Peter Kazmaier

Robert J. Sawyer is arguably Canada’s best known Science Fiction author and has achieved significant international  recognition as a Hugo Award winner and through the recent debut of his novel FlashForward on television. Given his stature in the field of Science Fiction, his blog entitled “Are the Days of the Full-Time Novelist Numbered?” is of particular interest to all of us who follow Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. Sawyer begins his blog by alluding to an invited lecture he gave  to the Canadian Book Summit:

I started by recounting how, a few months ago, I’d had fellow science-fiction writers Robert Charles Wilson and James Alan Gardner over for pizza; at that dinner, I’d told Bob and Jim that I feared there was only a decade left in which anyone could make a comfortable living writing science-fiction novels, and urged them to plan their careers and finances accordingly.

If someone with Robert Sawyer’s achievements  makes this observation, then one ought to listen. Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered? What does this mean for novelists who are just starting out (like me)?

As part of my Materials Science research, I have worked on technologies related to e-books and reusable paper and so I was very interested in the impact of technology advances on the reading patterns of North Americans. A few years ago I attended a conference at Humber College that brought together authors, editors, publishers as well as technology companies to talk about the future of reading, printing and publishing. A number of observations articulated at this conference particularly struck me:

• Online retailers such as Amazon.com are able to maintain huge virtual inventories of books since in their Print-on-Demand (POD) business, they only print a book when a an order comes in. As a consequence a large fraction of their sales come from the long tail of the sales volume distribution where there are many titles with few sales. [A case in point - authors beware. Many authors have signed book agreements in which the rights of the book revert back to them once the book goes out of print. With virtual inventories, publishers are able to argue that the book has never gone out of print even though very few copies are being sold.]
• As people become more visual, and their attention span declines, reading has declined in favor of television.
• With the rise of radio, television, and the internet, people have come to expect content for free.

This last point is of particular interest to me since I sit on both sides of this fence. On the one hand since I know the enormous amount of work that goes into writing a novel, I would like to achieve remuneration commensurate with the effort expended. On the other hand I also see this problem from the consumer’s point of view. At least when I buy a book, I have something to put on my shelf and which I can lend to my friends. In the world of electronic publishing,  software, and digital movies, this is not so. The consumer never ends up owning anything. They are asked to expend considerable money in exchange for some constrained “right-to-use” which may completely vanish with the next software or hardware implementation.  I think this goes against our strong bent for ownership – we naturally think if we spend money we ought to own something at the end of that process. If this view that there is a natural antipathy to spending money for an ephemeral “right-to-use” is correct, then it seems to me that the move towards ever increasing Digital Rights Management software and hardware is wrong-headed especially in a declining market.

So what does it mean for authors and the publishing industry? Are the days of the full-time novelist numbered?

I’m not sure. Certainly some new ideas for connecting with our reading public are required. It seems to me that however imperiled full-time novelists are in the next 10 years, publishers of novels and their cadre of workers such as acquisition editors have jobs that are in even greater peril. As Robert Sawyer has pointed out through his personal anecdotes, more and more expenses are being downloaded onto authors by the publishing industry. With respect to advertising and book promotion, authors are expected to  have a well-established platform for their work and also to assume the brunt of the responsibility for promoting their book. At some point the question will be asked by newer authors: “If I’m doing almost all the work myself anyway, why not up my margins and cut out all the middle men and publish the book myself?” I think the publishers would say that the quality of self-published books are inferior. This may be true to some extent because anyone can self-publish a poorly written work while not many can get someone else to pay for shoddy writing. Still reading is in part a matter of taste. There are many books that were a delight to some publishing house’s editor that I regret buying. Furthermore, I select most of my books by recommendations from friends in whose taste I trust. I don’t even consider whether the book is self-published or from a major publishing house. So a self-published book that receives those word-of-mouth recommendations to my mind is on the same playing field as others with a more established pedigree.

So where does that leave me? At the end of his blog Robert Sawyer points out:

Maybe we will all indeed still be smiling as writing sf shifts from a career to a hobby. Still, lengthy, ambitious, complex works — works that take years of full-time effort to produce such as, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, or, if I may be so bold, my own WWW trilogy of Wake, Watch, and Wonder — aren’t things that could have been produced in any kind of reasonable time by squeezing in an hour’s writing each day over one’s lunch break while working a nine-to-five job.

It is interesting that this is exactly where I find myself as I test the waters of novel writing. When I wrote The Halcyon Dislocation, I wrote it over four years on evenings and weekends since I had a demanding full-time job. I will be curious to know what the next 10 years hold for novelists and publishers and how many of these prognostications come true. What do you think?

Thanks for reading,

Peter