This showed up on my Facebook feed today, some idiot whining that editors were contacting her, but she was poor and she didn’t want to be bothered and people need to respect her financial situation because she can’t afford to do anything!

Yes, nobody should contact you out of the blue without your consent, I agree there. Those tend to be scams. However, the idea that you shouldn’t actually have to do anything because you’re “poor” is stupid. So let’s talk about it a bit.

This is hardly the first time this has come up. In fact, this is an incredibly  common contention, the idea that “I’m poor, I can’t pay for a professional cover or professional editing or anything and you can’t tell me that I should!”

Sorry, but writing for publication is a small business whether you like it or not. Businesses inherently have expenses. If you can’t pay those expenses, then you have no business being in business. This is just common sense. You d9n’t go rent a building and then say “I’m poor, I can’t afford the rent and you have to stop telling me that I have to pay!” That’s utterly stupid, but that’s the kind of mentality that these people have.

That’s really why Amazon KDP is so screwed up, because so many people think that writing is just something you do for free and it simply isn’t. There are expenses like covers and editing and advertising that cannot be ignored, no matter how much some people want to try. It doesn’t matter if you want to write. Writing is free. Trying to sell your writing, that’s not free. That’s just the way it goes.

So I told her to get a job and she whined about that. Lots of people do. The reason why you people are poor is because you’re stupid. Granted, I was hardly the only person telling her that and eventually, the moderator turned off comments because she was getting trounced, and deservedly so.

I know writers who are like this though, people who don’t have two nickels to rub together, but instead of getting off their lazy asses and getting a job, they’d rather sit around in their underwear and write stories and have fanciful dreams that they’ll get rich, if only the world was fair and everyone would acknowledge their genius.

These people almost always remain poor. Why? Because they lack realistic expectations with their “career” path. They think the world is magically going to beat a path to their door when, invariably, nothing of the sort happens. Mostly, they’re just not good writers to begin with. They are throwing crappy books up on Amazon out of ego, not skill. Nobody is going to buy their books, not only because they are often terrible, but because they look terrible, even if they are decently written. Their covers are garbage and don’t catch the eye. Their stories are full of errors and poor spelling. People, if they even bother to cast a glance at the book, are going to walk away because the product is unreadable. Then, they show up on writing forums and whine endlessly because they are too lazy or too stupid to do it right.

The second anyone tells them what they need to be doing, they’re full of excuses because “I’m poor!” I wonder why? That’s why virtually all authors, even the successful ones, have a day job to pay the bills and pay for things like covers and editing. Someday, if you’re really good, you might manage to earn enough with your books that you don’t mind those costs, but the costs are never going away. If you can’t afford to do it right, please, don’t do it at all. Your childish fantasy that the world is going to accept your ugly piece of crap with terrible spelling and grammar, and in this case, her posts were full of it so we have no reason to think her books are any better, these people are insane.

Yet they’re just ruining things for the rest of us who do put in the effort. More than 7500 books get uploaded to Amazon every single  day. The vast majority never sell more than a handful of copies because they are terrible. This is why you need gatekeepers. The barrier to entry should be low, but it should exist. If you just want to upload some unedited crap that you wrote this morning, go ahead. There are all kinds of free sites out there specifically for that. Once you start trying to upload to professional retail sites though, you need to be willing and able to do better.

These people don’t want to. That’s why they get rightfully trashed.