circularabbitat

Comment Threads

• davharris commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  Charlie Well, I'm just so glad you keep writing, and are managing to make a reasonable living at it. David...
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  Good. A relative didn't heed my warnings, and ended up taking a year off of work to write her masterpiece historical fiction novel... which nobody would buy. This then leads into the troubles with self-publishing, and the difficulty in getting a job after two years being unemployed. This doesn't mean "don't write." It means go into it with appropriate expectations and goals....
• heliostatic commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  Charlie, thank you for writing, and for writing well. That's not something I get to say to everyone whose work I appreciate, so I'm especially glad when I can....
• Charlie Stross commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  Josh Robbins: However, it's a message that beginning SF-only writers need to understand. To be successful as a full-time fiction writer, the less risky path is to work on mainstream novel writing first. After enough success with that, an SF novel could be attempted if a publisher is willing to pay a large enough advance. WRONG. "Mainstream" is itself a genre category -- genre being a convenient tag that tells bookstore staff where to shelve books. Figures from memory: SF/F accounts for about 7% of fiction sales in the US market, while Mainstream is around 11%; crime/thrillers are around 16%,...
• sethg-prime commented on CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?
  I have read (perhaps in another CMAP?) that genre publishers prefer authors who can maintain a certain rate of output: i.e., if your first novel comes out in 2010, they'd really like to have a second novel queued up for 2011, so that the buzz generated by the first novel is put to good use. So what happens to mid-list writers who can't sell enough books to quit their day jobs, but can't write fast enough in their spare time to keep up the pace that their publishers want?...