Why bother to write yet another book about publishing?
The best answer to that question actually starts with a poem: The grizzly bear is huge and wild, He has devoured the infant child. The infant child is not aware He has been eaten by the bear. INFANT INNOCENCE, by Ogden Nash With the proliferation of computers and word-processing programs and a growing cult of “personality” authors making “big bucks,” it is tempting to think that publishing has become an easy avenue for making “quick” money while at the same time satisfying some latent creative urge. This is a bit like deciding, “I think I’ll make a movie. After all, I’ve watched lots of them on TV and in movie houses,” and then buying a video camera and some digital tape and thinking that’s all you need. Rather like Ogden Nash’s Infant Child, “young” writers sometimes innocently believe that studying writing and honing their talent is all they need to do in order to get published, rather than treating it as a necessary first step. One of the major traps of all the arts (whether it’s wr
