Tag: self-publishing

Redux: No More Professional Writers?

[Contributing author Yvonne Hertzberger is away either modeling lingerie or making linguini—I’m a little unclear on the details, the phone connection is a little iffy up here in the mountain enclave. Anyway, enjoy this encore performance of an article that rings ominously as true today. – Hise]

On July 26 the Globe and Mail, Canada’s most respected newspaper, devoted two-thirds of the front page and half of the second page of their Globe Arts section to the article. ‘There will be no more professional writers in the future’ (their punctuation) Naturally, I was most interested. It came on the heels of a similar article in the Guardian. Other rags posted on the same topic. I got the impression they all timed their diatribes together for greatest impact. The purpose, as I see it – war on self-publishing and a (futile) reactionary attempt to save the old guard. Continue reading “Redux: No More Professional Writers?”

EX-PERTISE

This article makes me feel a little weird because it runs counter to a longstanding peeve I’ve had with internet writing information. Namely the widespread impression that anybody with a keyboard is equally qualified to tell other people about how to write and publish, whether or not their degree of knowledge on that subject is greater than or equal to the average ass of the average rat.

I know of two blogs in which 13 year old writers give advice on how to write novels. Dozens with invaluable insights on writing from high school kids. How many more with scintillating tips from people who just wrote their first book, or are going to finish it any day now, except blogging writing advice takes up so much of their time? Many of the newbie forums like Writers Digest are packed with total wannabes who have no sense of irony when it comes to contradicting published authors, even best-selling authors. The equality of information seems to reduce experience to the quotidian.

You can imagine how fond I am of this sort of thing. Continue reading “EX-PERTISE”

Honesty and the Self-Publisher

Raymond Chandler

A Guest Post
by George Copeland

When Raymond Chandler wrote that poor writers are dishonest without knowing it, he had no reason to suspect there’d one day be a militantly tenacious army of them slinging their stuff with the ad hoc marketing arm of social media. Bad writing has always been with us, but what’s new in its current form is the rise of a concomitant philistine ethic, a seeming celebration of the act of writing itself, not of a more deliberate and circumspect writing culture in search of excellence for its own sake. It’s a touchy subject. Bring the problem up in a room of indies and you’ll get the hard stare of rough men sniffing out the double agent in their midst. Continue reading “Honesty and the Self-Publisher”

Ed’s Casual Friday: Quoth the Indie…

Of all the traditional filler material any blogger or columnist might be tempted to use for a last post before Halloween, there is probably nothing so hackneyed, so stale, and so overdone as a parody of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, The Raven.

So here we go. 😉

 

 

Continue reading “Ed’s Casual Friday: Quoth the Indie…”