Why I don't take career advice from Cory Doctorow
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 4:40PM One of the very odd things about the writing business is how complete strangers, with no knowledge of it except that they once bought a book, will tell you how you should be running your professional career, usually with a starting declaration that you somehow got everything wrong in the first place.
It’s a bit like someone buying a copy of ‘The Dummies Guide to Excel’ and thinking it qualifies them to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. But hey… I may have sixteen or so books out there in twenty plus languages, a movie, a TV series in development and a career that’s kept me happy for a good few years.
It still doesn’t stop someone responding to an anti-piracy piece with the familiar retort, ‘It’s advertising, dude. Haven’t you read Cory Doctorow? Don’t you know what the future is?’
Actually I don’t know what the future is, and nor do many people in publishing right now. Though I do know a future in which books are stolen, not paid for, isn’t one that’s headed for happy times.
All the same the ‘listen to Doctorow’ stuff does crop up all the time. Cory Doctorow is entitled to his opinions. He works in a very different field to mine, science fiction, one that appeals to the geek crowd who seem to think they know everything there is to know about where publishing is headed. Good luck to him.
But before anyone else comes onto this site and advises me to learn at the feet of Cory Doctorow will you please take a look at these two pages.
This is a list of Cory Doctorow’s books available through the busy libraries of South East England.
This is a list of mine.
Doctorow has eight entries, all of them standard books. I have one hundred and eleven which cover hardback, paperback, audio and large print. I’m sure in his own field he outsells me greatly. But in mine it’s no contest, as one would expect.
This doesn’t mean I’m a ‘bigger’ writer than him, except in the libraries of south east England maybe. His fans have doubtless never heard of me, any more, I expect, than my followers of Italian crime go in much for SF.
The book world is colossal and complex and, thank goodness, full of enormous variety. A publishing model that works for Cory Doctorow will never work for me, because I have a different readership, notably a very strong one in libraries for loaned print copies, which is a market self publishing and free electronic versions simply cannot reach.
This is not a one-size-fits-all business, thank goodness. And anyone who thinks it is simply displays their basic ignorance of how it works.
Update
Cory Doctorow was on Twitter after this post appeared, very quickly indeed. A bit of our polite and interesting interchange is below. Let me make this clear. What I’m saying here is that I believe people who tell me, and writers like me, ‘Use Cory Doctorow as your career template’ are deeply misguided. But I don’t think Cory Doctorow’s career template for himself is wrong in any way. It’s clearly very successful.
Reader Comments (7)
[...] discussion was prompted by a blog post of David Hewson’s, Why I don’t take career advice from Cory Doctorow, in which he basically says “A publishing model that works for Cory Doctorow will never work [...]
Yes that's exactly how I remember it. I think it was before he wrote much
fiction too. Not sure I got the point there
Clarke proposing navigation using geostationary satellites as beacons in an idle thought (which is more analogous to EGNOS) is not the same as inventing GPS, and is not the same as building a revenue stream from it.
Details in http://dvice.com/archives/2010/07/arthur-c-clarke.php
Steven Johnson's TED talk has an entertaining and slightly more accurate take on how GPS was invented.
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html
Doctorow has never let mere facts get in the way of his rhetoric.
Quite a big fact too
Clarke's second revenue stream was running a scuba diving school in Sri Lanka. Asimov's was writing factual science books. Doctorow's is talking about Cory Doctorow.
Oh dear. My opinions have prevented you stealing my book. I am truly concerned.
Isn't interesting how 20% of the market thinks it wags the dog? I've taken to pointing out to people that a decade after the advent of iTunes, the music industry, which is often used as a (false) analogy to ebooks, makes only 30% of its revenues from digital. The future of ebooks is not inevitable. Nothing is.
I also find it amusing and ironic that this poster castigates you, but loves Doctorow---who bragged in the Twitter stream that his made a mid-six figure advance from the same dinosaur industry this guy loathes.