But Will it Sell?

Nobody could predict the foibles of the reading public.

The top selling author for years in Britain wrote handbooks on how to spray roses without killing them and his work outstripped all the most popular fiction writers of the day.

This is worth mentioning for anybody who thinks that success is based on having a fevered imagination or knowing the "right" people. The myth of the crazed writer started with all the druggies like Coleridge and it holds no appeal for me. Writing from pure intuition, like the automatic writing practiced by George, W B Yeats's wife, has been tried, just to amuse and it can open up the royal road to the unconscious as Freud put it.

However, the unconscious is not of much interest when it comes to buttering parsnips and that is what most writers care most about. Only a fool would take to writing without being paid and although I am happy keep going without an obvious monetary remuneration here, the benefits of keeping a blog are beyond gold or Euros at the moment.

There is nothing as dispiriting as seeing a person head down the wrong road to publishing disaster. Perhaps that accounts for the innate conservatism of editors who know the cost of failure to the last penny.

And here, at last, I can share an insight that has been gathering clarity for the past few years. Self publishing is more secure and, probably, more satisfying, unless one is really ambitious to become a public figure. The distractions caused by the industry's demands would prevent many who are now successful writers from ever starting out.

It's worth considering...