"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." Charles Darwin
 
With progression comes change and with change comes a crowd of folks who do not like it. Eventually though as Charles Darwin might state, our species learns to adapt to these changes or they fall off the evolutionary map. Thusly change is evolution, and evolutions create revolutions.

The Next Generation writers are an evolving species in the publishing industry but by all means we are not the first to overcome a stigma brought on by evolution. We, the writers and the small press publishers, have determined to be the ones most responsive to the changes that have occurred in the industry in this technology era; but we are not the forerunners of responders to what has been common practice since the beginnings of times.

Well it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the beginnings of change are going to have it's issues. There are issues with those who wish to stick to the "normalcy" they have grown comfortable with and there are those who seek to change things but have errors in their concepts and end products.

The NGW is striving to change the stigma brought on by our forerunners of invention. Sadly with new beginnings there are flaws in the design and execution. If we take the boisterous complaints hailed by the "ones who look down upon the self published writers, the small presses and the authors produced by small presses" into consideration, we find ourselves blossoming into the evolution as a species to be reckoned with.

There are many who believe that self published writers are vain, lazy and lacking in education sense. This is not true if you consider what a small press or one person accomplishes by themselves to make their dream a reality. For a self published author or small press to achieve a final product have you once counted the hats the poor author must wear? It tis quite a feat in itself to go beyond writing the book to actually getting it printed and sold. And they do this on a daily basis. Are some of them lazy? I would have to debate that because those who are mainstream published have done little in comparison to the workload these writers have. Yes lets please give them credit for their patience and their hard work of running to the mailbox for their rejection notices so they don't think we have forgotten about what they have achieved. But I can't honestly say I believe any of the mainstream published writers of today will be writers my grandchildren will be reading in their English classes. I dare not say that all the self published and small press authors will either but there is more to speak of considering their work and efforts to follow a dream and I would much rather my child learn of one of these writers than the ones who consider these writers a disease they must rids themselves of.

But none of this is new "news" and authors have been self publishing longer than any of us have been around. Self publication of books became a form of underground art sought by those who wished to be free to write and read something other than religious texts. Again there were no such things as publishers who would touch such works because this was an era of great religion and books well we've all heard the horror stories of books being burned through time. But, you'd be surprised to know it was the attitudes of the church and state that begot the self publication of books and you may even be surprised at who went against the grain and published their own works some of these books were published by authors who grew to be very famous and who are still read in classrooms today. Why - it certainly wasn't because of vanity and laziness.

You could stock a superb college library or an incredible bookstore just from the books written by the some of the authors who have chosen to self-publish at some point in their lives:

Margaret Atwood,

William Blake,

Ken Blanchard,

Robert Bly,

Lord Byron,

Willa Cather,

Pat Conroy,

Stephen Crane,

e.e. cummings,

W.E.B. DuBois,

Alexander Dumas,

T.S. Eliot,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti,

Benjamin Franklin,

Zane Grey,

Thomas Hardy,

E. Lynn Harris,

Nathaniel Hawthorne,

Ernest Hemingway,

Robinson Jeffers,

Spencer Johnson,

Stephen King,

Rudyard Kipling,

Louis L'Amour,

D.H. Lawrence,

Rod McKuen,

Marlo Morgan,

John Muir,

Anais Nin,

Thomas Paine,

Tom Peters,

Edgar Allen Poe,

Alexander Pope,

Beatrix Potter,

Ezra Pound,

Marcel Proust,

Irma Rombauer,

Carl Sandburg,

Robert Service,

George Bernard Shaw,

Percy Bysshe Shelley,

Upton Sinclair,

Gertrude Stein,

William Strunk,

Alfred Lord Tennyson,

Henry David Thoreau,

Leo Tolstoi,

Mark Twain,

Walt Whitman,

and Virginia Woolf.