Writing for the streetlamp at midnight

“When I speak at a conference, there’s generally somebody sitting in the front row who raises a hand and says, ‘I don’t need a big advance. I don’t need a publisher that’s going to send me on a national tour’—which is good because nobody is going to do that—‘but I just want to be published.’ That’s wrong. You want to be read. Writers need to understand the distinction between wanting to be published and what they really want. Publication is a means to an end. And the end is being read. If you’re looking to get credit, there are easier ways to get credit. But if you feel genuinely that you could make a promise to a reader, and that what you have to say is worth somebody you’ve never met and may have nothing in common with spending ten hours of their time on, that’s the goal.” – Jennifer Joel (interviewed by Michael Szczerban in Poets & Writers (emphases in original))