I don't think it helps that today, society wants instant gratification. We write a book, we want an agent to take us on at the first asking and a publisher to accept on the first submission, so any means that helps us to do this, such as the Brit Awards, is perceived by some to be a good thing.

At a literary festival, I got chatting to an editor from Penguin, who said that in the 'old days', a publisher would take on a writer's first novel and support them through several more novels as they learned their craft and built up an audience. By book seven, most authors had achieved this and began reaping rewards for the publishers. Sadly, the commercial world we live in means that publishers need our first novels to be book seven. But what many writers haven't realized is that they still need to write seven novels (or at least more than one) in order to learn their craft. We still have to do our apprenticeship, but the fast-paced world we live in doesn't encourage us to do so.

I think there are a lot of people out there who like the idea of 'being a writer' but don't actually like the idea of 'writing'. Yet it is only by writing that we learn our craft.