Check out this story posted yesterday on NYTimes.com about child authors whose self-published books are being financed by their parents. This isn’t a new phenomena, as Christopher Paolini’s parents self-published Eragon, which grew to become a big hit. It seems like the argument against childhood self-publishing is that these kids aren’t learning the perseverance and editorial lessons faced by adult authors. Their parents are financing books that would most likely be rejected by publishing companies. But I don’t think that there’s any harm in a kid self-publishing his manuscript and getting the enjoyment of seeing print copies. I wrote a lot of crap in my teens, and it would have been cool to see those books in print. Even if they were crap. If anything, it would make me want to write more often, and get a lot better, so that one day I could be placed with a traditional publisher.
My advice to the kids out there who are self-publishing: keep on writing 
.
