This is an article from the New York Times someone sent me. horrors!

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.xml;jsessionid=3E94DF75AAC61AA632679E57F8FF284B.w6?rec=t

Becca.

I had a year to write two books. Just coming to the end of the second. "2,000 words a day, seven days a week" - well, to be honest it's been more like 2,000 words a day, five days a week, with a more leisurely pace over the weekend, but still trying to add some words, in between whatever stuff needs doing around the house, or with the family.

Because I can't actually afford to live on the advances I have had to take on as much freelance work as I could manage. Which has meant that I left myself about three months to write each book.

Is it worth it? Honestly? I don't think so. I'm coming to the end of the 2nd book, and therefore the contract. I'm not sure what I will do if the publisher wants to renew.

I guess it comes down to self worth?
Writers are accepting the low returns for high effort which... I have mixed feelings on. There is a degree of necessity in getting your work out, but there also needs to be the recognition that it is intended as a source of income. Trouble is, for good or bad, there is so much competition in the form of self-pub for whom the sums and overheads differ, that a realistic price point is nigh on impossible to achieve.
G

well, this is not a very profound thing to say on the subject, but when I read it, first I had an image of little dogs jumping through hoops in a circus ring, and then the pressure increases, as in the article, and so the white-faced clown who owns the dogs decides to set fire to the hoops to make more of a show of it. So now the scared little dogs must repeatedly jump through rings of fire.

That is quite profound, actually, Becca. Because that's pretty much what it feels like. Plus the clown doesn't feed the dogs properly. And complains that he can't make any money because the dogs eat too much.

I'm laughing, but not out aloud.
I had a writer ask if I would vote for his book which was a finalist in a competition this morning, and of course I did because he's a friend of mine, even though I hadn't read the nine other books so couldn't compare anything, because it wasn't about that. It was about which writer could get the most people to vote for him, which is a kind of facebooky thing... who has got the most pretend friends of all in the nursery. For me, this type of fatuous thing fits into the world of that article as well, because although it's childish, it's also damaging.

Some of my all-time favourite books took decades to write. One of my worries with ebooks is the phenomenon of "Never mind the quality - feel the width".

It's the same in the music business - people are expected to bring out a new album every few months or the record companies drop them. And an artist friend tells me the pressure is on in art too.

It's not good for music, its not good for art and its not good for literature. And whilst some musicians, some artists and some writers are naturally prolific in their output, for many, creativity is like a fine whiskey that takes years to mature. I believe Tolkien took 14 years to write 'Lord of the Rings'. How would he have fared in today's market?

well spoken, Anna.

Anna, there's a lot of truth in what you say but I think it also depends on the artist/writer/musician. Some thrive on pressure, or at least it works for them at certain times in their life. A few years ago, for example, I was at a Brian Wilson concert. The second half was going to be Pet Sounds in its entirety. Dave Foskett introduced the set by mentioning that Brian Wilson wrote Pet Sounds at 21, and it was his eleventh album. Okay, there was a fair bit of lightweight stuff on some of those albums, but there were also some of the greatest pop songs ever written, and that's before you even get to Pet Sounds itself.

And yes, there is an awful lot of crap being self-published (and traditionally published). But there always has been a market for the good stuff, for want of a better word. And I believe self-publishing lends itself better to that than trad publishing. There is none of that pressure to produce fast and instant, for a start. You can produce at your own pace, gradually building a catalogue you're proud of. It will exist forever (or until electronic publishing outlets change) and so readers have plenty of time to find it. I'm convinced Tolkien would have self-published Lord of the Rings today. He'd have a fantastically rich website to go with it, and while it might take years for people to discover it, once they did, I reckon he'd be quids in.


<Added>

Much of this, I believe, is to do with a change of thinking that's required in writers. We tend to be wedded to the traditional publishing model, which is mostly geared to coating a book in genre colours then scatterguning it at the world in general, hoping enough copies will stick to make a profit. But the pathfinders in self-publishing realised early on that a more effective model, for the writer, is to build a base of dedicated readers who will buy whatever you write. The guys at the Dragon Page podcast advocated and demonstrated this model for many years, mostly to deaf ears but recently everybody, including some trad publishers, has been knocking at their door for advice. If - and yes it's possibly a big if - you could build a dedicated readership of say 3,000 who would buy say two novels a year and ten short stories from you . . . well, you can do the maths. The problem as such is that a whole new mind-set and approach is needed if this model is going to be pursued.

Terry,
some very interesting points.

