This is a photo of the First Tuesday of the month bookclub where 3 books for young readers are read and discussed. They always include a Story Picture Book, a middle grade novel, and one for Young Adults. The discussions are always interesting, informative and sometimes heated. Many of the attendees are writers themselves and therefore read these books with a professional eye.

I have a writing friend who is very vehement about the current need for authors to maintain blogs and twitter and refuses to have anything to do with it. Rather she has decided to walk away from the profession.

 Certainly the changes from when I first began writing and now are remarkable.

Once authors only had to worry about getting our manuscripts into a publisher on time. Sometimes we were invited to appear at writing festivals, certainly we had launches-  paide for by publishers.  Children’s authors were invited to speak to students about  ‘how we get our ideas’ and then allowed to retire from the public eye to write another book.

Since the change to digital publishing, most of this has disappeared. We are now expected to blog, twitter and keep up an appearance on facebook no matter how trivial the content. All this means publishers can now employ less people to market and edit.

That gets me onto ediitng, a much maligned profession. If only ‘famous’ authors would allow cuts in their work. But this is an old gripe and no doubt becoming boring.

What I am leading to is that this am I received a rather nice post about the excellent quality of my blog. But rereading it, I think the writer was referring to his own. Another interesting example of marketting.