An Open Letter to Any Prospective Writers

A reader just wrote and asked me some advice about breaking into the field. He seemed despondent over comments I had made recently about the state of the Nebula Awards and such. As a public service to any other readers with questions like his but too shy to write me, allow me to share my thoughts on this matter:

Dear Hopeful Writer-to-be,

Don’t be deceived. What I wrote was a complaint about SFWA, the Science Fiction Writers of America, a professional organization that has been taken over by the gray goo of Political Correctness, which I quit in disgust. This is because I do not need this organization. In the 1950s, they served a purpose to protect writers from unscrupulous magazine and book publishers. Now, they serve no purpose.

Don’t let anything I wrote dampen your spirits or your hope. My complaint was very narrow. I said nothing against the industry as a whole.

We live in the Golden Age of Science Fiction. There are more readers, more books, more comics, more movies, more computer games in the science fiction genre than ever before. You have more markets and more opportunity than ever before in history. There are fewer barriers and boundaries to overcome than ever before.

That, precisely that, was why I could leave SFWA without a blink of regret, and also (come to think of it) why they could afford to abandon their mission and become an ersatz political organization.

The publishing business right now is poised between two models, the classical model of mainstream New York publishers distributing books as physical objects to bookstores, and the new model of selling electronic files directly to customers through Amazon or some other Internet distribution. The impact is as great as the invention of the Printing Press.

I have a foot in both camps.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.