Maybury has a post up about our recent interview with Radio 1 in which he tackles the claim that we, as writers, shouldn’t bother our heads with the business end of, uh, writing.
I will soundly second his assertion that
the business of writing is very much the business of the writer, literary fiction or otherwise. That includes the general administrative aspects of writing – how to make a submission, where to submit work, help with making contacts as much as the financial ends.
One of the panellists joked (was he joking? I don’t know, he laughed anyway) that writers would be scared off if they knew the truth about publishing. Well, having a half-arsed knowledge of the publishing industry, which you can pick up by wandering within ten feet of a bookshop, just makes writers paranoid, and I’m not sure how knowing what you’re getting into is supposed to be worse than getting a nasty surprise when you think you’ve finally made it.
I for one am much more comfortable now that I’ve built up a more detailed sense of how the business works. As I said in an unaired part of the interview, the single most useful piece of information I picked up on the writing course was how to do up a proposal to send to an agent or publisher. It seems immensely silly to suggest that writers shouldn’t pursue this kind of knowledge.
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