Brendan Cody’s Blog

A Writer’s Life for Me?

More and more I’m considering that writing is best as a hobby than a career. Rats in the Slushpile makes a convincing argument based on the fickleness and random nature of the publishing industry, but (as if that weren’t enough) I came across the TIME magazine article How Writers Live. It paints a realistic picture of what awaits the majority of writers. Here’s my salient & sobering synopsis:

1. The number of books published per year has doubled in the last 100 years. Fewer than half now sell more than 5000 copies.
2. Author royalties are dropping, from 20% a decade ago to an average of 12% now
3. Advances are smaller than a decade ago (average $1500)
4. As a result of all this, the number of part-time authors who want to create, but don’t want an impoverished existence (like myself) is on the increase.
5. As a result of that the average length of time to produce a novel has moved from one year to three years.

All in all, it sounds to me like there is a shift occurring in the publishing industry. The shifting strategy adopted by the publishing industry seems to be to sign-up many authors quickly for as little as possible and drop them just as quickly when they yield no profit, and to adopt ghost writers to pen to order cookie cutter clones of marketable fiction or celebrity non-fiction. Could it be that this strategy is inducing a shift in strategy by authors too, authors who are no longer content to create for such dubious rewards, but rather choose to empower themselves with the new tools of the internet and a flexible part-time writing lifestyle?

Could it be that the publishing industry is killing the golden goose? Or perhaps publishers are simply taking the steps necessary to ensure their survival in a global, competitive environment. On the face of it, it could be claimed that this is leading to a suffocation of human artistic endeavor, but upon closer examination, I think that it is a positive thing because it is leading to a profusion of cottage industry type publishing.

A diversity of many creative voices, which would otherwise be stifled by commercial homogeneity, can only be a good thing for our future.

Add comment July 9th, 2008

New Toy! (I mean, Ultra Mobile PC)

So my laptop has been acting up for a while. I’ve had at least 3 boot attempts everytime I want to start it up and lately I’ve been getting disk errors too (*shudders*).

I bought it more for its multimedia capabilities and for a bit of programming. Now, when looking for a replacement, I realised I just wanted something for writing on the move and a bit of net surfing, i.e. really portable, lightweight, with no annoying loud fan noises or hard disk clicks this time.

So in searching, I came across the Asus Eee PC 900. It’s really nice. In size, it’s footprint is just a bit larger than a DVD cover - that’ll tell you how portable this thing is. It has a nice lightweight linux installation on it that is both easy to use and highly functional. OpenOffice comes pre-installed for the ‘ol writing. It has a silent solid state disk instead of a winchester hard disk, so can a few knocks without risk of damaging the disk. SSD disk capacities are still fairly small, but a novel doesn’t take much disk space (in fact, I’ve always found it a bit depressing that it takes so much work just to produce about 1 Mb of data!) The screen is large enough to view pages of text or web pages full width. I think kids and students are the main target for it, but I can see why it has so many ‘bigger’ fans too! Some of the more powerful UMPCs are very expensive.

The keyboard has a small footprint, so it takes a bit of getting used to and I needed to slow down my typing speed for a couple of days until I got accustomed to the keys sizes and placement. It will probably need a new larger capacity battery because the one that ships with it will only last less than two hours on a charge.

But overall I’m very impressed with what you can get for 300 euro now. Blink these days and the technology leaps another step.

Add comment July 4th, 2008