Garrison Keillor Says The Publishing Industry is Cooked

[Jack Getze]

Well-written, fun piece about going to a swanky industry party in Tribeca; feeling the end.

"I ran into my daughter's favorite author, Mary Pope Osborne, in New York the other night, whose Magic Tree House books I've read to the child at night, and a moment later, Scott Turow, who writes legal thrillers that keep people awake all night, and David Remnick, the biographer of Obama.

Bang bang bang, one heavyweight after another. Erica Jong, Jeffrey Toobin, Judy Blume. It was a rooftop party in Tribeca that I got invited to via a well-connected pal, wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses, standing, white wine in hand, looking out across the Hudson at the lights of Hoboken and Jersey City, eating shrimp and scallops and spanikopita on toothpicks, all talking at once the way New Yorkers do."

[Jon Loomis]

Well, the movie business is profoundly changed since the advent of TV, and live theater is profoundly changed since the advent of movies. There's also the demise of Vaudeville as a point of comparison, and the demise of radio as a performance medium. We could also discuss the end of the recording industry as we know it, and the imminent collapse of the newspaper and magazine publishing industries. I wish I shared your optimism, John--but it's not easy if you look at the numbers: book publishing is in decline, and in fact its demographic is graying. Something will take its place, but my guess is that the era of the professional writer is on the way out.

[John McFetridge]

The professional novelist, writing prose stories of 80,000 words or more may become a similar profession to poet.

But if you looked at the sales numbers for graphic novels and even video games -- and they need a kind of professional writer -- things change.

And I do think that e-books will evolve into something different than simply books on e-readers. The same way cable opened up TV to new kinds of shows - shows that couldn't have been movies or network shows - e-books will open up a new kind of storytelling that will still need writers.

[Jon Loomis]

Guess I'd better hang on to my teaching job, then.

[John McFetridge]

Oh, that's always good advice for writers. I think every writer Canada has ever produced has also been a teacher. The lucky few get to retire early.

It makes sense that writers would have another career. So few people have anything to say until they're in their forties...

[I. J. Parker]

Well, the big problem with that vision (and I don't disagree that it may become very real) is that viewers focus on a few types of shows and then the entire spectrum is inundated with the same sort of thing. See reality shows and talent competitions and game shows and soaps and young people engaging in ever new couplings among themselves. That ends up being a real wasteland for a thinking person.
Some people react by no longer watching. Some readers may react by no longer reading.

[Dana King]

We worry too much about reader demographics. Readers in general--and fiction readers specifically--are always going to be a little older. My daughter is a good example. She loves to read, but, as a college sophomore, her discretionary reading time is limited. She'll get out of school, start a job, and have a family, and her discretionary reading time won't improve appreciably. (Her disposable income probably won't kick any ass, either.) What she does read will likely be things she can continue to learn from factually: work-related, or other non-fiction.

Eventually she'll have an established career and the kids won't require her constant attention. Then she'll have the time--and resources--to read what she wants to read, but she'll look a lot more like the folks we see at Bouchercon than she does now.

The extinction of the reader base is the least of a writer's problems.

[John McFetridge]

Here are a bunch of responses:

http://flavorwire.com/94044/publishings-not-dead-the-industry-respo...

[Jack Getze]

I watched a sports show the other night, and was shocked to learn the results of a nationwide poll the network had done. The poll asked men over 30 if they thought they had the natural talent to play major league baseball -- that is, if they'd gotten the extra training, hadn't busted that knee, taught themselves to hit a curve ball, etc., could they have made it in the majors. More than 50% said yes.

Maybe some of us 18 million writers are fostering the same delusions.

[Jon Loomis]

Exactly, Thomas. Meanwhile, don't quit your day job.

[Dave Zeltserman]

In my own case I went through several stages. At first I wrote for the sake of writing and to see if I could write a story that I thought was any good. Then at some point I started writing to see if I could be published. After that it was to make a living at it. While I still enjoy the actual writing part of it where I find I can lose myself when I'm writing, the business side of things can wear you down. So would I keep writing if there was no chance of making a living at it? No, not anymore, and I'm guessing a lot of professional writers feel the same way. In some ways it would be a relief to have that damn door slammed shut, but it's still opened enough to keep me doing this.

[Dave Zeltserman]

Of course they do. You don't think Donald Westlake or Lawrence Block or many other pro writers didn't go into this expecting to make writing their career? Most pro writers I know go into this for exactly that reason.

With me it was a slower process before it got to the point where it looked like I would be able to make a living in this racket (And where I started believing I'd be able to). I still need things to break right--the damn movie deal to go from development to production, for example, or some more foreign rights deals. But if at this point if none of this worked out, I could leave this at least satisfied that I had my 10 or so books published.

[Jon Loomis]

I went into genre with the intention of making at least some money, and maybe even lucking out and hitting the home-run we all fantasize about. Now obviously I went about it all wrong--my books probably don't really have mass-market potential, as noted below, despite great reviews--but even so the "some money" part seems to be happening in increments, at least, and the home-run is still possible, to the extent that it ever was. As Dave says, if they make the film, you're good to go. I could do it full-time if there was a way to write two books a year, on average--but hey, I'm not a frickin' prose machine. Yet some people manage it, and more power to 'em. If none of that were a possibility--if there were no more advances, no royalties, no agent to handle the business end for me, no editor to help shape the manuscripts, etc.--I doubt that I'd continue to write long-form prose in any genre. I'd shift my writing focus back to poetry, most likely--first loves and all that.