*sigh*

[ksmith]

An interesting post by an agent tailor-made to burst my little soap bubble dreams.

I dream of the quit-the-day-job deal. I am also a tad security-conscious. I once took one of those on-the-job personality tests--the results were a tie between "entrepreneur" and "security", which is about as conflicted a result as you can get.

To be a full-time writer. The books need to keep selling, and you need to keep writing them. For 20, 30, 40 years or more.

Comments

[dancinghorse.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. Right now is Not The Time to fly solo--unless you can duplicate that first big sale and keep on doing it. Book sales are flat across the board--what that means is many many many authors saw their sales halved in the second half of 2005. Major collapse, and everybody is hurting. Even the big guys are seeing sharp drops in sales and therefore royalties.

I've been hanging on by my fingernails for 20 years, and did really well in the Nineties, but I've had to pursue alternative sources of income in the past few months. Frankly I don't see this getting better for anybody unless or until there is a completely new distribution model. The one we have are broke and it are broke bad.

Definitely keep the day job.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

This is scary.

I know that mmpbs have taken the hit for years because of consolidation of distribution and the huge changes in sales outlets, but are trades and hcs affected as well?

Are you thinking electronic distribution or growth of small press or moving away from paper novels into other types of storytelling, or what? If distribution is improved, will more people read the books? Or have we maxed out the book-reading public? Do we need to develop other ways to tell stories to attract non-readers?