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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy E Grenemyer" data-source="post: 2566467" data-attributes="member: 12388">Since we’re (s)trolling down memory lane, I thought I’d address this (because it reminds me of many of the posts I used to see on ---you guessed it--- the old novel forums) in the manner I did back in the day…. You’d have to have a pretty broad definition of amateur, as well as a pretty paranoid notion of what ‘personal ties’ means (which, in the real world, often refers to friends, work acquaintances, contacts, getting to know people through basic networking, etc…with no conspiracies implied or assumed). I’d also peg the first claim in the first sentence quoted above as simply wrong.Go to your local bookstore and count the number of different titles for a line like the Forgotten Realms.  Then count the number of times the same author name appears for each different book.You’ll find a majority of titles are by the same set of authors.  If you expand your search beyond the Realms (by looking at Dragonlance novels or jumping over to Star Wars novels) you’ll not only find more authors with multiple books under their belt, but also that some authors do in fact cross over from one genre to the next.So the question becomes one of figuring out exactly what you mean by ‘amateur’.  It certainly can’t mean ‘newbie’, because there aren’t all that many newbie authors compared to established authors. But strangely enough, the people so hired typically have writing (or other, professional) degrees, at least some years of experience in the gaming industry (if they have ‘personal ties’ as you put it) and are actively involved in the hobby they’d be writing for, probably know most of the people that will be editing and publishing their eventual work and (based on the points made in my first response above) already have more than one book under their belt.But I guess it’s too much of a stretch to believe a company might actually train, elevate and evaluate from within, huh?The whole concept of the ‘real world’ is a false one, by the way.  Splitting hairs leads to an empty argument. How does not becoming a successful (again, vague) novelist validate your claims?Does this really prove that all authors who don’t write more than one novel are corporate-inbread, amateur hacks? But you’d assume a whole lot about their skill sets and experience. It’s objective if it’s true regardless of who says it.  ‘Many people’ is too vague and too unlikely to be true without real sampling to rely upon as fact.Better to call it what it is, an assumption.J. Grenemyer</blockquote>

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