A depressed market

IgnatiusJ

Just wondering what people's opinions are on the state of the publishing industry at the moment.

I've heard people claiming that agents aren't taking on any new clients because publishers simply aren't publishing new writers.

The Irish Times quoted one agent (I think it was Jonathan Williams, but I could be wrong) as saying that the fundamental problem in the Irish market at the moment is that more people are writing books than reading them.

A fair reflection of the situation?

pickarooney

I don't really get why there has to be an 'Irish' market for books. A book can be written, 'agented', edited, published and read anywhere in the world.

Spore

Absolutely not. There's a very good reason there's an Irish book market - the Irish market is vastly different from say the British Book market. The Irish on average buy far more books that the average Briton. Crime fiction, misery memoirs, non-fiction does remarkably well here, Britain plumps for their own authors and mostly fiction at that. We read a lot of our own and International crime fiction does well here unlike in Britain.

yes the market is flooded with rubbish - it always has been. For every best-seller there's at least several hundred titles that will sell no more than a few thousand copies (at most, usually only a hundred or two hundred) and get no further than one print run.

But the cream usually rises... Sometimes it takes a long time, a la Hans Fallada. What depresses me most however, is the new craze of 'Celebrity' authors - witness Amy Huberman and her co-bints writing their trashy chic-lit crap and then infecting our airwaves plugging it. Ughh...

/vomits

EileenG

I think the market is changing, and in a way that could benefit writers.

Getting published commercially is getting harder, but it's getting easier and easier to get e-published, and this is no longer a niche thing, it's a big chunk of the publishing market. It makes it much easier to get a book to readers more cheaply, and get the money to the author faster.

Of course, there's a whole lot of crap in the e-pub market as well, but that's a different problem.

iguana

Spore wrote: »

What depresses me most however, is the new craze of 'Celebrity' authors - witness Amy Huberman and her co-bints writing their trashy chic-lit crap and then infecting our airwaves plugging it. Ughh..

This strikes me as so weird. Maybe it's just me but I really, really don't want to read a book by a celebrity author. When I'm reading I don't want to picture the author in my head, I don't want to hear their physical voice, I don't want to know anything about their love life, I don't want to picture them on the front of FHM, I don't want to be in any way familiar with a soap or movie character they have played or seen their faux chemistry with their co-presenter on a chat show.

Admittedly I read books by authors who I have seen being interviewed, but in that case their "celebrity" is as a writer so I don't find it quite as intrusive. But I don't think I could ever read a book by someone who is primarily a soap star or media personality. Maybe I'm missing out on some great work, I'm well aware that someone can have multiple talents and being famous doesn't preclude someone from being an excellent novelist. I'll happily read a novel by someone I know is also a well regarded astrophysicist for example. But if a writer is too well known, I'm too aware of the writer and can't really enter the story.