The thing about e-publishing and the web is that, yes, it's slowly providing a place for those less-commercially-viable works to find their audience, but I don't think it's yet consistently providing a way for the authors of those works to get paid enough to do this full time, or even necessarily consistently part time, especially for novel-length works.
And yes, the people who have a story to tell that's just shouting and dancing and wanting to be told will keep telling it, regardless, and may come to tell it very well, over time (as the vast troves of fanfic, among other things, shows us). But they're unlikely to have the benefit of an advance sizeable enough to let them sit down and focus on the writing for any period of time.
The demise of diversity in publishing isn't that old. Even 20 years ago, there were more mid-sized publishers in Canada, at least, than there are now, by a significant number.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-04-21 11:12 am (UTC)And yes, the people who have a story to tell that's just shouting and dancing and wanting to be told will keep telling it, regardless, and may come to tell it very well, over time (as the vast troves of fanfic, among other things, shows us). But they're unlikely to have the benefit of an advance sizeable enough to let them sit down and focus on the writing for any period of time.
The demise of diversity in publishing isn't that old. Even 20 years ago, there were more mid-sized publishers in Canada, at least, than there are now, by a significant number.