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Originally Posted by Hitech_luddite
...several weeks of lurking in these forums have convinced me there is something about the attitudes which I am seeing here that are in my view not healthy for the craft of writing. Rather than exposing people to a greater wealth of material, ebook reading seems for some to be narrowing their scope more than ever, meaning there are difficult choices to be made for the writer.
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Intuiting general trends from such a small and self-selecting sample as a forum like this is a bad plan. It's a statistically insignificant group.
To get a real idea of reader habits, you'd have to pore over databases of companies like Amazon and B&N, who have both significant ebook sales and long paper book sales histories.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitech_luddite
However reading ebook reviews of other people's work, both here and at other sites, I cannot help but feel the fundamental compact between writer and reader is breaking down. Writers are being judged not on the book they have written but on the book the reader wanted them to write.
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Ok, but what does that have to do with ebooks?
Fans, particularly the hard-core vocal types, tend to be highly demanding. The difference isn't the medium or the delivery, it's the line of communications between author and audience -- that is, for those authors who choose to open that line of communication.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitech_luddite
In another thread here a writer was criticized for his use of religious swearing.
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Ya know, I'd imagine that as an artist who wants sales, you have to pay some attention to your readers. But I don't see how caving in to their every whim helps you as an artist, especially since the desires of the members of your audience are likely to contradict one another as well as your own goals.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitech_luddite
Because ebook sites encourage categorization, which is always a dangerous thing, there is a real temptation to go with what we know we like....
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• "Categorization" has been rampant in the book biz for a long time.
• Ebook sales don't encourage categorization any more than paper books. In fact, there's essentially no difference between the ebook and paper site designs for Amazon, B&N etc.
• Niche marketing and niche sales, in addition to also having a long history, are trends in the culture at large rather than "just ebooks." (On a separate note, fwiw there is still a desire for the big hits.
I'm not finding your position terribly persuasive. Pretty much at every step of the way, someone somewhere has decried whatever changes are underway -- dating all the way back to the invention of the printing press, and more recently cheap paperbacks; big chain stores; online sales; POD, etc etc. I.e. your idealized era for authors -- assuming it existed as your fond memories recall in the first place -- was probably someone else's nightmare.
I also have to echo some other comments in that change is just the nature of things. You cannot dip a commercial enterprise or cultural structure in amber circa 1950 (or 1970 or whatever idealized year you have in mind), that's just not how the world works.
What can I say, I think if you really want to make it as a writer, you need to worry a hundred times more about landing an agent than what a bunch of web forum posters think. Yours truly excluded, of course.
