Professional, Amateur, or Other?
A beginning writer recently expressed concern about his status. I call him a "beginner" because he does write. He's produced several stories and essays. He will always have amateur status until someone actually pays him money for a piece of writing. I have to say "pays money" because some publishers consider publishing a work as payment, and some offer copies as pay.
Writers are different from, say, athletes, because they have another type of status: published or unpublished. Prior to Tim Berners-Lee's inventions of the World Wide Web in 1989 and the first graphical user interface (GUI browser) in 1990, there were only two states being published: by a publisher or by yourself (vanity or self-publishing). Paying for your work to be printed as a book or booklet counts as self-publishing. In that case, you are your own publisher. Now you can publish yourself in a blog, on your own website, or on websites that publish (for free or fee).
Computers further muddy publishing status with the "publish-on-demand" or "print-on-demand" printers and publishers. For a price they set up an electronic version of your work and print (and sometimes distribute and sell) as few as one copy. Having your first published work "accepted" by a demand publisher seems to me to be a spurious status change. I have investigated and considered it for other reasons, but I'm already a published writer.
The murky waters were cleared, somewhat, by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which legitimized electronic publishing by the back door method of extending the copyright protection to works that are pirated in electronic form.
Why the concern about the publishing status? It's all about clippings and contests. Before you scoff and huff away, know that some contests pay $5,000, even $10,000 or more to the winner. The catch comes in when the writer has to be "unpublished". For nonfiction writers, especially, the ability to produce clippings of previously published work is often the entry to paid publishing. Is a piece published on the Internet really "published"? Will editors accept an electronic file (which can be easily faked) as a clipping?
Writers are different from, say, athletes, because they have another type of status: published or unpublished. Prior to Tim Berners-Lee's inventions of the World Wide Web in 1989 and the first graphical user interface (GUI browser) in 1990, there were only two states being published: by a publisher or by yourself (vanity or self-publishing). Paying for your work to be printed as a book or booklet counts as self-publishing. In that case, you are your own publisher. Now you can publish yourself in a blog, on your own website, or on websites that publish (for free or fee).
Computers further muddy publishing status with the "publish-on-demand" or "print-on-demand" printers and publishers. For a price they set up an electronic version of your work and print (and sometimes distribute and sell) as few as one copy. Having your first published work "accepted" by a demand publisher seems to me to be a spurious status change. I have investigated and considered it for other reasons, but I'm already a published writer.
The murky waters were cleared, somewhat, by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which legitimized electronic publishing by the back door method of extending the copyright protection to works that are pirated in electronic form.
Why the concern about the publishing status? It's all about clippings and contests. Before you scoff and huff away, know that some contests pay $5,000, even $10,000 or more to the winner. The catch comes in when the writer has to be "unpublished". For nonfiction writers, especially, the ability to produce clippings of previously published work is often the entry to paid publishing. Is a piece published on the Internet really "published"? Will editors accept an electronic file (which can be easily faked) as a clipping?
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 9:27 AM
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