Last week, I wrote about the rewards of reading slowly, inspired by an article in the Guardian. Within that article, another theme caught my eye:

[M]ore people than ever are writing. If you time travelled just a few decades into the past, you would wonder at how little writing was happening, outside a classroom. There would be no people sitting in coffee shops urgently stabbing their laptops with two fingers, or updating the social network with the headline news of their lives. You might see the odd person signing a cheque or pencilling in an appointment in their Filofax. But mostly writing would be farmed out to professionals, and appear only in print.

Writing is not only for the select few; writing is for everyone. So, too, is reading. Because if we are all writers to some degree, then we are all readers too. Never has our education in language and literature through what we choose to read been more important.

Of course, those professional writers to which the article refers still exist. I wonder: has the opening up of writing made us more critical of those writers?

Now that so many people can publish their writing in all kinds of ways, from Facebook posts to tweets to blog articles to self-published books, they too are writers. The gap between ‘The Writer’ and ‘the writer’ has reduced. I think we expect more of The Writer now – the traditionally published author who has honed their craft for years and made it through the onerous submission process; we expect their writing to be really something.

But an aspiring author need not necessarily become The Writer; being simply a writer can be enough. The digital world has broken down barriers. Take Wattpad, for example: last week Forbes published an article entitled ‘$400M Fiction Giant Wattpad Wants to Be Your Literary Agent’. The article offered several examples of writers whose works on Wattpad caught the eye of big publishers and studios, and those writers are now living the dream without having taken the traditional publishing route. Do readers except their writing to be really something? Perhaps. Or perhaps in such cases there is a greater interest in the story than the craft; perhaps these are wonderful storytellers, and the agonising years of craft-building, of learning how to write by studying language and immersing oneself in literature by great authors of history – perhaps this has been bypassed.

I am fascinated by how the publishing landscape has changed. When I drafted my first novel, when my children were young, the path ahead looked fairly straightforward (and somewhat limited): finish the book and then try to secure a publisher, who would publish the book in print while I quietly wrote the next book. But when Burning Embers was finished, years later when my children had flown the nest, a new world had been born: I had more options. More opportunities as a writer. My books are now published in print, as audiobooks and as ebooks in English, and they are being translated and published in those formats in countries worldwide. I don’t simply ‘write the next book’; I write so much more, engaging with readers through this blog, through my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and through book tours and fairs. I’ve even written short stories for women’s magazines to promote my writing – such fun!

These are exciting times, then, in which to write, and to read. We don’t know how publishing will evolve in the next ten or twenty years, but I think we can safely assume that more boundaries will be eradicated and more novel ways found in which to write, publish and read; and that both writers and readers will continue to be empowered. As Bob Dylan put it, the times, they are a-changin’.