I was reading this description of the hypothetical 2030 writer's life of blogging, podcasting, newsletters, etc. and wondering when this person would have time for things like... oh, I don't know... actually writing? Never mind sleeping, cooking, eating, taking care of one's family, pets, aging parents, etc. And THEN I got to the part about how this writer is 'almost ready to quit their day job.' Like... wut? I got contact burnout just from reading all this. It doesn’t sound utopian to me, it sounds *exhausting.* I would be curious what kind of schedule you envision for all this, and how it could fit into a mere mortal's 24 hour existence? Not trying to be critical here (honest!), I'm just finding it hard to picture how this would work - all while somehow leaving breathing room for creativity.
This is a very excellent point, Alexandra. In fact, I've gone back and edited the post slightly, as I should have covered this in the first place: the 2030 writer's life was very much the kinds of thing I like to do, but it's absolutely not for everyone - and I don't think it needs to be. If an author wants to just *write the damned books* that's fine. The general concept still applies, I think: their readers can still keep in touch, still stay informed about new releases, still support that author in-between major releases.
Some people will make lots of stuff and enjoy doing it, others will take a different approach. I didn't mean to imply that *everyone* would have to do every single option. As with any creative endeavour, we'll all have our own particular way of approaching it: this was only meant to be one example, but I think I presented it poorly and made it read like it was The Way.
Thanks for pointing that out.
A related point, I think, is that what I'm hoping for here is a model that would enable a writer to gradually reduce the 'day job' hours and increase the 'writing life' hours. What each of us choose to do with those hours is an individual choice.
What I love about this article, is that the plan is morph-able.
With my size of family [13 children, all boys but 9...31 grandkids, and we care for 'mom'] I'm in Alexandra's camp.... but that's why I start my work day at 3-4am.
It's the only time I have.
Sleep comes when I'm dead.
I did not read this article like it was 'The Way'...but only because I've been doing a version of this since 1986. I've also been making my living doing so. There are so many options, tools and opportunities in today's world...that alone keeps me going.
What I'm also seeing are clever people looking to free the creatives of the shackles at every turn.
I truly do hope our turn is coming, Simon.
With all my heart, I hope so.
...and in the meantime, I'll work on side projects for money that are based on my fiction writing, so the bills continue to get paid.
Even with the utopian vision of 2030, I struggle to see how to get people reading my work. As you say, publishing is the easy part, getting readers to value and become invested in your work is the harder part. But I suppose it's what we're all working towards.
This has always been the struggle. Even getting a mainstream publisher doesn't guarantee any kind of success.
I can only go by my own experience, which is that as long as I write consistently, over time people DO show up. It happened on a big scale over on Wattpad, and has happened here to a smaller (but more meaningful) degree.
It's always that awkward mix of writing quality, practical convenience and luck. That last bit being the annoying, hand-wavey element.
Yes, Substack has given me a new context for my writing. I write a post a week, and even if few people read it does help me comb out some straggly thoughts. And people do read. My posts have even lead to the odd book sale, so I will keep at it. Working hard has never been an issue for me, it's the luck element that I struggle with, the being in the right place at the right time, and saying the right thing to help right person even before you know they're the right person. That kind of thing...
Love this hopeful vision, and how much of it is already in place here. On the podcast, they mentioned how Netflix remembers where you are in any episode. That alone would be a huge benefit to fiction readers. 🤞
Yes, there are a handful of UX tweaks that would make a dramatic difference to the reading experience. A lot of the really hard stuff has already been solved (ie, the subscription and payment systems in the first place, etc).
Yes, these would all be good things, but in the end, it still comes down to supply and demand. Writers have no clout in the system because the supply of fiction vastly outweighs the demand for fiction. Writer's lives will only improve when there are either far more readers or far fewer writers.
I'm not convinced that even if every human being on Earth became a rabid reader tomorrow that that would be enough to absorb all the fiction being produced today. And there is the further problem that even if everyone were a rabid reader, they would only have so many reading hours in the day, so the net result might only be to turn the current bestselling authors into billionaires rather than millionaires. In other words, the main constraint on demand may not be the number of readers in the world but the number of reading hours in a day. No matter how much we expand the former, there is nothing we can do to expand the latter.
