Writer versus Self-Publisher.

Self-publishers are not writers. They type, but they're not writers. They are a completely new critter on the face of business, but they are not artists and they are not creators in the classic sense of the term.

What they are, is exactly what they call themselves: Self-publishers. A lot of them like to use the hideous term "Indie Writer" to self-identify. But that description--while it conjures an overwhelming stench--doesn't really do justice to what it is that these folk do.

They self-publish.

That's all that they do.

Everything about them revolves around this one thing: self-publishing.

It doesn't matter what it is that they're self-publishing. Everything takes a back seat to the fact that they are pushing a button and sending out their poorly rendered crap onto the Internet and into the marketplace and hoping against hope that they'll make a buck from this dissemination of garbage.

They live to self-publish. They exist to clog the book business with a blockage of sewage that no plumber can dislodge. I doubt anything short of a thermonuclear detonation could clear the backlog of stink that they have forced on us all.

A self-publisher does not write. They do produce words, but they do not strive to make anything of worth by doing so. Self-publishers are shills for Amazon.com and Apple and the various companies who sell applications for tablet devices and the portable computers that people call phones. These scumbags don't care that their so-called 'work' is completely lacking in anything that might otherwise be worthy in fiction or non-fiction. That doesn't matter to them. They are here to sell a pyramid scheme, not a book.

Self-publishers are the worst of the worst. If they were writers (and they are not), then they would be the least talented and the least deserving to see the light of print. Instead, they are salesmen. And the lowest order of salesmen. These weasels strive to ensure that there is a sucker born every millisecond. Their job is to create victims and not something of merit.

Some time back I swore never to spend a penny of my money on self-published work. I swore never to waste an instant of my time trying to struggle through self-published fiction. So far, since that moment, I have stuck to that oath. And this is the only thing that will put an end to what another writer has termed "the shit-volcano" that is self-publishing. I'm hoping that at some point the avid readers will boycott anything tainted with the stench of self-publishing.

I do hold out hope that the fad will come to an end. That the millions of self-published novels will wither and die on the Internet vine and that the scumbags who make their livings promoting the self-published Ponzi scheme will find themselves tending the counter at the nearest equivalent of the Kwik-E-Mart.

"I was once a successful self-published asshole."