Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some people are using text-generating software to write a book a day. The world changes daily. Some people change while some don’t.

Here is a story about some folks in India(?) who are putting several books a day every day onto online book sellers. The same bunch of folks are writing glowing reviews of those books under different names and accounts. Wow. Someone figured out how to use the latest tools to make money.

And some, like the Washington Post’s editors, are crying foul. These aren’t real books. These are spam books or something bad like that. Someone needs to stop this before … well before something happens.

Note, the writers of the Washington Post are writers who want to earn a living from writing. The people in the news story are earning a living from writing in a different manner than the Washington Post writers. Hence, the Washington Post writers have a conflict of interest in their stories in that someone else has learned how to do their job far more efficiently at a far lower salary.

Nevertheless, these folks in India (we think that is the location) are creating books. One person working one day creates one book. The books are probably pretty good in that they convey information that is correct. There may be some writing hiccups, but “real” books have those as well.

Times have changed. If lower-paid people can use technology to do this type of thing, why pay other people more money to do the same thing. To write books AND make good money, you need to do something special(er).

And that is the point: we don’t use quill pens to write any longer. We use mechanical metal pens to do that. Times changed with pens and some people didn’t change. Times changed when we moved from the typewriter to the computer word processor. Some people didn’t change. Times have changed with writing. Some people are refusing to change. Some of those people want “the government” to take care of them. We shall see if that happens.

Times haven’t changed. To earn money as a creative person (painter, actor, sculptor, WRITER, etc.) a person need to do something special, something that others cannot do. Let’s use the tools at hand and put that extra something special into the product.

Times haven’t changed.