Pulp Fiction

During the week I came across a post on one of the author websites that I visit every day in which the lady author stated that she had published five novels during 2012. I can’t remember if she claimed to have written five novels in that time, but the fact that five of her books went live during that time got me thinking: what has Amazon led us into? Once upon a time it would have been a work of supreme effort to achieve that, but now it seems a common occurrence among some of the writing fraternity. I have to ask myself the question: are they any good? But does it matter? The advent of Amazon has removed the myth and mystique that used to surround a writer. Now we are all authors. Whether we are good or bad; it matters not. In a way that lady’s output diminishes the value of being a writer when I think of the hard work and hours of writing and editing that used to be the norm; for most of us anyway. Jeffrey Archer writes his first draft in longhand. After that there are usually another two drafts before being offered to his publisher. This comes after the research of course. John le Carré would write about a million words and discard over 50% of them. Jilly Cooper bashes away on a typewriter. All of these are world-wide best-selling authors, but I think they would shudder at the thought of their profession being sacrificed at Amazon’s altar of pulp fiction. Ghost writing is a lucrative profession, but it is pulp fiction nonetheless. Matt Lynn used to ghost-write military thrillers for Random House: the kind that sell by the ‘truck load’ in his words. Those writers write to a format in which creativity takes a back seat to the formula. In their own way they have talent, but they hide it behind the name of someone who ‘sells’ books. Eventually they usually give up hiding behind a ‘name’ and write books for themselves just as Matt Lynn did. I think Amazon has opened the way for a lot of good authors. It has also opened the door for the bad ones too. It doesn’t matter to Amazon: their remit is to sell books, which is what they do and do well. But it allows people to force feed the market and devalue the art of writing.