"My older sister’s reply the last time I asked her about books: 'I just read Facebook now.' Most books don’t succeed either in terms of sales or critical unanimity. Most writers don’t earn a living wage from their writing. Tenure-track appointments (I teach college writing) are rare as unicorns. But being a writer is not a sentence handed down, it’s a choice I’ve made. I love other writers and do not want to root against them (some of my closest friends, et cetera), but there’s a desperation inherent in the state of publishing that sometimes makes this difficult...."
From "The Unbearable Envy of the Published Author" by Lynn Steger Strong (NYT).
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Pratchett had his unfinished works destroyed after his death, as he wished, by having his computers and hard drives placed in the middle of a road, then crushed by an antique steam roller. Now there was a writer!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/30/terry-pratchett-unfinished-novels-destroyed-streamroller
Eh, that's painful. Maybe she can review books or something.
Publishing nowadays is all about New Voices, minorities, trans, YA fanfic scifi fantasy...anything but literary fiction. No white guys need apply. Or white women for that matter.
I'm out.
Again (as I did with the recent Murakami post), I disagree.
I'm a published author because I self-published. I sell a book every quarter or so on Amazon. I would like people to read me, but I write because I must. Writing is its own ends. If you don't enjoy spending time with your own thoughts, and are instead looking for others to admire your wit, I don't think you've gotten to the depths of your creative impulse.
And I would never describe my writing desire as monstrous. Lighten up, Francis.
"Writers, or at least most of us, are specific types of monsters."
Nothing monstrous in this piece. But some writers are monsters in their callous exploitation of the lives of family and friends. Hence the necessary addition, for either sex (is that still PC?), of writer to the hot/crazy matrix.
The vitality of viability of the semantic fragment.
Literature is aborted with a Tweet, a twitter, a rap, and fossilized brayers. Hee, haw.
Most college-credentialed writers and liberal art professors long for an end to capitalism so they are getting what they want.
"In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship."
Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
I wonder if she read Kevin's books?
At least this was an essay in which she owns up to her feelings of insecurity (as we all have to face) and figures out a solution. That's positive.
I contrast that with an essay in BookPage my wife found whiny and priviledged. It's about this woman writer with reservoirs of anger seeking an outlet, and being annoyed about:
* Making up stories with her children, they suggest killing off the mother;
* Not making enough money in traditional publishing
* Reading about women artists, going to NYC museums, and seeing so few of their works on the walls.
Plot twist: They're by the same woman.
Novelists have been dethroned. So have other traditionally prestigious literary roles. Maybe it's like painting having to make room for other ways of "art." Maybe it goes even further. The future of writing will be very different.
Writing is an expensive hobby, not a career.
The written word is dying and we're all getting dumber as a result.
Hey let's cheer up and watch some TikTok! Yeah!
I, always one with the trends, am a dead tree book fanatic with a large and well managed home library but in my sadder moments I allow myself to think about what will happen to them when I'm gone.
I follow a large group about cheap meals on Facebook and when people ask for, say, Depression era recommendations it's all YouTube channels. No cookbooks. "Follow so and so on YouTube her channel is great!" Video is great for some things and heinous for many others and constant video watching erodes a person's brain. Read people who write about classical education for more on this. Written words are crucial to intelligence.
Why didn't the Republicans do as well as they wanted to? Let's ask a newspaper columnist for a paper who obviously despises Republicans!
The smart - and realistic thing - is to support DeSantis. Much better judgement and no baggage.
Naah. The minute DeSantis becomes the face of the GOP, the media will attack him as hard as they did Trump -- harder, actually, because Trump is entertaining and know how to fight back. DeSantis, I'm not so sure.
It's all about the topics. Henry Rogers had no trouble finding a publisher for his racist screeds. Changing his name to "Ibram X Kendi" probably helped.
Neal Stephenson is doing ok. But he has a talent stack. Another, totally different, but also my favorite, David Foster Wallace didn’t end well. But not because he wasn’t being published. As far as I know.
"Writers, or at least most of us, are specific types of monsters. We have the hubris to think we have something to say, that someone might read our work...."
Not viable. Monsters? Wicked. Publishing peeves (PP) with the sclerotic handmaidens of our times.
Take heart. Moby Dick was a commercial and critical bust during Melville’s lifetime.
If you want to get your work published then publish it yourself. Time might take note.
If you want a publisher, then you have to write something with commercial appeal (based on publisher’s judgment, which is often wrong).
As Raymond Chandler said of his Philip Marlowe books, I could have made them more literary but then they would never have been published.
If you want people to read your stuff, try to find a writing style and topics/stories that satisfy that small, perhaps non-existent zone of creative satisfaction and commercial appeal.
I clicked through to her new novel, Flight. Plot is 3 families gathering for Xmas after their mother's death. Yikes. Hits close to home. Will have to buy.
