One good reason to write a book is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your system. In that sense, you can think of the lust to write books as a kind of disability.
Read the whole post, which is filled with cynical comments directed at anyone who wishes to write a book. I will add these:
1. Assume that one year from publication the book will not be read by anyone unless one of your grandchildren picks it up.
2. If you don’t get advice about writing a marketable book, you may have to self-publish and your book will sell fewer than 1000 copies. If you do get advice, you will sell fewer than 1000 copies and you won’t like your book as much.
3. Writing a negative review of someone’s book is like telling a mother that her newborn baby looks ugly. Yet many of us cannot resist writing negative reviews.
“I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor
“Writing a negative review of someone’s book is like telling a mother that her newborn baby looks ugly.”
Ummm. Mothers generally don’t charge me to look at their newborn babies. If I pay for a book and I think it sucks, I’m going to let the world know so others either don’t waste their money or at least are aware that not everybody likes the book.
I only write negative reviews of free books IF I feel the book description was misleading.
2 Blowhards , the bloggers, had an entry on how many people make money writing a book. It’s appalling. The distribution of rewards is highly power distributed.
Some of their entries got lost at some point, but the blog was still up last time I checked…
http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/000809.html
Often times URLS don’t seem to get posted to this blog. Prof. Arnold, I tried my best…
Perhaps it is micro immoral to call a baby ugly which can only hurt feelis but macro moral to criticize a book for the benefit of other readers.
Knew dentists when I was a kid, in the family.
One of them always wanted to write a book, ‘How to Prevent Gum Disease’, it had one chapter, one page, ‘Brush your damn teeth and gums’.
One good reason to write a book is when you have the feeling you cannot do anything else without getting the book out of your system.
…
1. Assume that one year from publication the book will not be read by anyone unless one of your grandchildren picks it up.
I feel the same about blogging and tweeting which I do. No one will ever read it but I have to get this out of me. I do not want to say it to my friends and end up arguing with them, that would not be good.