The Flood & The Drought

I think we're (writers) in a weird place that's only going to get weirder. I've written about it in other posts, but I'll try to articulate it clearly here:

There are a flood of writers out there (and let's be honest, the majority of them suck, some of them are good, very few are excellent), and there's likely never been a time when readers have had more choice of what to read than they do now.

Which is precisely part of the problem -- supply vastly exceeds actual demand. A flood of writers, a veritable tsunami, leading to a demand drought.

As a result, what venues remain are submission-swamped, which means acceptance rates are dropping (and I'm only counting human writers, here; not AI word pimps).

There was an "indie boom" over the last decade, but it's leading to an indie crash, as I see it. A flood of junk writing has glutted the marketplace.

A tiny fraction of fortunate souls cross over to trad, but that's absolutely no guarantee of anything -- trad's in as bad a predicament as indie is; it just has the benefit of more available capital and favorable distribution networks.

I'm seeing more writers finding it harder to sell their stories, and plenty taking refuge in anthologies and longer works, in hopes of there being less intense competition at that level. But the net result remains the market buckling and cratering for writers. Too many writers are competing for too few readers.

I think we're going to see a literary "Dust Bowl" emerge in the next five years or so, as hapless writers (most of whom likely only had a few stories in them to begin with) wash out in the drought. I'm willfully mixing my metaphors, here, because it really is both a flood and a drought -- a deluge of writerly demand for publication with a drought of reader demand and/or publishing venues.

The capacity to cultivate an audience, always a hefty lift, is the only way for a writer to have a hope of succeeding in the torrent of content out there. However, in a terribly crowded field, it's harder than ever to get noticed, especially without advocates (and even those might not be enough).

I did a tally of remaining books for me to do, and I've got ~45 books to-be-written, with around 30% aimed for a trad market, and 70% for indie. At my current rate of speed, that's about four books a year for me over the next ten years.

We'll see how things are in five years, but I'm thinking there'll be far fewer writers writing then than there are now, at least for anything more than simply a hobby or a form of psychological validation. More and more will see that barren landscape and ask themselves "Why the hell am I doing this?"