How the new book author must behave

The 21st Century author is going to have to be a different person from the intellectual loner of yore. Used to be if you had an idea, the gatekeepers were there to recognize and shape your idea for the public. Now if you want to be a new book  author, you must be popular. Authors that sell are those that figure out how to use social networking to get followers. Publishers that say they are interested in taking on “fresh, new voices,” are generally looking for young people that have half a million friends at Myspace. Awards are nice and all, but how big is your platform?

In some ways, though, things are more restrictive. The 21st Century author is going to have to be a different person from the intellectual loner of yore. Used to be if you had an idea, the gatekeepers were there to recognize and shape your idea for the public. Now if you want to be an author, you must be popular. Authors that sell are those that figure out how to use social networking to get followers. Publishers that say they are interested in taking on “fresh, new voices,” are generally looking for young people that have half a million friends at Myspace. Awards are nice and all, but how big is your platform?

If you’re already famous, you can get published nowadays and become famous.

So what will happen to the person who, instead of e-partying, sits down and actually thinks about something? Someone who engages in the kind of thoughts that are not mere regurgitations of the thousands of other people’s thoughts known as the Internet. This person has the kind of thoughts that are purely organic responses to the world and how it is. Someone that is such a social misfit, they can’t possibly see things from someone else’s viewpoint.

More importantly how is this person going to get published? And please don’t say the “Small Press.” I’m sure the small press is the answer somehow, but these days the small press is sort of like the independent movie makers. A lot of them are small and independent because they couldn’t make it in New York or Hollywood. So in the end they’re looking for someone young, pretty, and fast the same as the big boys. They care no more about the content in the books they publish than do the name brand publishers.

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