Quote:
Originally Posted by Dellaster
SF authors are no longer competing for reading time against just their active and/or popular reprinted peers. There is a tremendous amount of very good, previously-published mid-list SF(&F) from years or decades ago by dead or currently inactive writers that disappeared and is now reappearing. There's an awful lot of excellent stuff I missed in the 80s and 90s that I can now read. That leaves a correspondingly smaller amount of time to read new SF.
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That's a good point. Also, the ready availability of used books online has cut seriously into the reprint market. Fewer and fewer o.p. books get a second chance these days. Of course, that same availability also helps bring new readers to an author, so it's a two-edged sword. You get new readers but no income--in the short term, anyway.