9 April

Slow Death Of The American Author? Reports Of My Death Are Premature.

by Jon Katz
Death Of The American Author
Death Of The American Author

Scott Turow, the head of the American Author’s Guild has written an angry and passionate piece in the New York Times this week lamenting the “Slow Death Of The American Author,” citing the digital revolution, e-books, pirated books, Amazon, the corporatizing of publishing, foreign imports, recent court rulings, the plummeting price of books and shrinking royalties. Turow, a gifted best selling novelist, was both angry and dire in his prediction that new and mid-list writers (me) would not be able to survive all of these legal and digital and economic changes.

The piece is pretty grim, I have to say, yet I also have to say I don’t feel about my future the way Scott Turow does.  Writing and reading and story-telling are flourishing as never before,  I am writing more than ever before, and steadily building a whole new kind of audience. If I do my work, they will support it. For me,  the challenge of the writer is to change, not to vanish from the earth.

My writing life has surely changed, and I’ve shared some of that with you. Even without owning two farms, revenue from advances and royalties has shrunk as the digital revolution hit the writing life like a tsunami. My royalty checks buy us a few meals at Momma’s.  I think when people like Scott Turow, who is conscientiously fighting for the writes of embattled authors talks about the author, he is talking about people who used to take several years to write a book, could live off of the revenues generated by advances and royalties from hard cover books. That has changed. I can’t simply write a book every year or two and live off of that. Books are too cheap (or free) for me to compete with in the wold way. I need to develop new and diverse platforms for my writing, story-telling, and to take more responsibility for my own marketing.

I began doing that five or six years ago. The blog is part of it. So is social media. The videos are part of it. The photography began as part of it, and has evolved into something else. I am planning to begin a series of podcasts soon, another way of reaching current and prospective readers. My life is not the same as it was, and I am a New York Times bestseller (five different times). But to be a different kind of writer, a new kind of writer isn’t the same thing as being a vanishing writer. I am getting where I need to be. My blog is not just about selling books, it is about my life – and in many ways, yours.

About 30,000 people visit my blog every day. More than 10,400 people follow me on Facebook, more on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. I average 4,000 views a video on YouTube. None of these statistics and outlets would have been considered a part of the writing life of John Updike, Philip Roth or F. Scott Fitzgerald. They will be part of the new author and his or her life, the new scorecard, more important than reviews or literary luncheons.

There are so many opportunities now for writers to share and sell their stories, even in all of the chaos of change. More stories are being bought and read by more people in more ways than at anytime in human history. If I can’t make a living in that environment, then I deserve to go the way of the dinosaur. My challenge is to evolve, not complain, to survive, not disappear, to see my writing future as vital, not over.  I accept the reality of the Internet. It is here, and I can either get hit by the train or jump aboard.  I haven’t noticed any publishers going broke. Freed of the constraints of returns, packaging and shipping, publishers are making boxcars full of money. Writing is not a dying industry.

Scott is correct that the Internet has obliterated traditional publishing notions of publishing, royalties, payments. Writers will not be supported by generous publishers or subsidized in their lives any longer. Maybe that is too bad, but for me, this is what creativity is all about. Being creative. I think too much of the American author to think they will roll over and disappear. We are a stubborn and inventive lot.

I have no crystal balls and can’t say for sure if I will survive as a writer. I plan to. My agent says I have positioned myself well to move into the next chapter of writing, and we’ll see about that. I intend to remain both relevant and creative. I think reports of my death are premature.

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