A thought about books and writing

I write to help me think. I blog in case the things I think might be of interest to other people. But then I am retired.

I once published what i wrote because I had coauthors who wanted to publish and wanted to coauthor. Then I discovered that it was expected that I publish because of the work that I was doing. I also discovered that I liked seeing what I had written in published form and knowing that people were reading it.

I have just been listening to a panel of people talking about publishing in the Internet era. The panel was mostly composed of people who work for publishers. They were interested in publishing to make money. I never made much money from publishing anything, certainly not enough to justify the work in producing something to publish.

The publishers want writers to write what an audience is willing to buy. They want authors to do audience analysis and write things that will be easy to sell. More to the point, they want authors to do analysis of their own audiences and potential audiences. In fairness, they say that writing fiction about vampires for an audience interested in fiction about vampires will help the author who wants to sell his/her pop fiction to make money by writing.

On the other hand, most of the books that I recall and feel I benefited from reading were written to convey information that someone thought worthy of conveying.