Writing Magazine

Behind the cover

Who writes your books?

What a ridiculous question. Your name is (or will be) on the cover. So you write them, obviously.

Or maybe it’s not so obvious, after all? Some authors are happy to send their work out into the world unread by anyone but themselves. These days, self-publishing makes this approach perfectly feasible, and in the past even commercial publishers were basically printers whose authors’ work had little or no editorial input from them.

But other present-day authors would never dream of submitting their books to public scrutiny until they’ve been seen

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