"Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?"
... asks Canadian sf writer Robert J. Sawyer. Unsurprisingly, if gloomily, he concludes the answer is "yes".
In this, at least, I am ahead of the game, never having been a full-time novelist to begin with. Sawyer concludes:
Maybe we will all indeed still be smiling as writing sf shifts from a career to a hobby. Still, lengthy, ambitious, complex works — works that take years of full-time effort to produce — aren’t things that could have been produced in any kind of reasonable time by squeezing in an hour’s writing each day over one’s lunch break while working a nine-to-five job.
I'm not sure that I'd go so far, but such a model suggests that publishers' appetites for the "one book each year" series may be on the wane. Maybe it's not all bad news.
5 comments:
Provocative post from Mr Sawyer. But I was interested in the comment from one Moses Siregar III:
"Robert, I think there will be more SF/F novelists making a living then, compared to today.
1. The number of traditionally published authors able to make a _really decent_ living probably won’t go down significantly in ten years. I think the field will shrink, but the real successes won’t go down greatly.
2. The ease of ebooks is already leading people to read more. This should continue.
3. The major difference: Many more authors will be able to make a decent living off of independent releases. Even today, it’s 70+% royalties on ebooks.
#3 is what will open up a whole new ballgame; it’s barely happening now, but in ten years it will probably be fairly common.
Backlist and consistency will still be key, but writers have so many options available to them now."
Hmm.
I won't be giving up my day job on the basis of Moses Siregar III's views...
I have been thinking about this post, Tim, and have decided that I would really hate to be a full-time novelist. I simply cannot sit down for a set amount of time each day and write; it doesn't work that way for me. I have huge admiration, though, for those who do it, even if their days are numbered (?).
I wonder if the days are numbered or if Mr. Sawyer's simply becoming aware of the reality that full-time novelists have long been a minority among the published community?
It's a hard goal to reach, but it's still what I'm shooting for.
(Given, as I've mentioned before -- I think on your blog, in fact -- that I would really prefer to be a staff story writer on early/mid 20th century pulp rag.)
"(Given, as I've mentioned before -- I think on your blog, in fact -- that I would really prefer to be a staff story writer on early/mid 20th century pulp rag.)"
I think I could get used to that too, Nevets...
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