Obviously, there is a distribution of taste across the reader community, so book sales are not constrained solely by available reading hours, but does that range expand significantly as we keep adding new readers? Industries like movies and soft drinks would suggest that it does not. After a point, we simply add more people to the existing ranges. Expanding the reader community would be good for writers on the fringes of mainstream taste, but it would still mostly benefit those already making millions.
But it's actually worse than that. The social significance of fiction declines the more diverse it becomes. Fiction is only socially significant when everyone is reading the same books and talking about them. The more diverse fiction becomes, the harder it becomes to find people to talk to about the books you have read, and the more fragmented these conversations become. And the more fragmented they become, the less socially significant they become, which in turn reduces both the motivation to read and the enjoyment to be had from reading. The social significance of the novel, in other words, is constrained by the number of hours in the day, and to make novels socially significant again, we would have to restrict output brutally.
Which leaves us with reducing the number of writers. The explosive growth in the number of people writing fiction is still, to my mind, one of the great cultural puzzles for the last half century. Why did it happen? What does it mean? And why does so much of it appear to be concentrated in a single genre: fantasy? As this phenomenon mysteriously arose, so it may mysteriously decline, and that would certainly be a help.
But how much of a help? Because to significantly improve the economic prospects of writers, you have to do more than simply improve margins. Unless you can increase demand or prices, you are going to have to cut deeply into the body of writers who are making a trickle of income in order to redirect that trickle into the pockets of other writers.
And the only way that is going to happen is a mass abandonment of writing as a hobby. The great hope, it seems to me, is that the vast majority of the world's supply of writers suddenly moves on to a new hobby.
I don't have any stats to argue this either way. I can only go from my own experience, which is that readers have shown up over the years. In terms of that mass influx of writers that you mention, we should also consider that the vast majority of them will never finish or release a book, and a significant portion of those that do will have produced quite bad books. Once you slice off all of that, the remaining pool of books/writers is much smaller.
Though it's still infinitely vast in terms of how much any human could read in a lifetime. But that's always been the case, at least since the printing press appeared, surely?
It's interesting what you say about the cultural impact of books lessening, because we're not all reading the same books. And that diversity in literature has reduced its cultural relevance. I've certainly found this with music, TV and movies in the era of streaming: I never have conversations about TV or films, because there's no consistent experience - TV, in particular, has suffered from the move away from scheduling, and it's now impossible to discuss episodes because you never know who is in sync with your position.
Books, though, are different, for me at least, because I've NEVER experienced that cultural consistency. The sort of thing I like to read has tended towards scifi and fantasy, and nobody in my daily life has ever read the same sort of stuff. I don't read mainstream fiction or classics on a regular basis, so I don't get to enjoy the zeitgeisty water cooler novels.
The closest I've come is reading classic scifi, like Asimov's work, or novels like The Forever War and Flowers for Algernon, or 1984. But I still don't really get to have conversations about them, because the conversations all took place decades before I was born and read them. (OK, 1984 is maybe an exception)
And on a final point: a lack of diversity in literature (or movies, TV, etc) can help with focusing the attention and discussion, but ONLY if you're actually interested in that narrow, mainstream band of programming. It's deliberately exclusionary by design, and you're either with the 'in crowd' or you're not.
Personally, I'd rather have a more dissipated cultural landscape, in which their are pockets of deeply meaningful work for a wider range of people. It comes back to my 'one reader' thing: my fiction is never going to be reviewed in The Times, or win the Booker, or by discussed on television or Radio 4 cultural programmes. But it could mean an awful lot to a handful of people scattered around the world. The meaningful discussion (in my 2030 ideal) takes place in the comments and around the author's scene. It's invisible to anybody outside of that bubble, but for those who choose to step inside, it means the world.
The critic Joseph Bottom (The Decline of the Novel) reckons the last watercooler novel was The Bonfire of the Vanities. I suppose the last watercooler TV show was probably The Sopranos? The last watercooler album, maybe Sgt. Pepper?
Like you, I don't care for the contemporary literary novel, which has become something very narrow, its chief appeal being how many people *don't* read it and what sort of people do. From a literary point of view, what good stuff there is is in those pockets you mention.
But the harm this does may not simply be that it devalues the arts, but that it leaves a conversational void that mostly seems to get filled with politics. Which is not just bad for conversation, it is also bad for politics.
