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To ponder the question in the subject line, please bear with me while I indulge in a little bit of history.
We live in the age of text. Marshall McLuhan (in "Understanding Media" and other books) predicted an decline in the printed word and a global village, united by "hot" media that appeal to oral tradition and immediacy. Like so many visionaries from the 1950s and 60s, he failed to predict the Internet and and that it would reverse this trend. If you are reading this, then you are living proof of it: the proliferation of content onto the Internet has meant that more people than ever before are reading. They might not be reading books, magazines, and newspapers but at least they are reading something; and they have more access to more written content than ever before.
Not only are they reading, they are also writing. Again, if you are reading this, then you are someone who likes to post to forums. There are also blogs; and any database-driven web site (i.e., one that was made with a content management system or CMS) has the capability of allowing people to post comments to articles on it. Even Internet technologies that are primitive in comparison, like Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists, encourage people to write. With so many tertiary sector jobs requiring computer proficiency, people are writing daily as a part of their work; anything from making documents to writing e-mails qualifies as such.
The result of this, I think, is that there are too many people out there who consider themselves to be writers or to be capable of writing. The self-publishing industry has partly risen in response to this, there being too many writers and not enough publishers (or rather, not enough money to publish every book that everybody writes).
If this is the case, then publishers benefit from a "buyer's market," meaning that we can pick and choose what we publish. Some would argue that it means that we can afford to pay writers less, but that has obvious negative implications for writing as a profession; if the rates for paying writers go down to too low a level, then fewer people will be motivated to write who are actually good at what they do and the pool will be filled only with amateurs, who are willing to take any rate as long as someone is interested in publishing them. That having been said, I can tell you that many publishers seem to think this way.
I have my own views on this. I like to think that if there are more people out there who are at least interested in writing and who are willing to indulge this interest in a conscientious way, then it will improve the general pool of content out there for publishers to consider.
My question to everyone here is, have you noticed over the years that there are too many people out there who are interested in writing, too many people who call themselves writers who shouldn't, or that there is too much competition to get published?
We live in the age of text. Marshall McLuhan (in "Understanding Media" and other books) predicted an decline in the printed word and a global village, united by "hot" media that appeal to oral tradition and immediacy. Like so many visionaries from the 1950s and 60s, he failed to predict the Internet and and that it would reverse this trend. If you are reading this, then you are living proof of it: the proliferation of content onto the Internet has meant that more people than ever before are reading. They might not be reading books, magazines, and newspapers but at least they are reading something; and they have more access to more written content than ever before.
Not only are they reading, they are also writing. Again, if you are reading this, then you are someone who likes to post to forums. There are also blogs; and any database-driven web site (i.e., one that was made with a content management system or CMS) has the capability of allowing people to post comments to articles on it. Even Internet technologies that are primitive in comparison, like Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists, encourage people to write. With so many tertiary sector jobs requiring computer proficiency, people are writing daily as a part of their work; anything from making documents to writing e-mails qualifies as such.
The result of this, I think, is that there are too many people out there who consider themselves to be writers or to be capable of writing. The self-publishing industry has partly risen in response to this, there being too many writers and not enough publishers (or rather, not enough money to publish every book that everybody writes).
If this is the case, then publishers benefit from a "buyer's market," meaning that we can pick and choose what we publish. Some would argue that it means that we can afford to pay writers less, but that has obvious negative implications for writing as a profession; if the rates for paying writers go down to too low a level, then fewer people will be motivated to write who are actually good at what they do and the pool will be filled only with amateurs, who are willing to take any rate as long as someone is interested in publishing them. That having been said, I can tell you that many publishers seem to think this way.
I have my own views on this. I like to think that if there are more people out there who are at least interested in writing and who are willing to indulge this interest in a conscientious way, then it will improve the general pool of content out there for publishers to consider.
My question to everyone here is, have you noticed over the years that there are too many people out there who are interested in writing, too many people who call themselves writers who shouldn't, or that there is too much competition to get published?
