[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

The point is the same for the independent authors. If Indie writers and writers in general cant make money through the Internet, eventually they'll just stop publishing.

No, they won't. We will *never* have a shortage of people willing to write for free. Just like we'll never have a shortage of actors willing to work for beans, or singers who'll entertain at their friends' houses without getting paid.

We may lose some *specific* (and wonderful) authors, but we're not going to wind up with less people interested in writing, nor even less *talented* people writing. The ability to make money at any creative-entertainment job has always been much, much smaller than the number of people who want to do those things.

We may simply be leaving through an age of TEMPORARY abundance- that will last until writers just stop writing.

Kris Rusch points out that "For the year 2005, I see that 378,000 new titles got published in the English language. Before the indie-published books descended on the industry."

How many books did you read in 2005? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say "less than 1% of what was published." How many did you read in 2006? 2007? At no point should we worry about running out of reading material; if all authors on the planet took a 10-year sabbatical, we'd still have plenty to read until they started again. We'd have plenty of *excellent* books to read.

The problem with making money writing on the internet isn't "getting people to pay;" it's convincing them that what's new & hot off the presses is just as interesting as that book their best friend told them about six years ago and they just now got a copy.

We aren't living in the age of abundance; we're living in the age of surfeit. We have more educational and entertainment content than we can consume. If the rate of increase of the rate of increase tapers off, we'll still have more than we can absorb in a lifetime.

Authors are now competing with all of literary history, from ancient Babylonian texts to whatever was posted at the DailyKos five minutes ago. This doesn't mean authors can't make a living at their craft... it just means they can't rely on income from people who would rather be reading something else. They need to convince readers to choose their works, rather than expect the market to be so limited that readers will think it's that author or nothing.