Claiming our profession

I am a writer.  I've been a writer for over thirty years now.  I have written over twenty novels, and yet I'm still not mainstream published.

Does that mean I can't call myself an author?  I think there used to be that perception among non-writers.  If you weren't mainstream published then your work couldn't be any good, right?  You weren't a writer until you had a physical book in the bookshops.

But in 2014 some of the biggest selling authors still don't have a book in the bookshops.  At least, not a physical paperback, that is.  But they might have sold a million ebooks though.  Under the old system, these writers still wouldn't have been thought of as professional writers.  Self-publishing was something dirty, something only desperate people who couldn't write resorted to.

I think the change came at the start of the worst recession for a generation.  It became clear to us that publishers were running scared, unwilling to take a chance on new authors to the same extent as before.  In the past, that would have locked us out of publication. Nobody wanted to publish us so our work must not be very good, right?  But now we've become aware that the final buying decision on a book is made on its marketability, and not primarily on the quality of the writing.  And sometimes, to the fury of real writers, that means inferior product written by famous people gets a contract and the brilliant novel by an unknown doesn't.

Now we can do something about it.  We can put a novel out as an ebook and build a following for it.  We can sell a million copies and get the publishers sitting up and asking "whoa, what happened there? Why didn't we sign this author?"

The truth is agents and editors have no more idea of what will become a bestseller than you or I.  But now we can claim our profession by self-publishing.  Who is more successful, the self-published author selling a million copies on Kindle, or the mainstream author selling 300 paperbacks?

We have to claim our profession, not wait for people to give us permission to call ourselves authors.  And you never know, your Kindle book might be the next million seller.