So true. Plus, the growing Substack verse makes it easy to have different experiences like Notes=Twitter like, Newsletters=Bloglike, Podcasts and videos=YouTube/Spotify like, Chat=WhatsApp like.)
But all these experiences are currently focused on journalists, writers and creative individuals which enriches the platform and the minds of the users!
Simon- I echo many of the comments here. I think a platform for fiction writers would be a great idea. I know folks who have been exploring platform coopertivism for years now with some success. I am currently serialising a solar punk sci fi novel here on substack; https://nareshgiangrande.substack.com/ which is challenging to day the least. First of all to get a format for the substack that works. Its clearly not built for this. So i am improvising ... But also that old favorite - finding readers, or in my case readers/ and or podcast listeners. Podcasts maybe an easier sell? We shall see.
As I read your 2030 future state description I kept thinking, "Doesn't Substack already have most of these features now?" Any gaps seem very small, more UX/UI than any new 'gee-whiz' functionality.
Yup! It’s not an especially drastic ‘vision’. It’s what I keep emphasising whenever I’m within earshot of a Substack staffer: they’re so close to connecting all the dots.
Infrastructurally, it’s there. As you say, it’s the UX/UI connecting fluid that is required now.
Love it! Utopian visions are great because even if they don't come true exactly as is, they give us something to work towards. If anything, it has confirmed that I want to focus more on my fiction again to help make this happen in whatever small way I can (or just witness it for myself).
For now, I'm definitely anticipating those nifty Substack features!
I had all kinds of writing dreams for years. As with most writers, reality caught up with me. I retired about a year ago so now I have more time for writing and less need for money. I’m finalizing my third novel, though nothing published yet. For my first novel I tried to find a literary agent and traditionally publish. That didn’t happen and the publishing landscape has changed considerably. I recently found a small hybrid press to work with and plan on publishing my techno-thriller novel later this year or early next year. I’m under no delusion I’ll make any money and fortunately don’t need to now that I’m retired.
Last fall I started a weekly Substack science fiction newsletter as a way to find readers and connect with an audience. https://brucelanday.substack.com It’s free and always will be.
For prolific writers who treat it as a business, it’s possible to make decent money. Like many writers I do it for the joy of writing and to attract an audience. I never considered full time writing as I made too much money in my professional career to consider switching. Now I’m just looking to get my books published and enjoy connecting with readers and other writers.
I appreciate your optimism. I fervently hope you are right. When thinking of the future of fiction writing, I worry that that fewer and fewer people read novels and short stories these days. It may simply be my set, or my demographic, or whatever you want to call it, but I hardly ever hear people talking up a recent novel. In the meantime I hear plenty of people sharing their opinions about shows they've been watching on Netflix. Even in my weekly writer's group, I hear more enthusiasm for TV dramas and movies, than for recent books. It bugs me. It saddens me, but this feels like it's the evolving reality. With literature, individual readers can have very different subjective experiences of a story. With movies and TV shows I think the experience is more uniform. Something is being lost for sure. I wish more young people were excited about books. Maybe they are and I just don't know it.
This is similar to a discussion I'm having elsewhere in the comics with Mark. My take on this is that I've never experienced discussion about novels, because I've rarely read mainstream literature. I have read weird scifi stuff, or OLD scifi stuff, and nobody around me reads those things.
That's where the more niche online communities can make a difference, I think.
I remember back in the 90s, when I was still at school, there was maybe one other kid who was watching the show 'Babylon 5'. Nobody else had heard about it. But online, I hung out in the alt.babylon5.uk usenet newsgroup and had wonderfully in-depth discussions.
That's why genre fans have conventions, because we tend to be scattered around the country/world and need to actively get together to feel that community cohesion. It's easier for people who read more mainstream stuff, or the books that win awards and get reviews in the big papers.
Curiously, I've primarily noticed what you're talking about applying to film and TV. Streaming and the move away from scheduled television has short circuited the ability to discuss shows. The 'water cooler' chat the next morning after a big episode is impossible.
The exception is with big shows that are still released episodically, such as The Traitors. That still has a general hubbub of cultural excitement, because everyone is synced up in terms of their watching.
Good point about mainstream vs cult/genre. I admit I mainly read stuff that gets shelved under "literary fiction," a term which has a snotty ring to it doesn't it? I envy those who have the literary community that genre fandom might provide.
