A very serious blog post on traditional publishing

Kristine Kathryn Rusch argues knowledgeably and convincingly that authors should self-publish. I still don’t plan to. Here’s why.

I promised you a very serious blog post, and here it is.

I’m a long-time fan of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s (though for some reason I can never remember her name).

She’s a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, but I admit I’ve never tried her fiction.

I’m a fan of her blog.

She writes about the publishing industry, but not regurgitated primers on how to get published or the latest gossip. She writes well-researched, detailed posts about the nitty gritty things you need to know if you want to make a living as a writer, such as licensing rights, contract clauses, and why you should avoid agents and traditional publishers like the coronavirus.

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Why I’ve decided to pursue trade publication

I’ve decided to pursue trade (traditional) publication. Here I try to explain the madness that led to this decision.

If you know me, you’ll know you I’m a firm supporter of all writers, whether they write for themselves or an audience, whether they’re self-published or big five-published (except for total jerks–I’m slightly less supportive of them).

I started researching how to publish in 2006 when self-publishing was still very much fringe. (Not by coincidence, this was the year I first completed a first draft. It was 200k words long.)

At the time I was a long way from being ready to publish and I knew it, but I always intended to pursue trade publication.

When I came back to writing seriously a few years ago, the publishing landscape was unrecognisable. I redid my research, and concluded that self-publishing was now a real option, but I still wasn’t sure if it was the right option for me.

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Is reading poorly edited fiction bad for your health?

Reading poor writing desensitises you to it, and if you’re not careful soon we’ll all be drowning in custard.

This might be a short post because I’m trying to review five books and a camel today. Okay, it’s not that bad, but I have a few things I need to do before I can sit down and edit my work in progress.

If you pay any attention to the self-publishing world, you’ll have heard the frequent cries of outrage about how badly edited some self-published fiction is. I’m not going to argue that point. I’m going to assert some self-published fiction is terribly edited and some is not, and if you don’t agree with me you can go play on the see-saw on your own because I’m not going to play with you.

Glad we got that out of the way.

Now that we’ve established some self-published fiction is poorly edited, here’s my claim:

Reading it is bad for your health.

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