Friday 25 March 2011

Chapter Four - The Velveteen Author

The Velveteen Author decided maybe the Fairy GodWriter was right after all. Getting an agent didn’t matter. Getting published didn’t matter. Those things gave her a big headache. The only thing that mattered was the writing, since it brought her joy.

She also believed that writing was what she was born to do. If she kept doing it, something good would happen. She wasn’t sure what yet, but someday she would find out. Patience wasn’t her strong suit, but maybe the Publishing Gods were testing her.

So she cleared her calendar of all the things that weren’t a priority and focused on the writing.

But she was getting very tired of all the power resting in the hands of editors and agents who didn't understand her vision, and didn't get her writing style, even though she knew in her heart that she was a talented writer, more talented than many authors she'd read in the bookstores. It made her wonder if editors even knew what readers wanted. Maybe they were too afraid to lose their jobs, and weren't in a position to take a chance on anything new (despite their claims).

The buzz on the street was that the publishing industry, in its current form, was in trouble, not unlike many industries in these tough financial times. A case in point: the giant American bookstore, Borders, had gone bankrupt. In fact, many people believed that the publishing industry was going through a complete transformation. Although the Velveteen Author didn't usually pay any attention to all of that stuff, she did some research and discovered that a quiet revolution was happening in the book industry. An e-book revolution.

Now some people said that self-publishing an e-book was for wannabe amateur writers only, that it was a career killer, blah blah. But the Velveteen Author believed, like many others, that the end of traditional publishing was coming, and that e-book sales were on the rise, thanks to state-of-the-art e-readers like Kindle, Kobo, Sony Reader and iPad. Book technology was now cheaper, and maybe traditional publishers would have to reinvent themselves.

The Velveteen Author decided to self-publish her novels as e-books, putting all the power back where it belonged - with the author. She could be the master of her own destiny.

And she could finally call herself a Real Author.

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