Wwjdhi. Translation being writers who just don’t have it. I’m talking about those writers who want to be desperately published and make serious money from it. Now, I know no one here on Yahoo Answers (those of you who are writers of fiction and have penned short stories or massive seven hundred page novels) are in it to reach this goal. In fact, it seems every writer that I talk to only writes as a hobby or they write for their family and friends or because they LOVE to write.
I’ve never not once come across a writer who flat out admits, ”Yes, I write novels because I want to be the next Jk Rowling. I write books because I want to make millions and be on the NYT Bestselling list.”
Not. One. Single. Time. It’s like they’re ashamed to admit it. But whatever ”it” is there are certain writers who have it and others who don’t. It’s like having a girl or a hundred girls who think, for whatever reason, that they have what it takes to be a Victoria Secret model and so they try to ”break in” to the industry. They try for five or ten years even and are constantly rebuffed because while they might be pretty, they’re not quite what the industry is looking for.
And then you have a stunning, shapely twenty-one year old blonde who becomes a Victoria secret model on her very first try, without really breaking a sweat as opposed to the others who have been trying for ten years. Are there writers out there who clog the markets with their sad submissions, writers who just can’t realize that they are wwdhi? And more importantly, is it a fair thing to do?
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
Do Wwjdhi Impede Or Hurt Other Aspiring Novelists By Flooding The Market With Their Work?
Posted on May 5, 2012.
I don’t get it. One minute you’re saying these people might be a problem. The next you’re saying that actually they don’t exist.
“And more importantly, is it a fair thing to do?”
Life’s not about “fair.” Did you get top grades in every exam you ever took? No? Why did you “clog the market” by taking them, then? You weren’t as good as the people who got the top marks and you never will be. Didn’t you realise?
There are writers of all standards out there, from the truly brilliant down to the “my seven year old writes better than that” variety. But there’s nobody who draws a line and says “you’re only allowed to try if you’re above this line.”
Though I guess you could argue that this is what “no unagented submissions” is. At which point, they’re not clogging the market because they have no access to it.
I’d be delighted to be able to put “New York Times bestselling author” in front of my name. But I also accept that it’s not particularly likely. I keep writing because I like doing it, and because it makes my day when someone says they enjoyed one of my books.
I used to think it was a shame that so many people try to get published before they’re ready. If they could only be persuaded to wait until they had some chance, the people who read the slush pile would have more time to spend reading each submission and explain what they thought was wrong with it, which would help authors who had some chance know what they had to improve. Then I discovered that slush pile readers spend very little time on submissions that obviously aren’t ready. If they see a mistake in the first paragraph, they’ll reject it there and then. So if you could somehow remove all the rubbish from the slush pile, it wouldn’t save them a lot of time.
And then how would you persuade people not to submit before they were ready? If it was optional, most people wouldn’t do it. (We already have an optional “tell me whether I’m ready” service, known as critique groups and beta readers.) If it was mandatory, then whoever performed this service would soon be backlogged. And how would the service be paid for? Nobody wants to read slush in their spare time.
Then I realised that all this makes any sense only if your market is bricks-and-mortar bookshops, which have a finite amount of shelf space, and who want to maximise revenue per square foot of retail area. As the market moves to ebooks, shelf space becomes (effectively) unlimited. (You could hold a copy of every book in the Kindle Store on a hard drive that costs less than $100.) So it makes no sense to pay anyone to select only the “best” (i.e. most profitable) books. Any book could become a bestseller if given the opportunity.