Quote:
Originally Posted by HansTWN
You are an idealist (and let us hope you turn out to be right!). A writer can have a relationship like that with his readers in a forum like this one. But to make a living you have to get the word out to a wide audience. You can publish yourself, but will enough people know about it? How many books will crowd the internet and how can readers choose? And with this emerging "everything on the internet is free" mentality I am afraid we will just wind up with ad-supported versions by the big corporations who in this way could very easily defeat the system you have in mind.
By the way, I was only talking about the "big bucks" because that was what seemed to anger member FormatC.
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I am very much an idealist, yes
Writing is a passion, its a vocation, its not a career, it's not something you can get a qualification in and then apply for a job. Writing is a way of life. To make a living from this would be amazing, but writers should not kid themselves any longer that money will be a reward for what they do. I believe writers should treat money as an afterthought, a surprise when it occurs, a miracle when they can support their life upon that same money. Saying that, I do believe more writers will make a living when they're freed from the corporations and publisher's teets. I believe that audiences aren't just consumers and when they're treated as equal in the creative relationship they will repay this with loyalty and possibly monetary rewards (although there are hundreds of ways to pay for a work, you could simply spread the name of the author around and that would be payment enough).
The question of who will read and how do we choose are interesting. Like everything, word of mouth is prime, especially within the social media rich internet. Some writers (as in traditional publishing) will gain an audience on the back of a gimmick or a timely idea -- Jane Austen & Zombies, and the Badalcacci debut novel come to mind. Some will have buzz created for them or a transferred buzz, as in traditional publishing - any kind of tie-in with a movie/video game/shared world. And others will have to work hard to gain their audience and keep them, whether they make money or not. Choice, well that's up to you and won't change much from now to then. You'll make decisions with the new model as you did with the old; individual taste, reccomendations, reviews, reading the work, interests etc. Only with the new model you'll be experience a lot of culture freely in the first instance, and payment will be your own choice afterward. You, as the audience, will gauge the worth of a cultural artifact, if any. (Christ, I wish I could have done that with the last four Stephen King novels).