Is it harder to get published than it used to be?

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Thu, 2006-04-06 22:59

I've been thinking for a while that there must be a much greater supply of writing - due to increased leisure time and excess wealth among more people - than there used to be, say, a hundred years ago, while the demand (i.e. the size of the market) has not increased proportionately. This has to make the competition to get published stiffer than it has ever been.

It's also harder to do anything startlingly original I suspect - as in any artform that has been flogged to death over the course of the twentieth century.

And it also doesn't help either that the publishers and bookshops mercilessly flog a few chosen bestsellers and rarely encourage people to be more adventurous - but then the greed of big business is a given in any industry these days.

I admit I've mostly thought this in a slightly pathetic 'oh poor me' way, but I was wondering if anyone else had thought it too.

Sun, 2006-04-09 16:23

prou

People spend their entertainment dollar elsewhere, so the financial rewards of writing/publishing serious fiction aren't there. Journals that publish literary fiction survive (if they do survive) on endowments and grants. They pay their authors in copies. Even ditchdiggers get paid in cash. As a result of the above, getting published has become a game of playing angles -- such as what prestigious creative writing program have you attended, what influential person can give you an inside track. Etc. And "writers"? They seem to care about jaffa cakes. (See my" What Do Writers Want?")

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