Well done. At the moment. I am researching the topic of dopamine pathways in the brain and how corporations design their products and services to manipulate those pathways in order to create the corporate consumption complex. So, when I read your comments about how social media companies have turned themselves into addiction machines because they themselves are addicted to advertising revenue, I got a little of a dopamine buzz myself. An unexpected reward. Cheers.
Yeah, that was an angle I hadn’t fully considered previously. It makes sense of a lot of things, though: it’s fairly obvious what Meta could do to massively improve their products for creators (and users generally), so why don’t they? It’s because they can’t, because they (and their stakeholders) are unable to quit the habit.
Sounds like a thread for a science fiction story. Imagine a society in which people are controlled not by force but through the cultivation of their multiple addictions. Too easy. This other world already exists in the USA, where the president manipulates the masses by giving them their dopamine hits on his social media platform that are then picked up by the mainstream media. Gotta go. See if I got any more likes or new subscribers.
I think where I hit my utopia was when it just became the norm for me to sit down -- after work and dinner and time with the puppies and hanging out with my wife -- to write. That's almost a nightly thing now, although I also take time for some other things -- my Xbox, the six novels I'm reading, going out with friends. I was in a frenzy about 18 months ago, thinking I had to crank out stories and words and whatnot non-stop, and then I burned out and took a nine-month break and came back recalibrated. And now, I'm just relaxing into my little personal utopia. I don't make any money writing, and I have one guy who likes everything I write (he followed me over from Medium), but I'm dropping thousands of words into short stories and serials and working on all my novel projects. I can't complain.
If anything, if there's one thing that could be better, it is presentation on Substack, which is really good, but it can't compare to my website, where I have a 90k word noir serial in full on a single webpage (links to each chapter/episode), but for presentation, you can't beat that. That's what Substack is missing -- better presentation and the ability to really search through an author's archive. The list thing is dismal. There's got to be a better way. Dorothy: Locked & Loaded is going to have 150 episodes, and the only place anyone will be able to find and read them all is my website -- sorry, Substack.
I was reading this description of the hypothetical 2030 writer's life of blogging, podcasting, newsletters, etc. and wondering when this person would have time for things like... oh, I don't know... actually writing? Never mind sleeping, cooking, eating, taking care of one's family, pets, aging parents, etc. And THEN I got to the part about how this writer is 'almost ready to quit their day job.' Like... wut? I got contact burnout just from reading all this. It doesn’t sound utopian to me, it sounds *exhausting.* I would be curious what kind of schedule you envision for all this, and how it could fit into a mere mortal's 24 hour existence? Not trying to be critical here (honest!), I'm just finding it hard to picture how this would work - all while somehow leaving breathing room for creativity.
This is a very excellent point, Alexandra. In fact, I've gone back and edited the post slightly, as I should have covered this in the first place: the 2030 writer's life was very much the kinds of thing I like to do, but it's absolutely not for everyone - and I don't think it needs to be. If an author wants to just *write the damned books* that's fine. The general concept still applies, I think: their readers can still keep in touch, still stay informed about new releases, still support that author in-between major releases.
Some people will make lots of stuff and enjoy doing it, others will take a different approach. I didn't mean to imply that *everyone* would have to do every single option. As with any creative endeavour, we'll all have our own particular way of approaching it: this was only meant to be one example, but I think I presented it poorly and made it read like it was The Way.
Thanks for pointing that out.
A related point, I think, is that what I'm hoping for here is a model that would enable a writer to gradually reduce the 'day job' hours and increase the 'writing life' hours. What each of us choose to do with those hours is an individual choice.
What I love about this article, is that the plan is morph-able.
With my size of family [13 children, all boys but 9...31 grandkids, and we care for 'mom'] I'm in Alexandra's camp.... but that's why I start my work day at 3-4am.
It's the only time I have.
Sleep comes when I'm dead.
I did not read this article like it was 'The Way'...but only because I've been doing a version of this since 1986. I've also been making my living doing so. There are so many options, tools and opportunities in today's world...that alone keeps me going.
What I'm also seeing are clever people looking to free the creatives of the shackles at every turn.
I truly do hope our turn is coming, Simon.
With all my heart, I hope so.
...and in the meantime, I'll work on side projects for money that are based on my fiction writing, so the bills continue to get paid.
[grin]
Awesome article.
Always enjoy your readings.
