Over the last ten days I’ve taken two online seminars. They
didn’t deliver information I hadn’t already heard, but they’ve not been a waste
of my time. I wasn’t looking for something innovative; I was looking for an
angle I could transfer to my own situation.
I’m currently revising a Western for upload as an ebook. One
look at the array of covers round this post should make most readers blink. Er…
another genre?
According to most received wisdom this is spreading myself dangerously
thin. Writers should focus, on one genre, on one aspect of that genre… and I
agree – to a point. It’s what I tried to do when I first started. But where did
that leave me when editors changed, when lists contracted? Even having an agent
didn’t help. I have writer friends who have needed to change their author names
twice or three times just to keep a foot in the print industry, and those are the
ones I know of. It’s not something writers tend to boast about, often seeing it as a
failing on their part. I’ve come to see it as anything but.
The Western will come out under a pseudonym, but only
because that way it’ll link to the print versions. The cover, though, will be
on this blog, despite it standing chalk to cheese beside my other fiction.
At the top of this blog I state that I’m not a pigeon. Maybe
I was never meant to be. Perhaps few of us are. Perhaps it’s merely a mantra
we’ve been led to believe is the truth.
Yes, it's a shame the publishers seem to have forgotten what they exist for; to disseminate talent in the form of the written word. Selling and marketing are difficult roles for those who are creative, requiring different skills, attitudes and even personality traits. I wonder when the industry will wake up and discover that the creation of a written work is not entirely about the £s and $s, but about nurturing and developing talent to ensure there's actually something worth reading in the future?
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your western, Linda. I know it'll be well written.
Thanks for commenting, Stuart. The Western will certainly be different.
ReplyDelete