What is a "real" writer?

Nancy Famolari posted a blog entry entitled "Are You a Real Writer?" She stated a group set the criteria for being called a published author to mean a published author is a "writer" who receives an advance from a publisher.

In other words, that group considers one is only an author if he or she becomes indebted to the publisher. Yes, that's what an advance is -- a debt that will be repaid by royalties being withheld until the advance is repaid.

According to Joe Quirk (novelist, humorist, and ghostwriter): Your advance (from a publisher) is a LOAN with your career as collateral. If borrowing money from your credit card at 8% interest to support your writing is a bad idea, than borrowing money from a big New York publisher against books you haven't sold yet is a catastrophic idea. Bankruptcy ends after 7 years. The Red Mark next to your name is forever.

Therefore, according to the narrow, unrealistic definition of a published author by that group, only a writer who goes into debt to a publisher qualifies.

I am a writer because I write. Emily Dickinson never received an advance, was never paid for her work, and wasn't even "discovered" until after her death. Yet, no one can deny that she was a writer, an author: because she wrote, used words as colors to create images on the canvas of sheets of paper.

Yes, I've been paid for some of my writings and I've received some royalties, but I was a writer before I ever received a penny. I used words as my tools to create visual imagery on paper and computer screen. That action makes me a writer.

Other bloggers addressing this topic:

Harry Gilleland
Karen Cioffi-Ventrice
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When will Amazon stop? Guess it was a mistake

The view point discussion started on Lea Schizas' blog The Writing Jungle, to promote the controversial discussion for the VBT group. However, as stated in the following comment, we discussed a false story, or one that has been changed:

Cheryl Tardif, author and book marketing coach said...

Hi Vivian:

I've spent the morning tracking down people who are quoting me and discussing this past problem I had with Amazon because it's important you have all the facts.

First, there is NO policy at Amazon for this. They fully allow authors to post their titles in their signature lines. This was a mistake on the part of some overzealous employees who thought they knew what they were doing.

This case has been resolved and I'm happy with how Amazon handled it. Amazon has apologized for this error and has reinstated all my reviews, even taking the time to manually add my signature line at the end of each review.

You can read the full story at The Write Type ~ Multi-Author Musings.

~Cheryl Kaye Tardif,
author and book marketing coach

The rest of this post is outdated.

There's an interesting discussion over at Carolyn Howard-Johnson's blog - Sharing With Writers - about Amazon's latest kick in the gut to writers and reviewers. Here's an excerpt:

"A week ago I found that all 85 of the reviews I've written for other books had been deleted. It has been a very difficult and stressful week dealing with Amazon. They are not very accessible and I was given at least 3 different reasons why my reviews had been deleted. After numerous e-mails, this is what it's come down to:

"Their final ruling: 'Please know that our participation guidelines don't allow customers to promote their own titles in their reviews.' If you sign your review with anything other than your name, your reviews could be deleted."

To read the rest and participate in the discussion visit her BLOG.

If you agree with the discussion, or disagree, please comment and/or post on your own blog to add to the discussion.



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