Writing the End of the Book

I had lunch with a friend in Toronto recently. He’s a literary agent. He’s one of the best in the business, and represents more than 350 of Canada’s brightest lights in literature, theatre, art and culture. I was there on other business, but we did have a few minutes to chat about my own writing career, and the news he delivered brought no cheer to my bookish heart.

According to my friend, book sales are down about 40% across Canada. This is part of a trend that pre-dates our current economic slump, and therefore will likely not respond when the economy starts its languid recovery.

It seems that I’m writing at the end of the age of books.

For those on tenterhooks for me to cut-to-the-chase (a rarity) here it is: I love writing books, and want to keep doing it. So how, in the age of Twitter and Facebook and Kindle and E-Readers, can an upstart like myself make money crafting stories more than 140 characters in length? Jump to the end of this posting to add your comments.

For the rest of you:

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my Dharma – my purpose in life – is to write. I’ve been scribbling most of my life. When I was a teenager I used to slip out the back door in the middle of the night and perch under a street lamp and write the most ghastly, angst ridden poetry. I’ve penned stories for my collage newspaper and for The Globe and Mail; sold more than one hundred and fifty stories to dozens magazines and papers and had two books published; all the while trying to hold down other meaningful work to afford luxuries such as a mortgage, child support and premium beer.

So this news sucks. At least, it seems to.

And I’m trying to figure out what to do. I think a lot of writers are.

I’ve always said that the writing part of being a writer is easy. I’ve never had much trouble getting the words out. I’ve never experienced writers block. I have often suffered from a scarcity of time to write, and more often from a lack of focus or discipline, but my challenge hasn’t been writing: my challenge has been to make a living writing. The last time I tried was in the mid nineteen nineties and it was slim pickings’ around the Legault household, let me tell you (domestic beer….).

Making a portion of my living as a writer is important to me. It’s a symbol that my writing has value to others; it’s a symbol that people are reading my writing and that they are willing to support my writing with their hard earned pay. Earning at least part of my income as a writer will allow me to keep writing for some time to come.

There’s a lot to be said for the notion that I should just keep writing regardless of who wants to pay for it. If it’s my purpose to write, then I should let nothing stop me. There’s also something to be said that the need to be read has a good deal to do with my ego. While both arguments are true, I’m exercising my basic human right to ignore them.

I’m not a big trend spotter. I still have a pair of “dad-jeans” in my closet. But here are the trends that I see in writing and publishing: first, books are being replaced by digital media. E-books are a part of that, but blogs, citizen journalism, and all manner of social networking sites are providing content where professional writers, journalists and novelists once plied their trade.

Secondly: online, content still seems to be king, but it seems to be getting shorter and shorter.

I recently signed up for Twitter, which until a couple of weeks ago I thought would make me look like a complete twit. I have a hard time taking anything on which one tweets very seriously. But there it is. I have three followers, and I’m pretty sure they are just a “pity” group; you know, the people who choose to follow me because I picked them as the people I wanted to follow.

One friend suggested that Twitter was like Facebook, but with less crap, and shorter postings. To me, Twitter seems like a microcosm of what is happening to content, and I’m trying to figure out how I can compress what I’m trying to say with my life into 140 character Tweets. (For example, last week I sent the manuscript for my next novel – The Darkening Archipelago – to my publisher. At 610, 654 characters (110,000 words) I would have to post 4,362 tweets to convey this books content to the Twitosphere. My three followers might protest. At least their dissent would be brief.)

Digital media contains much promise, and some considerable peril, for writers. I feel like a messenger without a medium.

The digital book market today is where the digital music market was five or ten years ago, but without the promise of Napter to force a solution, though Google might provide the necessary incentive for more publishers to recognize the trend. E-Readers like the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader could be to books what the iPod was to music, but they have yet to catch the imagination and wallet of the general public. The promise is great: who didn’t want one of those crazy reading tablets that Captain Jean Luc Picard had on Star Trek the Next Generation? But Captain Picard didn’t have to tot his around in rainy Vancouver, or worry about running out of power in the middle of a plot twist. He didn’t read in the bathtub much, though that’s unsubstantiated.

And what will happen to Libraries and book stores if books vanish? Will the great books stores of my life go the way of Sam the Record Man?

Then there is the story of the Cushing Academy, a prep-school near Boston, Massachusetts, that is replacing its collection of 20,000 books with 18 Kindles, three giant flat screen computer monitors, and a coffee shop. The headmaster explains that he’s replacing the schools meager collection of books with millions becoming available online.

I just don’t know what to make of that.

My literary agent friend explained that I’m a writer between mediums. Books are dying and digital media has yet to catch hold. We’re struggling how to monetize this new format.

But monetize it we must. As a lifelong environmentalist, I know we can’t keep printing books on paper, even if it is ancient forest friendly. I can’t write environmental murder mysteries on an environment that has been murdered.

And monetize it we must: if anybody but the biggest names in literature are going to keep writing books, then we have to find a way to pay them. If we don’t, we’ll all just be blogging about what we did on the weekend with our kids.

I’ve always imagined myself to be a pretty modern person. A little stogy, but also on the cutting edge. Ok, maybe not. But I want to be. And it looks as if I will have to be, if I’m going to write books for a living. I just don’t know what my books will look like when I finally trick a big publisher into accepting my stories for print.

So I turn to you: tell me what you see as part of the trend in digital publishing: how are writers going to make a living? What is the future of books? What can we do to actually get out in front of this transformation of the written word?