Just to depress you all...

[Marc Joan]

...or spur you on to greater and more focused efforts, here is some unpleasant reading -- someone pointed me in the direction of the following:

Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically, Arts Council England reports

There's nothing very new here, in a sense; I've been reading similar reports for years. But I'd be interested to know how people react to this; is it a case of literary culture being doomed, literary efforts being pointless, etc etc ... or has it in fact always been thus, and therefore that rising above the herd requires now, as it always has and will, a significantly unusual combination of at least two of the three qualities of talent, luck and persistence? Do we throw up our hands in despair and hit the bottle, or do we laugh in the face of puny adversity as drooled over by Guardian journalists?

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Not depressed. The wannabe published writer is a market too readily ripe for the plucking, and the pendulum's got some necessary adjusting to do.

 

[Emurelda]

Not depressed. The wannabe published writer is a market too readily ripe for the plucking, and the pendulum's got some necessary adjusting to do.

Love the pendulum analogy - they do swing both ways after all. Cycles.

 

[Alistair Roberts]

A bit of both. The world is changing, and at too fast a pace. Life is a rush, until you die. Then, well, it's too late. What the answer is, I don't know. Perhaps (as always) the answer lies within the human imagination.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

This article from The Digital Reader makes some pertinent points about book sales figures:

https://the-digital-reader.com/2017/12/17/no-one-wants-buy-litfic-anymore-uk-arts-council-going-waste-taxpayer-funds

Statistics are often wildly misleading, for they're quoted without any context of how they were gathered. Using the Nielsen Bookscan data alone is foolish, as it only covers print sales, but this is what the Arts Council did to show that literary book sales were in decline. This is disingenuous of them, (not to say deliberately deceitful), for they know that sales of ebooks are on the increase.

For a long time, I've been puzzled by how traditional news media steadfastly ignore ebooks. I regularly consult the book review pages of online newspaper sites, but they never mention recently published ebooks. The only time that ebooks are reported, is in daft stories about how anyone can become an overnight best-selling author by uploading their manuscript to Amazon. It's weird how newspapers have a policy of pretending that their readers don't consume literature in any way but the printed form—especially when you look at how much of their so-called reporting is filched from the internet! I don't understand what it is they think they're protecting, for every media corporation has its fingers in digital and traditional print forms of literature.

I'm about to submit my four Cornish Detective novels to a digital publisher called Bookouture, and have been researching their operation. Browsing the profiles of their existing writer clients, several have achieved sales of more than a million copies, including Angela Marsons with 2.5 million books sold.

http://www.bookouture.com/bookouture-authors/

I'd go so far as to say, that none of these writers are household names, and the only one of Bookouture's clients that I recognised is historical novelist Debbie Rix, who used to be a presenter for the BBC. Despite this anonymity, they're outselling established authors whose faces regularly appear in newspapers and on television, receiving publicity for being nominated for literary awards. So far as the Arts Council are concerned, none of these digital authors exist—and, hence, none of the readers of their books enters the statistics. Also, all of these writers would be labelled as genre authors, rather than literary authors—which has to be one of the most ridiculous examples of snobbery!