The self-publishing, epublishing, blogging, and all manner of PEOPLE DARING TO WRITE AND PUBLISH in various ways enabled by the internet have certainly produced a lot of Writing Grinches. “We don’t need all these books. Bloggers aren’t real journalists. Ebooks aren’t real books. Self-published books aren’t real books. All these books just mean more garbage for readers to wade through.”
Wow. So much hate for the written word. What’s up with these Writing Grinches? To them I say: writing teaches people to think clearly. In what way is the world worse off if more people want to spend their time training themselves to think clearly? Now imagine a world full of people freely and cheerfully reading all the trash produced by these writing upstarts. Did you know that readers make better citizens, that there is no single thing you can encourage to produce better students, better employees, better neighbors than reading? Yes, even those who read trash like comic books and online comics, romance novels and erotic romance ebooks, self-published tales of all types. Readers are better human beings, no matter what they read. Writers are better human beings, no matter what they write.
So, Writing Grinches, expand your hearts and sit down with the Writing Whos, or stick to your grinchy ways, but I say more power to all who want to read and write, and may we continue to freely do both. Yes, even if somebody calls what we read and/or write trash. Maybe especially then.
Speaking as a traditionally published triceritops who had the gall to self-publish for fun long before Amazon threw open the barn door, I love the grinches on both sides. For a while there NetPubLand was getting pretty dull, but now the mud-slinging and name-calling is everywhere. And it’s so delightfully juvenile; not since high school have I witnessed my peers behaving with such hysterical herd mentality. I have so much material gathered for satire posts I think I’m fully stocked through 2014.
As for how to take it, I think we house slaves should rejoice! We are doomed to extinction, so we can party like it’s the end of Publishing as we know it. And I think we self-pubbed slobs should have a parade as we take over the biz and ruin it. Maybe we can get the fanfic writers to march with us.
And since I’m psychic, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen next year in Publishing: the same thing that happens every year. The names change and so do the venues, but there will always be a steady supply of writers producing amazing stories who I want to read, and readers looking for amazing stories who I want to write for. And that’s all that ever matters to the die-hard scribes like you and me.
Merry Christmas, my writer sister. May Santa drop some cool reads in your stocking. 🙂
There is plenty of material for satirists for YEARS to come! And cheers to the readers, that’s what it’s all about. Thank you, and I hope Santa was very good to you! My stocking has been stuffed with reads, including NIGHTBORN which will keep me up all night tonight. : D (Yes, I actually had the restraint to put that under the tree!)
Gah, that’s not anonymous, that’s me! Apparently my login timed out.