Any more experiences with this thing? I am seriously thinking of trying some simple ones. Will post back here with results. Eric Hammel’s assessment seems to make a lot of sense, and is convincing coming from someone with his background.

I do not detect hatred for the mainstream in the independent publishers here, just disdain, and some hurt; because of the mockery and vitriol they face, as exemplified by that childish woman at Salon throwing her toys out of the pram – because Mummy & Daddy are talking to someone else and ignoring her. And [...]

I think the spitefulness of so many comments like that mentioned by Henry Baum gives us the clue to the real fear felt by those who trot out such unpleasant diatribes – it is, I think, a simple snobbish horror at the prospective of the hoi polloi now being able to publish books. The hallowed [...]

I do get a little tired of the hysterical misuse of ‘piracy’ when referring to copyright infringement. The only parties in all this who are behaving like pirates – trying to destroy ordinary folks’ lives – are the media industry bosses. As I see it, the simple, inescapable fact, as dear old King Canute demonstrated [...]

Henry, I thought at first it was tongue-in-cheek, but decided at the end that it did not quite ring true as such. The apparent self-parody seemed to barely conceal a genuine, wistful longing for the past when writers like him were a cut above the rest, before the hoi polloi were allowed into the Club: [...]

Ah, the Good Old Days. “Do you mean before or after penicillin?” a friend of mine always lobs at those who trot out this nonsensical delusion. “Children, I am an author who used to type a book manuscript on a manual typewriter. Yes, I did. And mailed it to a New York publisher in a [...]

“well written and brilliantly argued”? Well, compared with the infantile chuntering from Hunter S. Thompson that he so admiringly uses to bolster his case, yes. However, without a capable editor’s clarity of communication and convincing, reasoned logic, passion so easily descends into adolescent rant. It is a shame this writer is not gracious enough to [...]

John Mellor commented on the blog post The Real Source of Self-Publishing Stigma

I think my first point might have come across as critical; if so, I apologise for that. I only meant it as a sort of rock-bottom starting point as in “Here we are, owing nothing and owed nothing, and we want to write. What are the many and varied ways in which we [...]

  1 year, 11 months ago · View

John Mellor commented on the blog post The Real Source of Self-Publishing Stigma

I think as writers, independent or dependent, we have to face a few facts:
1 The world does not owe us a living.
2 Of the many thousands of folk throughout the world who write novels, the ones who make a living at it can probably all fit round your dinner table.
3 If writing is important to you, consider trying [...]

  1 year, 11 months ago · View

John Mellor commented on the blog post The Real Source of Self-Publishing Stigma

Nice one Zoe, plenty of room in digital land. The two PDFs making up my book (text and cover) total less than 2MB. My hosting server allows me nearly 600 Gigabytes of storage, so I could put 300,000 books on there, all of them rubbish, without intruding on anyone! I think we [...]

  1 year, 11 months ago · View