just because you have written a book does not make you an author

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by TGS

Nowhere I know of has "author" as a protected occupation. In some places in the world you cannot call yourself and "engineer" if you do not have engineering qualifications, in other places you cannot call yourself a "psychologist" unless you have appropriate qualifications. However, it seems that being an "author" has no prerequisites anywhere...but perhaps you know different.

Last time I was there, being a writer in Dublin meant not having to pay taxes. It would be fun to survey the kinds of tax law abuse that must occur as a result of that exception.

[bigbadburninbush]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

Not that there isn't loads and loads of rubbish in self-publishing. But it is democratising publishing and allowing less easily pigeonholed authors to be heard, and one can easily ignore self-published works if one wants. I rarely look at self published works unless it comes highly recommended, so I don't feel my choices, selection and percent of quality literature that I peruse today are any different than 10 or 20 years ago.

But I would argue that market forces are doing precisely the opposite. By destroying the small publishers and enslaving everything to market forces. Amazons only criteria is that you sell. In order for unique voices to be heard it always required unique publishers with taste who were wiling to raise that author on a platform for all to see no matter the risk. Now its harder to educate people and fight through the noise to see the great.

For instance, an innocent peruser of the Amazon library may come across an edition of 'Moan for Bigfoot' by Virginia Wade, and find their choice validated by the like minded. And amazon will happily take your money. So will Virginia Wade for that matter. Of course Virginia wouldn't exist without Amazon and Bigfoot would never have crawled out of the forest without such support.

[Fluribus]

The core definition of "author" is simply someone who originates something. It doesn't even have to be a written work.

By the definition suggested here, this post has no author since nobody was paid to write it. There are massive numbers of songs, poems, letters, stories, and books without authors. Start throwing in the songs without singers.... The artwork without artists.... Boggles the mind.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If someone says to me "I am an author" without any other explanation, then I'm going to assume that he writes for work and makes money with it; that he is a professional author on the job, so to speak.
In that case, you're pretty much agreeing with me that "author" means a person who earns money.

If it then turns out that he isn't, and basically does cleaning for a day job, that person is still an author (an amateur), but he is inflating the designation.

To compare, anyone can reply: "I am a software engineer" or "I'm a singer", while the only software they write is used by themselves, and they only sing in the shower.

Yes, even if you do this stuff (writing, software engineering... anything, basically) for fun only, you're still an author/software engineer/anything, but you'd be wise not to mention it as your primary job or hint at it as your way of making a living if you cannot convincingly back it up. You'd be making a fool of yourself.

What I get out of this explanation is that you're basically agreeing with me that label "author" implies that one is earning money through writing.

[BearMountainBooks]

Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush

But I would argue that market forces are doing precisely the opposite. By destroying the small publishers and enslaving everything to market forces. Amazons only criteria is that you sell. In order for unique voices to be heard it always required unique publishers with taste who were wiling to raise that author on a platform for all to see no matter the risk. Now its harder to educate people and fight through the noise to see the great.

For instance, an innocent peruser of the Amazon library may come across an edition of 'Moan for Bigfoot' by Virginia Wade, and find their choice validated by the like minded. And amazon will happily take your money. So will Virginia Wade for that matter. Of course Virginia wouldn't exist without Amazon and Bigfoot would never have crawled out of the forest without such support.

Small publishers always have had a hard time of it, but Carina Press is still out there, Samhain, Angry Robot and so on. Baen is still out there and is an independent mid-sized publisher...let's see. Bell Bridge is still out there, so is Mysterious Press...

So there are self-pub'd books available for sale on major retailers...that impacts readers who are interested and also impacts self-published authors. I suppose a reader may accidentally buy a book by a self-pub'd author now and then. But I doubt that such an accident causes a huge uproar. It's fairly easy to avoid self-pub'd works if you care that much. Does it take sales away from trad published authors? Probably. But that is only going to happen if the self-pub'd books continue to find an audience.

