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Methinks the serious issues the author raises would have benefited from a better written article. Even though it's a subject that interests me greatly, I found

• alan-crowe 17y ago
  I was frustated because the artilce talked money but not economics. If 10% of people are readers and read ten books a year, and 1% are authors and write one book a year, average sales are 100 books. Yikes! It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days, but if twice as many people want to write as 20 years ago, how does that work out? Do average sales halve? Is it possible to write a novel that is in some absolute sense better than a novel of 20 years ago, so people change their priorities and read a book instead of going bowling? I doubt it. The author is on friendly terms with her fellow authors, but it seems likely that they are in zero-sum competition with each other and all the other authors out there. She gives the impression that it has got harder to earn a living as an author, which makes me guess that more people are trying to earn a living that way, but she leaves me to guess. How many competitors does she have? With inelastic demand, supply becomes the key number. I think that Charles Brown said "God loves authors, he made so many of them" with bitter irony.
  • h_operator 17y ago
    "It seems to me that every-one wants to be a writer now-a-days," Yeah: see Gabriel Zaid's So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance. http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-publishing-in-an-age-of-abundance http://jseliger.com/2008/06/18/so-many-books-reading-and-pub... .