So I’ve been reading about writing. Or more properly, about publishing. It’s really kind of a fascinating story. The paperback novel, as we know it, is less than a century old. It was essentially invented for soldiers during the Second World War. In the economic downturn after war, it made for a cheaper way for people to buy books. There were lots of big publishers in the fifties and sixties, and then they started being bought up by large corporations. They became much more bottom-line oriented. And it became much harder to become a fiction author. In reading about this, it really stands out that it was kind of an incestuous business. Everybody in publishing knew everybody else. You could still send in a manuscript without an agent. You could be discovered—Stephen King didn’t have an agent for his first book. Then things began to change. These days there are five very large publishers in English. ...
Blog of a struggling writer.