“… we're all writers now.”

“It's an arresting way of doing the arithmetic that depends on a definition of an ‘author’ harking back to the days of the gentleman hobbyist. For [Hugh] Howey, who sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his dystopian novel Wool himself on Amazon before landing a publisher, the self-publishing revolution has allowed 'hundreds of thousands of voracious readers with a dream of writing a novel' to write books 'out of love and passion, just like a kid goes out and dribbles a basketball for hours every day or kicks a soccer ball against a garage wall.'

     But over the past few decades we wouldn't have called these people 'writers' any more than we would call that kid in the back yard a footballer. If all it takes to be a writer is to stick your work online then we're all writers now.
     In the old days things were much clearer. All you had to do to call yourself a writer was publish a book, which meant you needed someone else to publish it – and someone else to buy it. […]”
— Amanda Hocking, The Guardian (Books Blog)
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