Even with the utopian vision of 2030, I struggle to see how to get people reading my work. As you say, publishing is the easy part, getting readers to value and become invested in your work is the harder part. But I suppose it's what we're all working towards.
This has always been the struggle. Even getting a mainstream publisher doesn't guarantee any kind of success.
I can only go by my own experience, which is that as long as I write consistently, over time people DO show up. It happened on a big scale over on Wattpad, and has happened here to a smaller (but more meaningful) degree.
It's always that awkward mix of writing quality, practical convenience and luck. That last bit being the annoying, hand-wavey element.
Yes, Substack has given me a new context for my writing. I write a post a week, and even if few people read it does help me comb out some straggly thoughts. And people do read. My posts have even lead to the odd book sale, so I will keep at it. Working hard has never been an issue for me, it's the luck element that I struggle with, the being in the right place at the right time, and saying the right thing to help right person even before you know they're the right person. That kind of thing...
Love this hopeful vision, and how much of it is already in place here. On the podcast, they mentioned how Netflix remembers where you are in any episode. That alone would be a huge benefit to fiction readers. 🤞
Yes, there are a handful of UX tweaks that would make a dramatic difference to the reading experience. A lot of the really hard stuff has already been solved (ie, the subscription and payment systems in the first place, etc).
Brilliant analysis, mate! You paint a lovely picture with these words.
Thanks, JB.
Yes, these would all be good things, but in the end, it still comes down to supply and demand. Writers have no clout in the system because the supply of fiction vastly outweighs the demand for fiction. Writer's lives will only improve when there are either far more readers or far fewer writers.
I'm not convinced that even if every human being on Earth became a rabid reader tomorrow that that would be enough to absorb all the fiction being produced today. And there is the further problem that even if everyone were a rabid reader, they would only have so many reading hours in the day, so the net result might only be to turn the current bestselling authors into billionaires rather than millionaires. In other words, the main constraint on demand may not be the number of readers in the world but the number of reading hours in a day. No matter how much we expand the former, there is nothing we can do to expand the latter.
Obviously, there is a distribution of taste across the reader community, so book sales are not constrained solely by available reading hours, but does that range expand significantly as we keep adding new readers? Industries like movies and soft drinks would suggest that it does not. After a point, we simply add more people to the existing ranges. Expanding the reader community would be good for writers on the fringes of mainstream taste, but it would still mostly benefit those already making millions.
But it's actually worse than that. The social significance of fiction declines the more diverse it becomes. Fiction is only socially significant when everyone is reading the same books and talking about them. The more diverse fiction becomes, the harder it becomes to find people to talk to about the books you have read, and the more fragmented these conversations become. And the more fragmented they become, the less socially significant they become, which in turn reduces both the motivation to read and the enjoyment to be had from reading. The social significance of the novel, in other words, is constrained by the number of hours in the day, and to make novels socially significant again, we would have to restrict output brutally.
Which leaves us with reducing the number of writers. The explosive growth in the number of people writing fiction is still, to my mind, one of the great cultural puzzles for the last half century. Why did it happen? What does it mean? And why does so much of it appear to be concentrated in a single genre: fantasy? As this phenomenon mysteriously arose, so it may mysteriously decline, and that would certainly be a help.
But how much of a help? Because to significantly improve the economic prospects of writers, you have to do more than simply improve margins. Unless you can increase demand or prices, you are going to have to cut deeply into the body of writers who are making a trickle of income in order to redirect that trickle into the pockets of other writers.
And the only way that is going to happen is a mass abandonment of writing as a hobby. The great hope, it seems to me, is that the vast majority of the world's supply of writers suddenly moves on to a new hobby.
Anyone for Pickleball?
I don't have any stats to argue this either way. I can only go from my own experience, which is that readers have shown up over the years. In terms of that mass influx of writers that you mention, we should also consider that the vast majority of them will never finish or release a book, and a significant portion of those that do will have produced quite bad books. Once you slice off all of that, the remaining pool of books/writers is much smaller.
Though it's still infinitely vast in terms of how much any human could read in a lifetime. But that's always been the case, at least since the printing press appeared, surely?
It's interesting what you say about the cultural impact of books lessening, because we're not all reading the same books. And that diversity in literature has reduced its cultural relevance. I've certainly found this with music, TV and movies in the era of streaming: I never have conversations about TV or films, because there's no consistent experience - TV, in particular, has suffered from the move away from scheduling, and it's now impossible to discuss episodes because you never know who is in sync with your position.
