[LINK] "A Journeyman's View"

[rfmcdonald]

Andrew Barton's perspective on the proliferation of writers whose work is cheaply available online is pretty much my own. Pretty much; I can't imagine writing being a job capable of supporting me anyway, and see blogging here and elsewhere as being as much about creative fulfillment as anything else. This is what happens when you've mass literacy in a society and an economy allowing people to produce and exchange large volumes of narrative very inexpensively.

Once upon a time, it was well within the realms of possibility - even probability - for a writer to make a living off their work. Back before the Second World War, when the pulps were one of the largest sources of popular entertainment there was, there was always a demand for short stories and novelettes to fill their pages - and while contributors may only have been a cent per word, that works out to $50 for a 5000-word story. May not sound like much, but that's $50 in 1939 dollars, which translates to $764.19 in 2009 dollars. A sufficiently driven writer able to burn enough typewriter ribbons could manage to live on that sort of pay.

The writer's market is a different place today. Sure, there are still markets for short stories, but unless you're selling one every other day you're going to have difficulty living off them - and the market isn't big enough to support that kind of glut anyway. Professional authors haven't lived off shorts for decades; it's all about novels now. So it's not that surprising that some people are starting to get worried about the impact of digital piracy on the livelihoods of authors.

The Globe and Mail carried an article dealing with this the other day, asking whether piracy and electronic publishing might be a one-two punch that could knock out mid-list authors. Personally, I think that's bunk. There will always be authors as long as people read for pleasure - I'm more concerned about the impact that AI writing software may have on the world of authorship in the years ahead, but fortunately for wordsmiths we're not quite at that point yet. But there are plenty of people who don't agree.

[. . .]

This... I can't get behind this. People, the sort of people who read at least, are not complete idiots. People can tell when what they're reading is poor, when what they're reading is crap. They'll respond by not reading it any more. Sure, in a large enough sample size you'll likely find a few people who like something, but "a few" is not enough support for an author to build a livelihood on. What's more likely, in my mind, is that the amateur explosion will result in a lot of dross from which a small number of worthwhile pieces will emerge. Everyone had to be an amateur at one time; it took twelve years from the time I started actively writing until the day I sold my first story. All we're seeing today is the largest and most transparent slush pile in history

Go, read.