I heard a documentary about self-publishing on Radio 4, a while back, and was very impressed at how the industry had changed.

My own history is that at one time, I was trying to break in to magazine journalism. I used to write health and disability related articles, human interest stuff etc. and had a few bits and pieces published.

But then the industry changed (or I grew up) and I realised that in order to make a living out of it, I was going to have to have the sort of output a team of journalists would struggle to achieve. It wasn't so much the word-count as the research - I prided myself on getting my facts right, but there simply wasn't the time, especially since this was largely pre-Internet days.

I started finding editors encouraging me to cut-corners (as I saw it) and wanting particular slants, even if the facts didn't fit. For instance, try as I might, I could not get a story published about parenting if the child in the story had a disability, unless it was about the child being cured.

At that point, I realised it was all about the advertisers, not the readers, let alone about telling the truth, informing the public, or even telling a ripping good yarn. It went against everything I held dear, not to mention the fact that I simply couldn't write that fast (I have a grudging admiration for people who can, still).

The advantage I immediately saw in modern self-publishing is that you can "Publish and be damned". The disadvantage is that you actually have to be fairly talented in marketing, or pay someone a lot of money to do it for you. At which point, you might as well go for traditional publishing.

I'm not anywhere near selling any of my fiction at this stage, so its a moot point for me, but I am very attracted to the idea of not having to justify to some narrow-minded editor why I've written about something 'difficult', without the requisite happy ending. Although of course, if its fiction, the rules are probably just as annoying but in a different way. I'll certainly be looking into it.

NB: I'm not saying all editors are narrow-minded, and I am talking about 20 years ago and I am talking about a particular sector of the industry.

Hi Ada - those are very interesting insights you give into journalism!

The advantage I immediately saw in modern self-publishing is that you can "Publish and be damned". The disadvantage is that you actually have to be fairly talented in marketing, or pay someone a lot of money to do it for you. At which point, you might as well go for traditional publishing.

Except for bestselling authors, publishers these days don't seem to do any publicity as such - it's left entirely to the author. However, they do have the advantage of being able to get your paper books into actual shops, which is a form of marketing in itself - my impression from reading about indie publishing is that at the moment, this is harder to do for indie writers though things seem to be changing.

However, because as an indie author you keep a much bigger proportion of your cover price (70% on Kindle, for example, as opposed to maybe as low as 6% of a trad-pubbed book once you've paid your agent and the cover price has been heavily discounted), you have to sell far fewer books as an indie to make the same amount of money.

Also, you actually get your book published for certain! A book that you can't get trad published, by definition, isn't making you any money.

Anna, agree with most of what you say. A friend of mine is a freelance photographer who sells to national newspapers but they mostly pay peanuts so for him it's more about building a portfolio and reputation than making money direct.

The advantage I immediately saw in modern self-publishing is that you can "Publish and be damned". The disadvantage is that you actually have to be fairly talented in marketing, or pay someone a lot of money to do it for you. At which point, you might as well go for traditional publishing.

This is probably the crux of the matter. I'm still setting up in self-publishing so it's too early to tell if it's going to work for me - work in terms of making any money, that is; it's certainly going to work with regard to me putting out work I'm proud of in the way I want it to appear. I'm hoping that it won't in fact require lots of marketing and promotion. I believe that's more for the trad publishing model, where quick, big and generic sales are the order of the day. I believe that if you put out quality, readers will find it. That's what I've always done, in and around all the commercial crap that gets hyped up in any field of the arts. But I could be wrong! On the other hand, I see friends accepting publishing deals at the moment that really look more like death traps than creative opportunities.

I'm not anywhere near selling any of my fiction at this stage, so its a moot point for me, but I am very attracted to the idea of not having to justify to some narrow-minded editor why I've written about something 'difficult', without the requisite happy ending.

It's not usually the editor that's narrow-minded; it's the acquisitions and sales committees that moderate everything down to the safest sales point. One of the reasons I got fed up with children's publishing was I would put in books that my editor(s) loved but which subsequently got rejected by a committee because some kid straight out of university decided it wasn't 'current' enough or whatever.

You said before that you're writing the kind of book you want to read. Honestly, I think that attitude will eventually work in self-publishing

I read that Ursual K. Le Guin has gone self-pubbed because her publisher asked her to write more like J.K. Rowling!!! Horrible, horrible.

http://kriswrites.com/2012/08/22/the-business-rusch-the-end-of-the-unprofessional-writer/

That is so depressing. Like Joni Mitchell being told to write songs like Rhianna's.