Self Publishing

I'm not against self-publishing. How could I be having dabbled in it myself? I think it has a place. It's allowing some fantastic writers to get their work out there who may never have done so through traditional methods (though I happen to believe these writers would have made a breakthrough eventually, they're too good not to have done) and its allowing independent publishing ho...

uses to spring up without the need for huge overheads or up front capital (which will lead to some success stories I'm certain).

It's just that as I've spent time on the many sites out there devoted to this new phenomenon I've found myself feeling uncomfortable and depressed time and time again. Why?

I started writing when I was 16. I started submitting to publications when I was 24. I didn't really get a publishing credit(other than the University Newspaper) until I was in my early thirties. But I got lots of rejection slips and I drafted stories thirty or forty times because I'd learned they get better when they're re-drafted. It meant that when I was really published I'd put in years and years of groundwork to get there. I'd sweated and cried and beat the door down with my bare, bloody fists and earned the right to say I was a published writer. It meant something.

What I think I'm seeing in the work of some is the development of their craft, their early work, being laid bare and thrown out there for the rest of the world to purchase (or get for free), read and quite often pour scorn over long before it's ready.

I want to shout at them that they're not there yet, that they need to put the hours, weeks, months, years in, the hard graft, not release three/four/five novels in a year. I want to shake them and tell them they'll be better off for it.

I wonder if they'd listen...