I published my book, myself, on Amazon. I advertise to the people I think might want to read it. What do publishers do these days anyhow?
i don't Understand? What does she mean; by 'books'? does she mean graphic novels?
stephenson just has been indulged too much by his editors, his time travel and magic tale was ok, but the last two were tedious,
"In the precapitalistic ages writing was an unremunerative art. Blacksmiths and shoemakers could make a living, but authors could not. Writing was a liberal art, a hobby, but not a profession. It was a noble pursuit of wealthy people, of kings, grandees and statesmen, of patricians and other gentlemen of independent means. It was practiced in spare time by bishops and monks, university teachers and soldiers. The penniless man whom an irresistible impulse prompted to write had first to secure some source of revenue other than authorship."
Mises, Ludwig von (1956). The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality
This is still largely true. Most writers of books do not make a living from their incomes generated by their books, but must work at jobs, (often teaching).
I don't read as many books as I used to. But there's more good stuff on TV, so it all evens out!
i don't Understand? What does she mean; by 'books'? does she mean graphic novels?
Handmade tales full of lust, regret, fury, envy, and guile published in trimesters, nevermore.
The unbearable burden of the consecrated knee taken in undignified deference to his harried sanction.
there's more good stuff on TV
Textual Vibrancy (TV) from sunrise to sunset, snacks, and subliminal braying. You, sir, madam, or self-identified, are a publisher's treat.
Writers were important people when television and the movies didn’t exist, just like everybody used to know several card games and most people enjoyed playing them with their friends, before smartphones.
And you could always get a gig as a writer in the Middle Ages if you were good at flattery and could find a patron, or you were happy to write potboilers, which in those days were chivalry type stories of knights errant and the like. Spanish conquistadors loved that brand of fiction so much that they named California after a mythical land in one of those novels.
Of course there is always a “genius” exception for the Chaucers and the like, but even Chaucer bowed somewhat to public tastes.
The Book of My Enemy has Been Remaindered by Clive James
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised efforts sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upone one’s enemy’s book –
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
The rest of the poem is at https://www.clivejames.com/the-book-of-my-enemy-has-been-remaindered.html
I am part of the problem because I don’t like anything written in the past decade or more, and prefer printed books. Right now I am reading on written in (checks copyright page) 1936 called Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts and I “can’t put it down” but there is no way it could have been published today.
I just don’t like being preached to and any new fiction seems to be about preaching.
Maybe Elon Musk will publish them for $8 a month!
Books are much less important because the power elite can push liberal/left propaganda through the internet and movies/TV. You don't need "The population bomb" or "The color purple". Just keep pumping out the NYT/Wapo and Hollywood movies and TV. Watching "the view" or CNN accomplishes the same purpose.
I've noticed a slew of hate trump books at local library (The library buys 12-20 everytime), for the last 6 years. Yet, most go unread. Talked to librarian he confirmed it. Trump haters don't need to read a book to hate trump. And Trump supporters won't read them.
Nobody reads any more. Historians hardest hit.
When did writers come to think of themselves as freaks and depraved misfits, rather than as blessed seers and unacknowledged legislators of the world. That's been going around since the romantics, but it really took off when television came in and books became less important. We also started mass producing writers in workshop classes and creative writing programs, so the attitude became widespread. If you're a lone writer in a garret you may convince yourself that you are a solitary, towering genius, but if you're in a whole class of writers and barely squeaked through to a degree, you probably know that you aren't, and that you also aren't going to fit into any other career very well. That idea circulates among writing teachers and they marinate in a sense of their own marginality.
She obviously needs a nom de plume like Asawin Subsaeng or Sohrab Ahmari, since those are the kinds of bylines that are being published. Most book publishers are just as woke as newspaper publishers. If you have a legacy-American sort of name, you probably need not apply. Or maybe the people from elsewhere in the world just will work cheaper.
If I could do it I would write romance novels. I think you can make money doing that. There's a woman author right now, Colleen Hoover making a killing in the YA romance genre.
You really want to help struggling writers? Join KU and then find authors who are decent and getting better and read their KU offerings. Some of it is really good. Some of it is drivel. But Amazon takes all the KU subscription fees and divided it up among the KU contributors based on page views. It is the best way I can think of to pay new writers something while they hone their craft.
I've written two non-fiction books. One is a history of medicine for medical students. I self published it in 1995. It has sold 20,000 copies and is till selling on Amazon, not a lot but some copies.
I wrote a memoir that is on Kindle only and it is still selling after 7 years. Both have good reviews and I get pocket change every month.
I had to write for work, and had every opportunity and encouragement (except release from administrivia) to do so, but I don't really like writing. Not long form, so my contributions were articles or encyclopedia entries mostly.
Samuel Johnson thought that no-one but a blockhead wrote for anything but money. YMMV.
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