The Insecure Writer’s Support Group is a place where writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. It’s a safe haven for you on your author journey and available at this website where you can also find resources, articles, and various other help.

The awesome co-hosts for the July 1 posting of the IWSG are Jenni Enzor,Beth Camp, Liesbet, Tyrean Martinson, and Sandra Cox! Don’t forget to go say hello as you’re hopping today.

July 1 question: There have been many industry changes in the last decade (this is a stellar example of what, as an author, I would term understatement), so what are some changes you would like to see happen in the next decade?

The best way to answer this seems to be with a list. A bullet point listicle. Yes. Just roll with me here as I present:

SE’s Non-Exhaustive List of Fail-safe New Rules for the Writing Industry*

*research based on zero experience whatsoever, but I do have a blog and probably stayed at a Holiday Inn at some point in my life, so definitely very trustworthy

  • All stickers on covers to be made illegal, effective immediately. I’m very serious about this. Sticker residue marring a beautiful cover is all bad things in this world and should be banned forever.
  • E-readers for everyone. Cause we are living in a material  sorry, digital world, and I am a digital reader girl. Also higher literacy rates can only be a good thing, so yes. Make books easily available for everyone.
  • As a corollary to this: all E-readers should come equipped with the Library lending app, standard. Because more books! For free!
  • Richard Armitage and Jude Law should be required to narrate one audiobook per year. Have you heard either of them speak? YES PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN.
  • Indie bookstores are the future. I would like to see some sort of location app that pings to warn you whenever you’re close to one and gives you directions. Honestly, none of us care if we follow the road trip itinerary or whatever, we just want to know if we mistakenly passed the bookstore instead of going inside it as is proper and correct.
  • ALL TRADE PAPERBACK SIZES TO BE STANDARDIZED. Stop changing your minds on paperback sizes, publishers! I don’t care if it saves you money! You don’t exist to save money, you exist to give us perfectly matched series!
  • There is nothing worse than buying the fifth book in a series and finding out they’ve CHANGED the DIMENSIONS and now this book is thinner, or taller, or fatter, than the others in the series and GREAT, now I have to start over and buy them all again in the correct size or else spend the rest of my life twitching whenever I look at the mismatched series staggering across my shelf. STOP IT, PUBLISHERS.
  • The Big Five (or is it Four, now? I forget) publishers should immediately hire ownvoices sensitivity readers/consultants and pay them well, because they will save the publishers a huge amount of missteps, mistakes, and retractions in the long run.
  • Create and promote big name prizes and awards for Indie books. I’m talking Pulitzer or Booker status, but for self-published titles. They are a huge portion of the market share, they are here to stay, and they deserve some recognition. The awards ceremonies will likely be much more exciting and interesting than the traditional ones and I, for one, welcome our new confetti-blasting overlords.
  • Also a big name award for book cover design, because covers are seriously underrepresented in awards when they do most of the heavy lifting in selling the book.