Trying to define the word author as a way to exclude self-published authors isn't going to help traditional authors. The genie is out of the bottle. And as it ever was, the ONLY way to gain and keep an audience is to write more books and hope they find an audience.

[jandrew]

Ah, the good old days when NOT being an author actually meant something. Now virtually anyone can NOT be an author, even published "authors". Sheesh.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush

But actually, upon more careful examination, this thread brings up a subtle point which is that today there is no clear way to differentiate between the artists we should pay attention to and the more common fare. Companies like Amazon have sought to democratize literature and so promote the idea that everyone can be an author and stand side by side with greats, and the only differentiator is sales. Same is true for other arts too.

If the "greats" were truly great, then they would not be losing as badly to the self-published authors as you seem to be implying.

The good authors will sell books, the bad authors won't, and whether or not they are trad-published is not nearly as important a criterion as whether or not they know how to write. Which incidentally, not all trad-published authors do.

Amazon offers choices, more so than...

the trad publishers, of whom it could truly be argued that they try to tell us which "artists we should pay attention to".

Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush

Well that's just it. Amazon says we should pay attention to Stephenie Meyer. A lot of attention! Even though amongst those who value the written word, it is well known that she can hardly write. Her books being full of mistakes and common prose. I believe that great voices shine through based on their intrinsic qualities, however in this time it seems that market interests can all but drown it out.

So we're talking about authors. And that used to imply some quality, but sadly now not really, hence the need to distinguish. I guess that used to be called 'taste'.

Amazon says to pay attention to Meyer because people are already paying attention to her. Amazon is interested in only one thing, and that is sales. And funnily enough, the same applies to the trad publishers. If people truly thought she wasn't worth reading, her books wouldn't sell and she wouldn't get such a high rating on Amazon, now would she?

This is besides the fact that she can write very well, you and a lot of other people (me too, in fact) simply protest against the vapid nature of what she writes. But apparently some people like that kind of stuff, enough to pay money for it.

In any event, you just sound stupid when you insult the quality of her work when you really (should) mean the content of her work.

And that still doesn't mean she doesn't deserve to be listed.

Also, she is trad-published, and the trad publishers are the ones who first pushed her work. Thus -- proof that trad publishers care as little for the "noble art" of literature as Amazon does.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Grace Elliot

Why not? No one appointed me judge and jury.
However, if I asked someone what their occupation was and they said 'Prime Minister' and you know full well they aren't Mr Cameron, I would smile and inch away....

Even if their name is Harper?

[Prestidigitweeze]

This has been written about before, of course. I've been expecting someone to post pdfs of these two famous essays, but since no one else has done it, here you go.

"The Death of the Author," by Roland Barthes

The translated essay as it originally appeared in Aspen Magazine:

"The Death of the Author"

Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"

Here's a comparatively recent (2010) mainstream piece on Barthes' essay that was published in the Guardian:

In Theory: The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes:

"As soon as a fact is narrated without a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively -- that is to say, outside of any function other than that of the practice of the symbol itself -- a disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death and writing begins. . . . The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author."

"Though the sway of the author remains powerful . . . certain writers have long attempted to loosen it. In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, and for us as well, it is language which speaks, not the author. To write is, through a prerequisite impersonality, to reach that point where only language, and not 'me', acts and performs. Mallarme's entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing. . . ."

"A text is made up of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation. However, there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader -- not, as previously said, the author."

Michel Foucault (from "What Is an Author?"):

"It would be as false to seek the author in relation to the actual writer as to the fictional narrator; the author-function arises out of their scission -- in the division and distance of the two."

Maurice Blanchot (from The Essential Solitude, which predates the essays by Barthes and Foucault):

In the solitude of the work - the work of art, the literary work - we discover a more essential solitude. It excludes the complacent isolation of individualism; it has nothing to do with the quest for singularity. The fact that one sustains a stalwart attitude throughout the disciplined course of the day does not dissipate it. He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed. He who is dismissed, moreover, doesn't know it. This ignorance preserves him. It distracts him by authorizing him to persevere. The writer never knows whether the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he starts over or destroys in another.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

If the "greats" were truly great, then they would not be losing as badly to the self-published authors as you seem to be implying.

