La Bene Vita

On Writing

Twenty years ago, I read a lot of fiction. I borrowed so many books from the library each week that they gave me a tote bag.

We had no Internet, texting, or even cell phones.

Today, I read blogs and the news, and it's often shocking and engaging enough to keep me enthralled for hours... much like some of the better works of fiction from my teenage years. I try to read fiction, but I have so little time. And I have to wonder how the book industry is doing. A girl who used to read 10-20 books per week now reads 2-3 books per year. Today's teenagers are too busy on Facebook and their gaming systems to read. Libraries are threatening to downsize or close in the face of failing levies. And, to make matters worse, the printed publication industry is diluted by ease of author submission, distribution (Amazon, anyone?), and access to editor names and addresses, which used to be only available via limited published lists and literary agents.

With no disrespect intended to any of the published authors at WDC, a lot of junk has been published. It's too easy to get published these days. And, as many published authors know, it's too hard to market your works. How many of our published authors actually earn a living off of their printed publications?

Printed publication has lost some of its meaning. The e-reader was surprisingly long in coming, but I believe that's because the hardcore readers among our population resisted. The printed word was such a miraculous human advance. How can we belittle that by replacing it with 1's and 0's that appear, fleetingly to the human eye, as print? The words on my Kindle vanish after maybe ten minutes of inactivity. How will the archeologists who dig up my remains - or, in a more likely scenario, the remains of those who, up until two weeks ago, lived in the northeastern villages of Japan - know what we were reading?

I guess I wonder why people even bother to be authors anymore. We are all hanging on to some ideal of what a successful author should be - published by one of the big houses, on the NYT Bestseller list - but I wonder how much that even means anymore. I haven't done the research. Have any of you? How is the industry doing? Are the big houses hurting? Are we still marketing and selling the printed word like we used to? Or has the market share been snagged up by Facebook, Yahoo, the TV networks, and all of the other forms of human communication that dilute the industry?