Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
It's not the authors that are dying: it's the publishers.
|
And the best seller authors. It's an interestign parallele to television. Before cable, there were three television networks who controlled nearly all programming. Cable fragmented that, and hundreds of new networks were created, with the better run ones making original programming. The internet has continued that process, and there are not more megalithic networks with so much control over the market that they can create popular fads.
Bad for the big networks, but infinitly more diversity for the audience.
Same thing is happening right now to writing. The big, big names, who are big names partly because they're very good writers, but also partly because they were
made the big names by the marketing power of the big publishers, the bestsellers, they are in big trouble, the same way that the TV stars of the most popular shows can't expect to get paid as much because the highest rated show on TV now has a fraction of the audience of a mediocre show from 30 years ago. The publishers are in trouble. But the little guy, the nobody author, has opportunity that never existed before.
And we, the readers, have access to a diversity of available books that was unimaginable even ten years ago.