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Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze
I know a lot of guys who used to make a decent living writing novels in the heyday of paper. The ones who weren't wildly successful seem to be having a lot of trouble these days. I find that unfortunate. You can factor in the distraction of other kinds of media (particularly gadgets and non-passive media, in my opinion), but others' lack of interest doesn't invalidate the massive commitment of time and energy those writers have devoted to their craft.
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How much time and energy a writer devotes to writing is completely irrelevant; all that matters is the product at the end of the process. I don't care how long the author took to write the book or how difficult or easy it was to write.
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Also, you can't talk about writers being undeserving without noticing which writers we're actually talking about: the kind who are committed and consistent enough to write for a living. In the Victorian period, you'd have been insisting that Dickens, George Eliot and George Meredith didn't deserve compensation because your nephew, the aspiring novelist, did fine without any, and laws to that effect might have prevented a number of great books from being written.
We might now have other books from the Victorian period instead, which were written by people who could manage during their off hours, but would they be of the same quality if their talent wasn't nurtured by enough money to allow them more time to perfect their work, and maintain a flow that didn't suffer from the stress of an unrealistic production schedule?
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What is your point here? Let's subsidize anyone who self-identifies as a writer so he or she can write full-time, and the end result will be great literature? Sorry, I don't buy it.