4 ms·
It's the same with fiction writing - there are far too many people doing it, and the quality is ever more variable. I don't think this is a bad thing, just a si
by summerdown2 13y ago
It's the same with fiction writing - there are far too many people doing it, and the quality is ever more variable. I don't think this is a bad thing, just a sign of an industry in transition. I really like the fact that large numbers of people are encouraged to become creators.
But there really does need to be some way for a consumer to find what they're interested in, and for an artist to reach those who might be interested in their work. At the moment the old mechanisms seem to be vanishing, and it's not clear what will take their place.
I've seen people try forming communities with shared worlds to spark interest, new approaches using Patreon and Kickstarter, the ever unreliable flooding of social media. But the truth is that as a reader I'm finding it harder to search for things I like and as a beginning writer, I'm seeing my more advanced friends drop out of the midlist.
- thenomad 13y agoI do think that Netflix may be on to something with its curation /discovery of new sub-sub niches. One of the issues with creating fiction compared to non-fiction right now, in any medium, is that it's much harder to niche down in fiction. In non-fiction I can perfectly happily make a viable living from writing to a niche of, say, "owners of cats with behavioural issues", or "Finance-focused startups in need of lead generation knowledge". In fiction, niches are much less granular - at best, you can target, say, "werewolf-based romance", and for many projects, you'll be targeting "fantasy", "hard SF" or similar huge niches with very vague requirements and significant saturation problems.