekeepers pull their finger out I might make a little more than minimum wage per year? Why wouldn't I, or any writer, pubbed or unpubbed, official or unofficial want to be part of an exciting time in literature, in culture?