Get ready for them. They are coming whether I contradict myself or not. It makes no difference how well I express it or whether my details don’t quite add up.
The new writer will wonder why there was ever a distinction between a writer and an editor at all. The new writer will wonder how anyone could have written anything at all under the old ideas. This is good news. It is the greatest explosion of written expression in human history. You can’t tie it down with a publisher’s office in New York City and a 40-year-old printing press.

I love my books. I would not part with them. I love bookstores. I love publishers. But they are yesterday. Just like the cathode ray tube.

Let’s push the envelope even further: Why is it assumed that editors make books better? I can walk through my local grocery store and pull thirty books off the shelf, all of which stink. They all had major publishers and established editors. And they uniformly stink. But they follow a pattern. They incorporate certain ideas about what makes for a good story and what might sell some copies. It’s like that old screenwriting lesson you read in all the books – a beginning – a middle – and an end. My arm has a beginning middle and an end. So what?

Perhaps editors and publishers are pattern keepers. They want to maneuver books into general patterns that they are familiar with. I thought that Joyce and Pynchon had long ago proven the editor to be useless. No editor would ever have let Joyce survive even a mild winter. And Pynchon must have given his editor some good LSD because his books are bullets into the head of any editor I’ve ever seen.

Why do books need to be better than a blog? Why should they follow more of a pattern than a blog? Why not question the existence of editors. Artists question these things. A person who is not questioning them is not an artist – he or she is a business person.

Get your story straight…

I read writers on the web every single day who put to shame what is printed between expensive covers for sale at the local Barnes & Noble. I read it for free and the writers are happy when I read it. It makes no difference to me whether you agree or not. Or whether I’m informed or not. I see reality. And if Candlelight Stories burns up with all the rest of them, ha ha, so what? I’ll start the fire. After all, I’ve got the candle.

First of all, Grisham meant the he specifically would be alright. He’s a millionaire that will sell books no matter what happens to the publishing industry. The mid-list authors are the ones that will suffer.

And yes, some people can hone their novels into something that readers will happily digest without a 3rd party to edit it, but those people are extremely rare. Editing a novel is a much more involved process than editing a blog and even that seems beyond many people. I don’t read blogs that are poorly edited. Yes, most of them are edited by the writer, but as I said it’s much easier to edited 600 words than it is to edit 100,000.

While the publishing industry does seriously need an overhaul, flushing it down the drain entirely is a mistake. Readers will lose immensely not only because of the poor quality of what will make it into the world, but because they won’t get very much from their favorite authors if they are doing all the publishing work themselves. That stuff takes a lot of time and energy. Time and energy that would be better spent by a writer sitting down to write their next book.