How Little League is Promoting Self-Publishing

[thndrcloud]

When I was nine my parents signed me up for the inaugural season of our town's girls softball league. It was a twelve inch ball and we played slow pitch. Well, the rest of my team played slow pitch while I either sat on the sun warped bench or stood in right field attempting to pick splinters from that bench out of my posterior. There were two problems with me according to my coach: I couldn't catch and I couldn't hit. Her honest, though brutal, critique of my abilities sparked a desire to obliterate her assessment of my hopelessness and force her to eat her words by becoming the best. I managed to accomplish that dream many years later after I found some more helpful coaches and spent a LOT of time practicing.

These days a coach would never dare tell a child that they stunk like last week's egg salad left on a park bench in August. These days kids are given equal play time and rotated through every position to foster self-esteem and teamwork with no score keeping and trophies for everyone. These days kids are being taught that they have the right to be successful regardless of their abilities and work ethic.

I believe this mindset is why there is such an upsurge in the number of people who think that they can publish books. Notice I used the word publish, not write. Anyone can write a book but what many of these budding creatives don't understand is that finishing a book doesn't make it good.

Lacking that understanding these wanna-be authors are throwing their work out into the world in its raw form and getting rejected from every way the wind blows. Thanks to the age of entitlement we're now living in, these rebuffed writers often turn to the world of self-publishing to claim their God-given right to publication. This is only adding another complication to the already complex mess the publishing industry is navigating. So what does that mean for those of us who want our writing to be taken seriously?

As a writer I'm finding myself in the same situation now as I did when I was nine. I recently finished the first draft of my first novel. I'm proud to say that I'm off the bench but it's fairly clear to me that I haven't hit the ball yet. Just as in softball, in writing there are winners and there are losers, but you don't get a book published just because you participated. I have a lot of revisions ahead of me that may still leave me with an unpublishable manuscript. Regardless, I'm determined to at least finish this season in the hope that it will improve my skills. I'll keep my eye on the prize without letting the empty success of others affect my path. Then someday, with some helpful coaches and a LOT of time practicing, I will see my dream come true when I am chosen to be published.

[Sophie Minter]

You know, when I first decided to write my manuscript I had no idea what I was doing. When it was finished and I "thought" worthy of being published I queried. After thirty rejections I understood one thing--I didn't have the respect for writing that I should have. Now, three messy manuscripts later, I not only respect writing as a business, but I bust my literary butt to do it. Even though--big sigh--I may never get published.