Filed under: Publishing > Egalitarianism

Getting published used to be an expensive operation...I mean back in the 1800s they had to set type by hand. Now that'll run up your prices. Today any Joe Shmoe can get published. Please read this New York Times article "You're an Author? Me too!". Printing books is very cheap now, in part because of computers, but also there are different ways to get read now...like blogging for instance. Once I publish this blog it could be potentially read by almost everyone in the world. There's a good chance that no one will read it...but that is not the point. Of course, some would argue that allowing everyone to be published means that anything of real quality will be buried under a heap of mediocrity. But real literary genius had always taken centuries to rise to the top. In the US an average of 172,000 titles are published a year. Since most Americans read less than 5 books a year, we are falling way behind the curve. I myself won't read anything written after 1900. I think it takes at least a hundred years for the good stuff to rise to the top. Another way to look at it is, say 5 good books are written every year, the average American has almost no chance of reading any of them! So my attitude is; relax...stick to books published a hundred years ago and you will be fine.