The "yakkers and tweeters and braggers" -- otherwise known as networking -- what has that to do with actual writing?
I wrote my first book because I was horrible at job interviews and believed the book would rise or fall on its own merits. That I didn't have to put on a persona, or sell myself, or convince others that I'm competent. The book would do that.
Pretty naive, eh?
Quotation of the Day
Franzen on Bezos: 'One of the Four Horseman'
"In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction, Jeff Bezos of Amazon may not be the antichrist, but he surely looks like one of the four horsemen. Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world.
But
what happens to the people who became writers because yakking and
tweeting and bragging felt to them like intolerably shallow forms of
social engagement? What happens to the people who want to communicate in
depth, individual to individual, in the quiet and permanence of the
printed word, and who were shaped by their love of writers who wrote
when publication still assured some kind of quality control and literary
reputations were more than a matter of self-promotional decibel
levels?"
--Jonathan Franzen in a Guardian essay called "What's Wrong with the Modern World"
1 comment:
I'm torn by this.
On one hand, I do like the option of doing it myself.
On the other hand, I feel that it has made it harder to get published the more traditional way.
Post a Comment