For Writers: Hard Advice Which You Won't Want to Follow

This article is going to be hard-hitting and I’ll probably get attacked for it, but I see far too many writers wasting their time and energy daily trying to sell their books when the facts about what to do to be successful are staring them in the face, and something has to change.

Some of these truths are going to be hard to accept, but I don’t think there’s much point apologising for them when they are, self evidently, true.

The reason I can be so blunt — and want to be — is that I care about many of these writers as individuals and I want to see them, and others like them, succeed. This isn’t because I like the ‘warm feelings in my heart’ which I get when I see people doing well, but because there’s a central and vital importance involved in freeing up artists and artistry so that they thrive and spread triumphantly across the globe. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that there are many things wrong in the world — and one of the ways of working to restore the balance is to give artists and writers the tools to be strong, vibrant and effective communicators. Waves of beauty and wisdom and aesthetic cleverness and poetic potency can cut through tremendous amounts of chicanery and depression and apathy and ignorance. What a writer or artist does with his or her time is important — making the results of that work more powerful and far-reaching is crucial.

So if y