Why Writers Disappear
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
Last week, I spoke to a gathering of librarians in Washington State.
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I was asked to speak on the changes in publishing for my first talk, because those changes have an impact on all of us. But I struggled a bit with the topic for my second. So I put on my reader hat and thought about the things that frustrate me as a reader. I came up with “Why Writers Disappear.”
My thinking was this: How come writers vanished from bookstands? Why would a seemingly successful writer (to a reader) never write another book? Why did series end in the middle even when two more books were planned?
Most readers—and most writers—don’t know the answer. I do.
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Everything Dean Wesley Smith and I do as teachers of writing and writing business is to designed to keep writers in the profession, to keep them writing, and to make sure they still have careers fifteen years from now.
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Almost no one does continuing education for professionals, and even fewer teach the business of writing.
Yet business is the primary reason that writers disappear.
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Like everything else in publishing, this trend of the disappearing writer is changing. Fewer writers will disappear because they can indie-publish the works that traditional publishers don’t want. But even then, not all of our favorite writers who have “vanished” have made an indie-comeback. And there are a variety of reasons for that.
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Writers disappear because:
1. They can’t get a new book contract under that name.
2. They can’t get a new book contract because their genre has vanished.
3. They became toxic—and that toxicity trickled through the entire industry.
4. They achieved all their goals.
5. They were no longer interested in writing.
6. They moved to a different part of the industry.
7. They got discouraged.
8. They couldn’t handle the solitude.
9. They couldn’t handle the financial problems inherent in a writing career.
10. They had life or health issues that interfered with the writing
11. They didn’t keep up with the changes in the industry.
12. They sold or gave away too many rights to their books.
Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch and must-read if you don’t want to disappear.
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This is very interesting. I’m glad someone is writing about writers disappearing, because it happens alot.
And it feels sad to me. One of the reason I’m so pissed off at the Publishing Industry is because they made writers disappear; they took writers with talent and promise and they messed with them over contracts and genres and blacklisting. They treated them as disposable and unimportant.
The cost to writers and to readers is immeasureable. I find it hard to forgive.
I also really hope that any writer thinking about Traditional Publishing today will pay a great deal of attention to her #12.
I would add that they are sometimes “branded” out of the ability to grow that inspired them to write in the first place.
Once you establish a track record in a certain genre, it becomes relatively easy to sell books in that genre and agents and editors start to think of certain types of books as being your signature. While a writer may want to stretch creative boundaries, she may find that to do so means giving up all of the success she has worked for up to that point, or starting over with a new “brand.” The older you get, the less appealing it is to want to start over as a beginner.
So a writer who feels she has said all she wants to in a particular genre, and is blocked or ignored when entering another one might just decide to take up sheep herding or something. Get a real, steady job that has a pay check and is less entrepreneurial.