Thursday, March 22, 2012

Wild World of Writing



The writing world is just wild! With Authors, Publishers, Agents, and Editors, we find ourselves in a world of words, bouncing around like balls in a BINGO machine! It’s a wonderful world mostly, where like minds join together for the same common interest and that is the love of reading and writing.

The definitions of such are below:

AUTHOR --
1. a person who writes a novel, poem, essay, etc.; the composer of a literary work, as distinguished from a compiler, translator, editor, or copyist.
2. the literary production or productions of a writer:
3. the maker of anything; creator; originator:

WRITER --
1. a person engaged in writing books, articles, stories, etc., especially as an occupation or profession; an author or journalist.
2. a person who commits his or her thoughts, ideas, etc., to writing.

PUBLISHER --
1. a person or company whose business is the publishing of books, periodicals, engravings, computer software, etc.
2. the business head of a newspaper organization or publishing house, commonly the owner or the representative of the owner.
 

AGENT --
1. a person or business authorized to act on another's behalf:
2. a person who works for or manages an agency.
 

EDITOR --
1. a person having managerial and sometimes policy-making responsibility for the editorial  part of a publishing firm or of a newspaper, magazine, or other publication.
2. a person who edits  material for publication, films, etc.

Publishers, Editors, and Agents are not necessarily writers/authors. They are in the business because they were either writers in their previous years and found the business exciting enough to stay in the field one way or another, or the love of reading has brought them to this juncture.
 

And not all writers make good editors. I see some well published writers/authors of their own works still in need of an editor who can pick out that typo and make their work appear more professional. Say a writer posts an article at Helium. If they have not edited their work and many typo’s abound, what are the odds of that author ever being taken seriously?
 

Is an agent necessary to get your work into the hands of the publishers? Not necessarily, but they do know who to pitch your work to and whose hands it would best have a likely shot at being published. So as you can see, it is one wild world this writing domain that I’ve gotten myself into. With ups and downs, in's and outs, the Wide World of Writing is a kaleidoscope of adventures and can bring a richly rewarding creative world to life for you whichever you are in the industry, writer/author, agent, publisher or editor.
 

As the Cat Stevens song says, “Oh baby baby it’s a wild world!” ...it goes onto saying, “But if you wanna leave, take good care, hope you make a lot of nice friends out there, but just remember there’s a lot of bad and BEWARE!”
 

The same can be said for the writing world.

1 comment:

M. SUE said...

For the time being, I am mostly my own author-editor-agent and yes, I do feel a bit like my head is an air-filled celluloid sphere that is blowing with the tumbleweeds on the wild, West Texas wind. Is that why I'm not getting more writing done? My writer-author-editor task, should I choose to accept it, is to rope those wild words in, corral them into a fenced-in area, then rein them in "to bring a richly rewarding world to life." Now, I guess I should get to work!
Sending smiles~
Auntie Sue