Our essay writers often write their own books, too. This is the article, where they collected prejudices dominating newbie authors, and stopping them from work on their manuscripts.
Don’t do that. Keep going.
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Legend #1
The culture’s dead: past writers were the best, nowadays we can’t get to the same level
Those cry for the culture who never studied its story. Useless books were published at all times since printing technology had been introduced. For instance, the Silver Age of Russian literature is normally estimated by classic works, yet there were books which modern reader would never like as well. The most part of books were of that kind.
On the book market, there is a normal filtration: authors send their works, editor thinks on them, something gets published, something is being sold out well. Only few manuscripts pass through ages.
Publishers publish what is being bought. You can spend enormous funds on the advertising campaign for the book, but if it does not satisfy people’s needs, nobody is going to buy it. Everyone has different thoughts on what is wonderful and needed, and things that are not pleasant for you may sound like a music for someone else.
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Legend #2
Non-fiction is a novel about life truth, and mainstream is the popular literature which middle-class workers like to read
Actually, non-fiction is literature which is not fictional (there is no fictional plot and characters). Non-fiction novel is an oxymoron, as “novel” means “fiction” at any case.
Mainstream is a fictional work, in which the main plot is devoted to moral development of characters.
People think wrong about words “nonfiction” and “mainstream” because of understanding them literally and forgetting about the fact, that every term and word in the publishing business has its own meaning and history.
Note: the term “mainstream” was introduced by the USA publishers. This was the word which meant works, published by leading American magazines in the beginning of XX century.
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Legend #3
If you want to be published, write an epic novel series
This is one of the most widespread mistakes of newbie authors: they want to create a work which is genuine by contents and beautiful by form, but they don’t have a skill of processing their texts. As a result, they create huge word constructions, which are complicated, unusual, and… completely unreadable.
The newbie writer is easy to come to the market with the entertaining book. Nicely written novel about “How I Spent Summer in Turkey” is more likely to be published than the “Attack On Roman Empire” written badly. Working on a topic which is beyond one’s level yet is a certain experience guarantee, of course. But one shouldn’t count on a publication in that case.
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Legend #4
My story is worth to be published as it is interesting to myself
There are not so many freshmen who think on a question: “What can my book give to readers?” In most part of texts, there can be noted one single thing: the wish of an author to let emotions flow on a paper.
For instance: author thinks about any beautiful woman, then comes to a condition and decides to share his feelings, writing a love story. One can come back home from a concert and sing a motive of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony with the same result.
The story with such contents is read fine when the author knows how to use words very well. The newbie author can’t write their text like that, so there is the need to count on something another: topic, characters, new curious information. If there is nothing like that, there is no sense in publishing such text.
Another spread topic: the description of the author’s sufferings. There are tons of manuscripts about illnesses, prisons, catastrophes and so on received by editor’s houses. The author complies on their fate and wants to get sympathy. There is another misfortune added to this hardships as a result: publishing house’s denial. There are many people ready to help those who got into trouble, but there is a little part of them who are ready to buy “complying books”.
See more legends in an upcoming article.