Game Over, Man...

I know I've been something of a doomsayer on some of my other posts, but what can I say? I think publishing's in a lot of trouble, both on a trad level and (of course) on an indie level. A confluence of circumstances has produced a very writer-unfavorable environment, including:

1) Way, way too many indie writers out there flooding the market with works, to the detriment of everyone else (including, weirdly enough, themselves).

2) Trad writers unable to make ends meet because of various circumstances, including publishing houses lowering their already-low advances and the fact that only 30% of trad-published writers earn royalties.

3) Decline of written fiction as a primary cultural medium -- basically, a host of other forms of more readily-accessible entertainment is impacting readership.

4) Disappearance of paying publishing venues, whether magazines, journals, or publishing houses.

5) The end of the Baby Boomers. I know a lot has been made of Millennials and Zoomers reading more than the oldsters, but those groups also have way more entertainment options than the Boomers did at their age. All of the giants of the writing world are Boomers (King, Roberts, Grisham, Patterson, Steele, etc.) -- they rose at a time when Boomers actively supported novels. When the Boomers are finally gone, no writers will have the stature and cultural cachet to sustain the way those others did. They will be niche writers, versus blockbuster writers.

6) Less disposable income among the 99%. Basically, more and more people are forced by things like wage stagnation to live hand-to-mouth, which makes a book purchase feel like a needless extravagance. And, especially in the US, attacks on the public sector put libraries on more precarious footing, so there's that, too.

I think we're going to see in the next five or more years a serious realignment of the publishing world -- the glut of indie writers of the past decade is going to wither away as more and more of them find fewer and fewer places to get stories published, and even if they're self-publishing, they're just going to find it harder to garner readers who already have tons of choices.

Will some still carry on? Sure, but most are going to wash out. And those who survive the flood-n-famine are going to find that more people are simply reading (and, most importantly from the professional writer perspective, buying) fewer books.

There was a time when short stories, novellas, and novels could inspire movies and television shows. Nowadays, it's video games and comic books. Why is that, do you think? It's because games and comics have large and dedicated audiences, far more than there ever were for literary magazines or even genre magazines. Production companies go where the audience is, and that dedicated audience is with gaming and comic books.

I think we'll increasingly see a time when books are simply accessories to other marketing efforts. For example, a celebrity will churn out a book, and it'll sell simply because it was released by a celebrity. Or a book might come out that'll complement some show or movie, instead of being the initial inspiration for it. And so on. Think of those Warhammer books, for one example among many.

There was a time when books were primary cultural vehicles for society, but that time is fading rapidly, even in areas like Young Adult, which, at least for a while, enjoyed a steady stream of interest and support for those formulaic sorts of stories. But when's the last time we saw a major YA franchise like that impact society at large the way they used to.

Writers are going to go the way of jazz afficionados, basically -- living fossils of a niche form of entertainment that has seen better days.

And the publishing industry will continue to contract, which means fewer opportunities will arise for writers at all, and even the stubbornly self-published will find fewer willing readers for their work.

At least for fiction, what we'll see among writers are celebrities and other 1% elites putting out accessory books, a sliver of professional writers actually able to make it, somehow, a few literary fanatics like myself who'll keep at it regardless, and a horde of wannabes who'll churn out junk that vanishes almost as quickly as it was made before they give up. That horde, incidentally, will likely thin out as fewer and fewer people put writing as central to their being.

Then, publishing will go back to being what it was -- a boutique industry where the privileged are free to express themselves in a quaint format that hearkens back to another era.

It's a grim time to be a writer these days, sadly.