Books, though, are different, for me at least, because I've NEVER experienced that cultural consistency. The sort of thing I like to read has tended towards scifi and fantasy, and nobody in my daily life has ever read the same sort of stuff. I don't read mainstream fiction or classics on a regular basis, so I don't get to enjoy the zeitgeisty water cooler novels.
The closest I've come is reading classic scifi, like Asimov's work, or novels like The Forever War and Flowers for Algernon, or 1984. But I still don't really get to have conversations about them, because the conversations all took place decades before I was born and read them. (OK, 1984 is maybe an exception)
And on a final point: a lack of diversity in literature (or movies, TV, etc) can help with focusing the attention and discussion, but ONLY if you're actually interested in that narrow, mainstream band of programming. It's deliberately exclusionary by design, and you're either with the 'in crowd' or you're not.
Personally, I'd rather have a more dissipated cultural landscape, in which their are pockets of deeply meaningful work for a wider range of people. It comes back to my 'one reader' thing: my fiction is never going to be reviewed in The Times, or win the Booker, or by discussed on television or Radio 4 cultural programmes. But it could mean an awful lot to a handful of people scattered around the world. The meaningful discussion (in my 2030 ideal) takes place in the comments and around the author's scene. It's invisible to anybody outside of that bubble, but for those who choose to step inside, it means the world.
The critic Joseph Bottom (The Decline of the Novel) reckons the last watercooler novel was The Bonfire of the Vanities. I suppose the last watercooler TV show was probably The Sopranos? The last watercooler album, maybe Sgt. Pepper?
Like you, I don't care for the contemporary literary novel, which has become something very narrow, its chief appeal being how many people *don't* read it and what sort of people do. From a literary point of view, what good stuff there is is in those pockets you mention.
But the harm this does may not simply be that it devalues the arts, but that it leaves a conversational void that mostly seems to get filled with politics. Which is not just bad for conversation, it is also bad for politics.
So true. Plus, the growing Substack verse makes it easy to have different experiences like Notes=Twitter like, Newsletters=Bloglike, Podcasts and videos=YouTube/Spotify like, Chat=WhatsApp like.)
But all these experiences are currently focused on journalists, writers and creative individuals which enriches the platform and the minds of the users!
Gah, I’m so old. I’m like 2030 that’s like decades away! But, no, no it isn’t. Here’s hoping the reader experience improves here.
Simon- I echo many of the comments here. I think a platform for fiction writers would be a great idea. I know folks who have been exploring platform coopertivism for years now with some success. I am currently serialising a solar punk sci fi novel here on substack; https://nareshgiangrande.substack.com/ which is challenging to day the least. First of all to get a format for the substack that works. Its clearly not built for this. So i am improvising ... But also that old favorite - finding readers, or in my case readers/ and or podcast listeners. Podcasts maybe an easier sell? We shall see.
As I read your 2030 future state description I kept thinking, "Doesn't Substack already have most of these features now?" Any gaps seem very small, more UX/UI than any new 'gee-whiz' functionality.
Yup! It’s not an especially drastic ‘vision’. It’s what I keep emphasising whenever I’m within earshot of a Substack staffer: they’re so close to connecting all the dots.
Infrastructurally, it’s there. As you say, it’s the UX/UI connecting fluid that is required now.
Love it! Utopian visions are great because even if they don't come true exactly as is, they give us something to work towards. If anything, it has confirmed that I want to focus more on my fiction again to help make this happen in whatever small way I can (or just witness it for myself).
For now, I'm definitely anticipating those nifty Substack features!
I had all kinds of writing dreams for years. As with most writers, reality caught up with me. I retired about a year ago so now I have more time for writing and less need for money. I’m finalizing my third novel, though nothing published yet. For my first novel I tried to find a literary agent and traditionally publish. That didn’t happen and the publishing landscape has changed considerably. I recently found a small hybrid press to work with and plan on publishing my techno-thriller novel later this year or early next year. I’m under no delusion I’ll make any money and fortunately don’t need to now that I’m retired.
Last fall I started a weekly Substack science fiction newsletter as a way to find readers and connect with an audience. https://brucelanday.substack.com It’s free and always will be.
