Wednesday, December 25, 2013

The Death of Writing as a Career?

Interesting post, on FB of all places.

Richard Russo, "An Open Letter to My Fellow Authors"

Excerpt: 
What the Apples and Googles and Amazons and Netflixes of the world all have in common (in addition to their quest for world domination), is that they’re all starved for content, and for that they need us. Which means we have a say in all this. Everything in the digital age may feel new and may seem to operate under new rules, but the conversation about the relationship between art and commerce is age-old, and artists must be part of it. To that end we’d do well to speak with one voice, though it’s here we demonstrate our greatest weakness. Writers are notoriously independent cusses, hard to wrangle. We spend our mostly solitary days filling up blank pieces of paper with words. We must like it that way, or we wouldn’t do it. But while it’s pretty to think that our odd way of life will endure, there’s no guarantee. The writing life is ours to defend.

ATSRTWT 

Nod to Pietro PC

2 comments:

windwheel said...

Dreadful.
In India, the leading 'Libertarian' writer, Gurcharan Das, as well as some wannabees, opposed the end of price discrimination in publishing.
(Vide- http://socioproctology.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=publishing+dicks)
Authors oughtn't to be paid for their books but for writing. Otherwise you get the same book in a slightly different guise every couple of years whereas, on the other model, there is a lot of market discovery going on- which is what language is for.
'Only stupid people read'.

Tom said...

Dreadful!
He wants artists/writers "to speak with one voice"! Why then would we need more than one? Next, he complains to these artists that they are "hard to wrangle". Apart from BDSM fantasies, who in hell wants to be wrangled?

Yes, the world is changing.Resisting that is futile. The way to handle change is to LEAD it!