Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
There's a lot of truth to that, and in much of the rest of your post. However, on this one I'd have to disagree somewhat...
For midlist genre writers, this is a really challenging time to be a writer. It has grown significantly harder in the last 10 years to make any decent money with traditional publishers, and in the last 5 years, it's gotten harder even to get a book out in paperback, much less distributed properly. Ebooks are not yet bringing in very much money, on the whole. I know a lot of people who have gone back to their day jobs, or stopped writing fiction altogether.
On the other hand, the new models of publishing may change everything. But most people I know are struggling to find the best way to adapt to the changes. I'm very glad I now have most of my backlist out in ebook form.
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Perhaps I am looking forward too quickly - I am thinking of things going on _this year_ as a reversal of what has been happening - and specifically with ebooks and Amazon.
Also, I may be comparing from a much earlier perspective - I went to Clarion in 1982. All my mentors were people who had come up in the sixties and seventies. I watched the careers of a lot of successful friends completely die through the eighties and early nineties. To me, it feels like this last decade (specifically because of Amazon's efforts to bring small press and used books into it's model, and now Kindle) has a been an improvement in sf. For mystery, though (which is my genre) it still like it was for sf in the nineties. Barnes and Noble is still using the genre as a place to churn new authors.
So I guess what I'm saying is that all this stuff people have been bemoaning as the end of publishing and bad for authors is a very good thing for the almost dead midlist.
Camille