For prolific writers who treat it as a business, it’s possible to make decent money. Like many writers I do it for the joy of writing and to attract an audience. I never considered full time writing as I made too much money in my professional career to consider switching. Now I’m just looking to get my books published and enjoy connecting with readers and other writers.
I appreciate your optimism. I fervently hope you are right. When thinking of the future of fiction writing, I worry that that fewer and fewer people read novels and short stories these days. It may simply be my set, or my demographic, or whatever you want to call it, but I hardly ever hear people talking up a recent novel. In the meantime I hear plenty of people sharing their opinions about shows they've been watching on Netflix. Even in my weekly writer's group, I hear more enthusiasm for TV dramas and movies, than for recent books. It bugs me. It saddens me, but this feels like it's the evolving reality. With literature, individual readers can have very different subjective experiences of a story. With movies and TV shows I think the experience is more uniform. Something is being lost for sure. I wish more young people were excited about books. Maybe they are and I just don't know it.
This is similar to a discussion I'm having elsewhere in the comics with Mark. My take on this is that I've never experienced discussion about novels, because I've rarely read mainstream literature. I have read weird scifi stuff, or OLD scifi stuff, and nobody around me reads those things.
That's where the more niche online communities can make a difference, I think.
I remember back in the 90s, when I was still at school, there was maybe one other kid who was watching the show 'Babylon 5'. Nobody else had heard about it. But online, I hung out in the alt.babylon5.uk usenet newsgroup and had wonderfully in-depth discussions.
That's why genre fans have conventions, because we tend to be scattered around the country/world and need to actively get together to feel that community cohesion. It's easier for people who read more mainstream stuff, or the books that win awards and get reviews in the big papers.
Curiously, I've primarily noticed what you're talking about applying to film and TV. Streaming and the move away from scheduled television has short circuited the ability to discuss shows. The 'water cooler' chat the next morning after a big episode is impossible.
The exception is with big shows that are still released episodically, such as The Traitors. That still has a general hubbub of cultural excitement, because everyone is synced up in terms of their watching.
Good point about mainstream vs cult/genre. I admit I mainly read stuff that gets shelved under "literary fiction," a term which has a snotty ring to it doesn't it? I envy those who have the literary community that genre fandom might provide.
Well done. At the moment. I am researching the topic of dopamine pathways in the brain and how corporations design their products and services to manipulate those pathways in order to create the corporate consumption complex. So, when I read your comments about how social media companies have turned themselves into addiction machines because they themselves are addicted to advertising revenue, I got a little of a dopamine buzz myself. An unexpected reward. Cheers.
Yeah, that was an angle I hadn’t fully considered previously. It makes sense of a lot of things, though: it’s fairly obvious what Meta could do to massively improve their products for creators (and users generally), so why don’t they? It’s because they can’t, because they (and their stakeholders) are unable to quit the habit.
Sounds like a thread for a science fiction story. Imagine a society in which people are controlled not by force but through the cultivation of their multiple addictions. Too easy. This other world already exists in the USA, where the president manipulates the masses by giving them their dopamine hits on his social media platform that are then picked up by the mainstream media. Gotta go. See if I got any more likes or new subscribers.
Keep going
https://music.apple.com/us/album/self-esteem/1485043082?i=1485043450
I think where I hit my utopia was when it just became the norm for me to sit down -- after work and dinner and time with the puppies and hanging out with my wife -- to write. That's almost a nightly thing now, although I also take time for some other things -- my Xbox, the six novels I'm reading, going out with friends. I was in a frenzy about 18 months ago, thinking I had to crank out stories and words and whatnot non-stop, and then I burned out and took a nine-month break and came back recalibrated. And now, I'm just relaxing into my little personal utopia. I don't make any money writing, and I have one guy who likes everything I write (he followed me over from Medium), but I'm dropping thousands of words into short stories and serials and working on all my novel projects. I can't complain.
If anything, if there's one thing that could be better, it is presentation on Substack, which is really good, but it can't compare to my website, where I have a 90k word noir serial in full on a single webpage (links to each chapter/episode), but for presentation, you can't beat that. That's what Substack is missing -- better presentation and the ability to really search through an author's archive. The list thing is dismal. There's got to be a better way. Dorothy: Locked & Loaded is going to have 150 episodes, and the only place anyone will be able to find and read them all is my website -- sorry, Substack.