Today, author Charlie Stross, from this month’s book club selection, joined us for a Q&A, where he filled us his thoughts on how new writers get traction, the skyrocketing of ebook sales (from 1% to 50% of his sales in the last five years), and gave us the first line of his new book coming up in July.
https://gizmodo.com/the-io9-book-club-is-in-session-lets-talk-about-neptu-1475904875
https://gizmodo.com/author-charles-stross-is-here-today-answering-your-que-1480440155
Commenter RM Ambrose asked about how new writers can build their career, and Stross shared these thoughts on the business of writing and publishing:
In 2008, maybe 1% of my sales were ebooks. Today, make that 50%. We’re in the middle of a gigantic format shift as the mass market paperback distribution system withers and dies but the ebook system explodes. Meanwhile, ebooks make self-publishing quite easy … if you know what you’re doing. Clue: authors are authors, not editors, typesetters, cover designers, marketing experts, and accounts clerks. (This is why I don’t self-publish — I’ve got publishers to do the boring stuff for me. It’s this quaint old-fashioned thing called “division of labour”.)
[Robert J.] Sawyer is quite right that it’s getting very hard for new writers to gain traction. All writers face two problems: how do you maximize your readership, and how do you maximize your revenue? These are orthogonal problems, and a strategy optimized to solve one may not optimally solve for the other.
Having said that, I don’t think things are necessarily as bleak as all that. I keep seeing new writers who have somehow broken through all the obstacles that are so daunting to us old-timers, often with spectacular success. The key thing to remember is that, however much you may be devoted to it as an art form, writing is a business. It’s definitely not a lifestyle. (If you want to hear sarcasm, get a group of well-lubricated writers gathered together over a bottle of wine or two and ask them what they think of the mass media depiction of novelists, as opposed to the reality!)
Stross also gave a release date for his next book, “The Rhesus Chart”, due out in July next year — along with the first line of the upcoming novel:
“Don’t be silly, Bob,” said Mo, “everyone knows vampires don’t exist!”
I, for one, am not holding out high hopes for Mo’s fate…
Image: Ronnie Pitman
