The increase in self-publishing fiction in recent years has me feeling rather unsettled. For me, as an aspiring science fiction writer, as much as I’d like for other people to read my work I feel that it’s more important for it to go through the traditional route of quality control through magazine editors and publishers. This route would mean that my peers, who would be well versed and experienced within the industry, have judged my work and found my stories to be of a good quality and add something to the field and society. By negating this quality checking I might not realise for example, that my story was actually a re-hash of one told better 20 years ago. I’ve personally had a rejection letter with constructive criticism that caused me to re-draft the short story and the overall quality has been vastly improved as it lead me to explore different avenues and question the message I was trying construct and way in which I did it. I wonder if in the years to come, the credibility of authors will become suspect due to an over abundance of poor quality work where the authors weren’t helped by editors and readers might not have the ability to filter truly unique writing from copy-cat stories.
My letter published in April 2013 issue of ‘Writing Magazine’
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