Eseme's Den

This is mostly for my own reference - I want a place to gather some of this stuff. I may find a better way to do this in emails to myself, so I should stop cluttering up friends lists soon.

( Money, Craft, Business, Steampunk, and the great genre TV debate )

People have mentioned, in the comments of someone else's post, that they'd like me to post various tidbits I run across relating to the wacky world of publishing. Trust me, right now it appears to be exceptionally wacky, as everyone tries to predict the future.

I ran across two very different people, talking about the future of writers this week. This all started at John Scalzi's excellent blog, Whatever. It's now topped Neil Gaiman's blog on my "I've just got to check that" list, generally because Scalzi posts regularly, including a cool feature called The Big Idea in which he lets published authors guest blog about the idea behind their new book. Also, he was just elected SFWA president. For those interested, he's over at http://www.whatever.scalzi.com The blog has been around for a very long time, and has featured bacon taped to a cat, meaning that he will never get that much traffic again in his life.

The Future??

First, someone emailed Scalzi asking him what he thought of Robert J. Sawyer's post about how very soon there will be no more full time genre writers. That post is here: http://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=2413 and is worth reading to understand his views. He points out some interesting things.

John Scalzi does not agree with Sawyer. His take on the matter is here: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/30/the-full-time-sf-novelist-probably-not-as-endangered-as-you-think/ In this post, he points out that virtually all genre authors do not make all their money from writing anyway.

All of that is food for thought for those who are considering writing a book. I know I have the beginnings of three on my hard drive, one of which is actually at about one fourth to one third of a novel, and stands the best chance of being finished.

Note, however, that neither Scalzi nor Sawyer pull out any actual facts or numbers to support their points. While there are not a lot of actual statistics out there about being published, there are a few. And we have science fiction and fantasy authors to thank for that.

First, Jim C. Hines conducted a survey of authors (who were professionally published, receiving at least a $2,000 advance), asking questions which he hoped would address some common myths about being published. The results were published in three parts, in full Mythbusting style!

All data from 2010.

Part I : http://jimhines.livejournal.com/496760.html

Part II : http://jimhines.livejournal.com/497092.html

Part III : http://jimhines.livejournal.com/497733.html

For statistics on advances, we can thank author Tobias Buckell, who has twice surveyed science fiction and fantasy authors about their advances. His second survey got a much higher response rate, and was completed in 2005 (so may be out of date).

His data is here: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2005/10/05/author-advance-survey-version-20/

He also did a survey on how many novels authors wrote before selling one, this survey was in 2006: http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2006/12/19/survey-how-many-novels-did-you-write-before-selling-one/

The Onion Knows The Future!

If any of the above links are depressing at all, read this:
Minotaurs Are The New Vampires