Week 5 Readings

These articles are more than just a little depressing. As if we haven't heard enough bad news about the stupid economy lately. I mean, publishing your work is hard enough (I already have a Plan B that involves bringing back apple selling) without small presses collapsing around you left and right. It's particularly stressful for kids in my position, who are just getting ready to leave school and have little to no published material to land them a job or a book deal with Random House or whatever, and who are counting on indie presses like these.

I'd have to agree with Patty (at least, I think it was Patty) in that I definitely noticed how greed seemed to act as a catalyst in both of these collapses. That was the most upsetting part of all, really. I mean, you'd think that once you were out of middle school- high school at the very latest- you'd have reached a point in life where you'd be able to interact with people who have learned how to behave like decent, goodhearted folk. Seriously, how much moral grounding does it really take to realize that it is unethical to falsify information that hundreds of publishers and organizations depend on? Many of those publishers were doing good things with that revenue, too. I mean, lying to nonprofit Buddhists? For chrissakes!

Sad as it is that this is the reality writers and publishers must face when trying to make a name for themselves, I can't actually say that I'm intimidated by these events. Call me a hopeless optimist, but I think it's times and situations like these that force people to rise to the occasion and, in doing so, to become a lot better for it. Trying to publish your work as an emerging writer will always be hard. If you can do it while facing the adversity of economical circumstances such as these, anything that comes afterwards will seem like smooth sailing. I mean, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? Just look at cockroaches. Those bastards have built up immunities to almost every household poison in existence.