There are times I feel a bit like a dinosaur, wondering what all these furry little bastards running around underfoot are up to, and where’d all the food go.<\/p>\n
I’m not speaking about life in general; I’m doing okay at keeping up with the world, even if I still don’t have a smartphone or iPad.\u00a0 I’m talking about writing for a living.<\/p>\n
For about thirty years, I thought I had a handle on it.\u00a0 I wrote novels, and publishers in New York bought them and paid me reasonable advances, and everything went pretty smoothly.\u00a0 There were a few disappointments along the way, when a story I wanted to tell didn’t sell, or a series got dropped, or whatever, but I made a living at it, and was generally pretty happy with my situation.\u00a0 I made adjustments to suit the market, but wrote more or less what I wanted to write.\u00a0 I did some experimenting now and then, but my bread and butter was always the fantasy novel.\u00a0 I spent fifteen years writing primarily for Del Rey Books, then switched to Tor for the next fifteen or so.<\/p>\n
Then a couple of years ago, Tor declined to make an offer on the third and fourth books in the “Fall of the Sorcerers” series.\u00a0 No big deal, I thought; I’ll just switch to another publisher again.<\/p>\n
Except so far, other publishers don’t seem to be interested.\u00a0 I keep hearing about all the wonderful new ways to get rich as a writer — paranormal romances, steampunk, urban fantasy, straight-to-ebook self-publishing, etc. — and can’t see how to make them work for me.<\/p>\n
I don’t think it’s just me, either.\u00a0 I seem to remember that back in the 20th century, the annual summaries in Locus<\/b> would report about 1,400 new titles being published annually in SF, fantasy, and horror; well, for 2010 they reported 508.\u00a0 (They don’t count small press or self-published titles.)\u00a0 The book market seems to have undergone a massive contraction — not necessarily in total sales, but in number of titles in the genre.<\/p>\n
So these things happen.\u00a0 I’m not going to try to keep the buggy-whip factory running when everyone’s driving Fords.\u00a0 My wife’s grandfather was trained as a blacksmith, but became an auto mechanic when blacksmithing dried up; my own grandfather was a carpenter’s mate on a tea clipper, but realized that was a doomed occupation and put himself through engineering school.\u00a0 One must change with the times.<\/p>\n
But I can’t figure out what to change to<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I was told urban fantasy was a hot genre, so I wrote an urban fantasy.\u00a0 It hasn’t sold — it’s too emotionally cool, I’m told, and male protagonists don’t sell unless they’re named Harry Dresden.<\/p>\n
All these damned mammals underfoot…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are times I feel a bit like a dinosaur, wondering what all these furry little bastards running around underfoot are up to, and where’d all the food go. I’m not speaking about life in general; I’m doing okay at keeping up with the world, even if I still don’t have a smartphone or iPad.\u00a0… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-generalities-rants","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}