"The youth now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Perhaps
you´ve seen the above statement before. Supposedly it was said by Socrates in
his defense speech when he was acused of corrupting society. If this is true or
it´s a hoax made by either Platon or Xenophon is unknown, but the fact remains
that it´s been written by the students of Socrates and thereby we can safely
say that someone thought these thoughts in ancient Greece.
Recently
I read a quote by a simple farmer that is even more to the point:
“Things today are not what they used to be - and they never have!”
“What
does this have to do with Indie vs. Traditional publishing?” you may ask.
Well,
it really is quite simple:
Every
generation feels threatened by the culture and views of the next and this is
apparently also the case for generations of publishers and authors.
Try
watching the underneath clip from youtube. It´s in Norwegian, but someone has been kind
enough to provide a translation in English. When you´ve watched it, please read
on, because I have some important points to make:
Medieavel Help Desk
A
friend and fellow author wrote on his blog:
“One of my university lecturers told a friend to tell me that
if I self-publish it might ruin my chances of being traditionally published or
entering competitions.” - you can read the entire post here.
Why would any publisher or host of a writing competition rule
out selfpublishers? Do they not want good quality? Or could it be that they
would rather have uniformity in views on how to properly publish?
I think it has to do with defending your livelihood. If Indie
Authoring becomes main stream, how would publishers make money and survive the
publishing business?
Thus, it would seem to be better to try giving selfpublishers
a bad name and start rumours about poor quality and bad editing. And yes, there
a examples of both in the Indie World, but quite frankly: so is the case with
traditional publishing.
Are there more poor quality in Indie books than in others?
Well, to be honest, I think there is, but for one thing, it´s
going in the right direction as the readers simply won´t read bad quality and
thereby bad writers and writers publishing bad edited books won´t sell their
books. In time, bad quality will diminish to a level competing well with
traditional published books. And we are almost there…
And this brings me to the point I want to make:
Really, the publishing war is not a question of quality, but
a question of “who makes money and for what services?”
But it doesn´t sound good if traditional publishing companies
use this argument, does it?
“We think, Indie Publishing should stop, because it shifts
the balance of power and we are beginning to make less money than before!”
Hmmm…. Not a solid case, is it?
It sounds much more reasonable to come up with all sorts of
excuses and statements about quality and reading experience - just like you saw
the munk in the video clip complaining about this new world of books, where
things aren´t as they used to be.
I could continue for hundreds of pages with examples that
Indie Authoring is a good idea that will not go away, but it would bore you, I
think.
Instead, I´ll tell you something quite interesting:
About a decade ago, a single mum received no less than 25 rejections
on her manuscript for a children´s book, before a small publisher decided to
take her in as a new author.
That author was J.K.Rowlings and the book was “Harry Potter
and the sorcerers stone.”
Imagine, if she decided to believe the publishers word that
the book wasn´t any good?
