Goodreads asked Scott C. Holstad:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Scott C. Holstad READ!!! Study. Do your darn due diligence. In "the old days," if you wanted to be a (successful) writer, you had to know not only what HAD been published, but what WAS being published at the time, as in what are editors and publishers looking for now? I read thousands of books, hundreds of journals and magazines, subscribed to god knows how many, and of course wrote for hours every day of the year for decades. But I also wouldn't send my submissions off to a publication unless I had a pretty good grasp on what kind of stuff they tended to accept, who they published, their preferred styles, etc., because if you're going to send sonnets to many magazines, you've just wasted everyone's time and your money while conversely, if you write conversational, populist poetry, there's little bother in submitting it to journals like Ploughshares, the New Yorker, Poetry, etc. Same too with other types of writing and publications. Don't show you're an amateur by now knowing your field or your craft. Unless you're one of the current ocean of digital self publishers who have never heard of proofing and would never bother hiring a proofer or editor, in which case they look and read like dumbasses, even if they write a decent tale. And that's not just my opinion. Read the reader reviews of most self published digital books and the ONE universal primary complaint is the typos, bad grammar, unprofessionalism, how the book was good but could have been better with editing, etc. Here's my personal snobbery. Up until this century, over the past century, most writers -- successful or not -- had to "pay their dues." They had to write and submit, in some cases for many years, try to find agents, try to find publishers, try to get out of slush piles, put up with rejection, be patient and persistent, and if lucky and deserving, some would finally get some type of book published, etc. Ideally, professionally proofed and edited. However, with the advent of digital self publishing, everyone thinks they're a freaking writer (there's a difference between being a "writer" and being an "author" -- anyone can pay to be an author...), and basic grammatical and publishing standards have plummeted and while some don't care, many do and many feel -- myself included -- that if you self publish something that looks horrible, even if it's otherwise good, you look like a moron. And I get further annoyed with all of the non-native English speakers publishing Kindle books in English. I have nothing against speakers of other languages. I taught ESL to students from dozens of countries with dozens of languages and have nothing but respect for them. But if you're Russian (to use a book I recently quit reading because I literally couldn't understand the content due to lack of standards such as articles, etc.) or another language speaker and you're trying to publish a book in English, if your English isn't darn good, HIRE AN EDITOR!!! Don't trade your alleged expertise by looking and sounding stupid! It's self defeating. More people writing today need to think intelligently and strategically and most don't and don't know they should. And it reflects on their sales/success/etc. Feel free to hate me and call me a snob, but I dare you to find anyone in PEN or the Authors Guild who disagrees with me. People today are too lazy or impatient to pay their dues and they publish crap. And that's sad...

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