The good authors will sell books, the bad authors won't, and whether or not they are trad-published is not nearly as important a criterion as whether or not they know how to write. Which incidentally, not all trad-published authors do.

Amazon offers choices, more so than...

the trad publishers, of whom it could truly be argued that they try to tell us which "artists we should pay attention to".



Amazon says to pay attention to Meyer because people are already paying attention to her. Amazon is interested in only one thing, and that is sales. And funnily enough, the same applies to the trad publishers. If people truly thought she wasn't worth reading, her books wouldn't sell and she wouldn't get such a high rating on Amazon, now would she?

This is besides the fact that she can write very well, you and a lot of other people (me too, in fact) simply protest against the vapid nature of what she writes. But apparently some people like that kind of stuff, enough to pay money for it.

In any event, you just sound stupid when you insult the quality of her work when you really (should) mean the content of her work.

And that still doesn't mean she doesn't deserve to be listed.

Also, she is trad-published, and the trad publishers are the ones who first pushed her work. Thus -- proof that trad publishers care as little for the "noble art" of literature as Amazon does.

Commercial publishers aren't trying to tell us which artists to pay attention to. It's commerce, not art. They publish the books they think they have the best chance of making back their investment on.

[LovesMacs]

Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush

But I would argue that market forces are doing precisely the opposite. By destroying the small publishers and enslaving everything to market forces. Amazons only criteria is that you sell. In order for unique voices to be heard it always required unique publishers with taste who were wiling to raise that author on a platform for all to see no matter the risk. Now its harder to educate people and fight through the noise to see the great.

No. Traditional publishers, like independent and self-publishers, are also trying to make money. If trad. publishers' only goal was to educate people, they would be giving away books for free or minimal cost.

Originally Posted by bigbadburninbush

For instance, an innocent peruser of the Amazon library may come across an edition of 'Moan for Bigfoot' by Virginia Wade, and find their choice validated by the like minded. And amazon will happily take your money. So will Virginia Wade for that matter. Of course Virginia wouldn't exist without Amazon and Bigfoot would never have crawled out of the forest without such support.

So in effect you are arguing for less choices for readers, not more.

[TGS]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

This has been written about before, friends. I've been waiting for days for someone to post pdfs of these two famous essays, but since no one else has done it, here you go.

"The Death of the Author," by Roland Barthes

Michel Foucault's "What Is an Author?"

Here's a comparatively recent (2010) mainstream piece on Barthes' essay that was published in the Guardian:

In Theory: The Death of the Author

Bloody hell, Foucault and Barthes in one post. That deserves some Karma! (But I don't think the dead or absent author they talked about is the same one that is being talked about in this thread)

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Even if their name is Harper?

If it was Harper you should run away before he starts singing.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by TGS

Bloody hell, Foucault and Barthes in one post. That deserves some Karma! (But I don't think the dead or absent author they talked about is the same one that is being talked about in this thread)

TGS:

It's being talked about in the sense that people are attempting to define what an author is and, in some cases, determine whether the author exists at all. Hence my excuse for mentioning Barthes and Foucault.

Perhaps I'll cite Madness and Civilization if someone says I'm crazy for bringing this up.

P.S.: Thanks for the karma!

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Catlady

So by your definition, we are all authors. This devalues the word so much as to make it meaningless.

We're all authors if we write an e-mail, we're all singers if we warble in the shower, we're all artists if we doodle on a scratch pad, we're all decorators if we move the living room sofa a few feet this way or that, we're all CEOs if we manage a household. It's silly and pointless.

It's only if you actually make money doing the particular job that you can anoint yourself with the title and have it mean something.

So you are saying that someone who is only published after death and makes no money while alive was not an author when alive? A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is one of thousands of examples, and maybe Stieg Larsson? of posthumously published authors or are/were they as the made no money themselves?

I don't think making money is the best criteria although I think a good or great author should.

Helen