So, over the Christmas holidays, my family and I began an experiment where we would go device-free for one day a week. In the beginning, I saw the withdrawal on my teenage children’s faces, and my husband was just as bad. A month later, we started to notice patterns within our activities on how so much of our lives actually revolved around the internet. (Stationary lists for the school were online.)
We’re now at the beginning of March 2019, and the experiment has gone completely awry!
There was a time when the world at large looked down their noses at anyone who self-published, like the writing was sub-par. In many ways, it was. In those early days of Amazon and Kindle, self-publishing was so easy. Getting your book out into the world was just a matter of uploading your file to the internet and clicking on a few buttons. You didn’t even need to pay a dime if you didn’t want to. As such, everyone from the dog to the neighbor was self-publishing — and the world became flooded with books, many of which should have never been published when they were.
The market is still flooded with sub-par self-published books, but things have moved on. With the changes that have occurred within the industry as a whole, the quality of the self-published works has gone up and the ability to get traditional publication contracts has dramatically become harder. And the attitudes about self-publication have now flipped, and the stigma is now attached to the traditional roads.
For someone like myself, it is exciting times to see these transformations within the publishing industry. However, the shift in attitudes actually make my blood boil — but not because of where the stigma now lies, but because of the way people treat me when they discover that I’m determined to go down the traditional route with my fiction.
It was an incredibly hard decision to make, but I’ve decided to bring the radio podcast ConvoScience (or Conversations in Science, as some know it) to an end. There were many different reasons behind this decision, the biggest of which is a refocus on priorities.
I’m a writer. I’m an editor. I do have knowledge that I like to share, but I should be writing!
Saying that, this is NOT the end of the science from me. Science is in my blood. It’s a part of who I am and my family. I have always had a way of explaining science in a way that others can understand, so that is NEVER going away. Instead of talking it out, I’ll just write it.
