I read an excellent book last week when the author mentioned a very intriguing question about why writers are more than readers? Or why people don’t read in the first place?
If you take a microphone out right now and start interviewing people in the street about why they don’t read, they will give you endless reasons. One person might blame the time, that he doesn’t have spare hours to read. Another can blame the TV, claiming that it is more exciting to watch a show than reading. Reading needs a lot of concentration, and some even claim that they don’t have the patience to sit and read.
My friend Ronza Smeirat read the other day that there are so many books out there which, if we per se need 12 hours to finish one book, we need over 300 000 years to read all the books published around the world. Can you believe this?
So what’s the secret? Why are there so many writers and not so many readers? Well, according to the author Henry Hitchings, he claims that people love to talk about themselves. Nowadays, we all have checklists that, when we reach a certain age, especially at retirement, we imagine that it is time to share all the knowledge and experience we have lived through all these years by writing a book. It’s a trendy thing to do, and so many are doing it.
We should never forget that self-publishing has made publishing so accessible that we publish with a click of a button. People don’t even think about publishing companies anymore; why handle rejection when we can self-publish our works and show them immediately?
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Stephen King
What these writers don’t know is, we all need to read for us to write. We need to fill ourselves with so much knowledge that we release out to the world. Reading one book and publishing another is not the right balance. It would be best if you read a good chunk of them before you publish a single book. Now that’s the right balance.