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Originally Posted by Lemurion
I disagree. Canadian writers can make a living, and quite a few of them do. However, they tend to sell to the same New York publishers as American writers do. The ones who go for grants tend to be writing literary rather than commercial fiction and sending it to Canadian publishers. That's a very small market. The majority of the Canadian market (which is about 10% the size of the US market -- in line with the population) is served by the same US publishers as the US market. There's a reason that I can buy exactly the same book in the US as I can in Canada, and that the Canadian price is printed on a book I bought in Virginia.
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The Canadain writers I'm aware of who can make a living as writers without requiring government grants all do so selling outside of Canada.
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Don't tar all Canadian writers with the CanLit brush. Many of them (Robert Sawyer and Dave Duncan for example) have no problem making a living from book sales.
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I'm not. But Rob Sawyer and Dave Duncan are exceptions. How many Canadian writers have achieved success outside of Canada? The point was simply that the Canadian market is probably too small to make a living selling only to it.
(And Sawyer had an, um, "interesting" tenure as President of SFWA, largely because his Canadian experience and consequent motivations didn't map well to US writer's concerns. AFAIK, he still gets Canadian gov't grants, and qualifying for the highest level is part of his goals. I can't blame him, and I'd likely do the same, but the environment he lives and writes in is rather different from the one here.)
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Dennis