Informative if somewhat depressing background piece on the publishing world in flux:
From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author's life?
(The Guardian)
The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation. Robert McCrum talks to award-winning authors who are struggling to make ends meet.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/02/bestseller-novel-to-bust-author-life
Inasmuch as this site is an effort to look for solutions to problems of the sort, I thought the article worth linking here. The question behind this site: How can good writers put their tales before the public, with a good shot at making more than coffee money?
Of course storytelling, the second oldest profession, is not going to die out, but it will need to adapt to a new and bizarre cultural landscape, where copyrights are not respected because 'information should be free,' where book publishing is turning into a legacy technology and, due to unrelated developments, people are not spending as freely as they did on luxuries like books.
Information, perhaps, should be free, but groceries are not, and that is the fork the writers are caught in. Anybody still unclear on why "may you live in interesting times" is a curse in Chinese?
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