I'm Not Discouraged
douglain posted this discouraging note about genre writing:

"Nobody is even trying to make a living anymore. It's an amateur field now about being cool and published. People spend the little money they do earn on going to conventions where they can pretend to be professional writers."

...and asked for responses. There's been a great discussion in the comments section. I posted a version of these comments there, but then decided to keep a copy here too.

I think that very few genre writers have ever made a living at it during most of their careers. I forget who I was listening to in Toronto a couple years ago, might have been Robert Silverberg, but he was saying there are definitely more writers making a living off SF now compared to 1970, for example. It used to be hard, was the general impression. And I've seen similar statements in requal-related debates around SFWA, saying that there are about 50 genre writers making most of their living off fiction now, if you include work-for-hire, and that's twice as many as there were thirty years ago.

Most of us could list a fairly high percentage of those fifty writers if we thought about it. Almost none of them hang out on live journal, and few of them hang out online anywhere as far as I can tell. That may be worth a different discussion.

Of course, there are also many more writers trying to break in now, I think. In the past forty years, we've gone from no structured programs for genre writers to Clarion, Clarion West, Clarion South, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, Uncle Orson's Boot Camp, as well as the distance MFA programs like Seton Hill, and the rise of internet workshops ranging from the formal Long Ridge Writers and James Gunn workshops to the crit group models of Critters and OWW. That's not even a complete list. Many of these have arisen in the past ten years, or five. I've almost felt at times that the programs were growing faster than markets for fiction.

I have a very strong feeling that there are at least some writers coming out of these programs with a sense of entitlement: "Okay, everybody has been telling me I'm good. Where are my sales?" I have seen resentment of the successful writers in some of these places by those who aren't successful.

So I don't know who made the comment in Doug's post or the context in which it was made. But it sounds like sour grapes to me. It's too easy to go all golden-age on the past. In raw numbers, I'm sure that more writers make a living today than ever before. Look at the list of genre books being published each year in Locus. Isn't it up over 2000 now? Thirty, forty years ago, it was only a few hundred. Many of those writers eke out a living at best, and more supplement it with work-for-hire or other work. I bet that's always been true too. You ever read the biographies of John Jakes (who started out as a genre writer) or Fredric Brown or Clifford Simak or Cordwainer Smith or Philip K. Dick or (insert other writer here)?

The number of those writing-for-a-living writers may be a smaller percentage of the total writers, and I think most of them are outside the online communities of aspiring writers. And I assert there's also a growing number of people who feel entitlted to success, and they make comments like the one in Doug's post. The writers like Elizabeth Bear who are making a majority of their income from fiction are busting ass to do it. There are plenty of examples of them, if you take the time to look.