Evolve or die. That sounds harsh, but that is the reality of the publishing world right now.
Authors cannot afford any longer to be disconnected from their marketing, their brand, and what channels their work is in. The days of the author in their ivory tower are over—if they ever in fact existed.
What prompted this particular maudlin observation was this story from the Guardian newspaper, titled ominously From Bestseller to Bust: Is this the End of an Authors Life?
Chilling isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you want to curl up, turn away from your dream, and find something else to do with your life? If you are just starting out, doesn’t it just make you want to give up before you’ve even begun? Well I hope it doesn’t.
This article is about authors who are living in the past. It is as much a relic as a story of a nineteenth century novelist. Now that may also sound harsh, but it is also the way of the world. Evolution is happening all around us—even big publishing at long last is realizing that.
Some authors do not.
This story is from Britain, and I had it suggested on Facebook that that somehow the British culture is different as far as writing and the appreciation of writing is. I’m not sure if that is true, or maybe it is a product of the literary genre, which these authors mentioned in the article all seem to be.
All I know is that I find it hard to feel very sorry for an author whose major complaint is that he can no longer afford office space in London, and has been forced to convert his attic to a writing spot. My writing spot is at the kitchen table or on the couch.
For all this apparently is blamed the credit crunch (I can believe that one at least a little) and the internet (now hold on a minute!)
However, I do have some sympathy for authors who only get paid twice a year, which is how large publishing pays, but there are other ways that the internet opens up publishing. Far from being the reason that the authoring lifestyle is dying, it could be its salvation if only people cared to look around a little.
The thing is, authors these days have to be flexible. They have to be entrepreneurial. They have to keep their eyes open for new opportunities and markets, and for some people these things aren’t something that they are willing to do.
For those people, yes there will be losses, there will be changes, and maybe they won’t be able to make their living out of being writers as they once were able to.
It actually makes me rather sad. Just today I signed on with a new venture, Scribl, where the creators are working with the idea of crowdpricing. There are sites like glossi, where you can create an online-magazine to advertise your book.
All of these new ways of doing things I find exciting, and I think it is so sad when the writer Rupert Thomson mentioned in the Guardian article says “I can’t really imagine a life where I’m not writing. I’ve got this ludicrous faith that I’ll be able to go on as I am now. That’s all I want.”
It’s sad because if he wants it to go on, he has to change, but you can read it in the article he doesn’t want to. For those people I really don’t see much of a bright future. Let’s hope not all of us are quite so inflexible.