# Will Writers Overtake Readers?



## Philip Overby (May 2, 2014)

This is kind of a writing/publishing related question. Or just something that recently popped into my head. I had a professor that told me one time that "Only other poets read poetry." I couldn't help but think that was partially true. I shifted over to writing stories and novels since then. However, with the ease of publishing and the ability for writers to get their work out there in the world within seconds, will there be a point when the only people reading books are other people that write books? I'm not saying this will happen, but there was a point in time where poetry was considered the thing to do and prose was lower on "writers' ranking" so to speak. 

Is there another form that will take precedence over the novel, or are novels here to stay?


----------



## Devor (May 2, 2014)

First, I think it's silly to think poetry is dead.  Poetry is written music, and now that musical accompaniment is readily available, the bland, written form just feels incomplete.  There are some great poems out there, don't get me wrong.  But the more artistic ballads were an extension of the basic poem, and the basic poem has become subsumed by the music industry.  That has stripped poetry of the support it needs to continue to develop.

But look at how many people try to write song lyrics.

The novel might die someday, but only if you take a narrow definition of novel.  It might be replaced by the novella, or short-story-series, or we might some day define "super-long" novels as being distinct and see the 100k novel die.  I've said before, but in fantasy I expect collaborative novels could be on the rise some day.  Or you might see stories become more interactive, shared-world type things on the internet.  I don't have any specific predictions, but who knows?

But storytelling isn't going to die any more than poems did, and neither will it be killed by film.  Film doesn't capture the core of what a novel is about quite the way that music does for poetry.  The novel may take a different form someday, but its substance will remain unchanged.


----------



## monyo (May 2, 2014)

This sort of phenomenon had occurred to me a while ago, though mainly as being a result of increasing globalization and population growth. Life is short, and there is already vastly too much stuff to learn and experience in one lifetime. Hundreds of years ago a person could have conceivably become knowledgeable in all the major fields of knowledge and experienced most all of the (surviving) great works of art. These days that's completely hopeless, and it's only going to get harder from here. For example, I believe studies of scientific publications show that human knowledge has a compound interest rate of about 5%, leading to an approximate doubling of the world's knowledge every 15 years. Feel free to disagree with the exact numbers, the point is just that we've long since passed the point where you could read, watch or listen to all the great masterpieces thoroughly enough to really internalize them.

Getting back on topic though, given the limited lifespan, I assume most of us want to focus on the best things. But with every billion more people, especially billions more educated people who aren't living in abject poverty, there are that many more people competing to produce the greatest works of art. It's inevitable that you end up with the vast majority of people focusing on the same few best works, making it perpetually harder for any given person to produce something that's really influential on a large scale.

On the other hand you also have more room for diverse subcultures to spread out. For example, a lot of people just don't care about fantasy and will never read much of it, so you get communities like this one that have their own "greatest works" that everyone wants to read, versus other communities with more or less mutually exclusive hierarchies of importance. So I suppose while the more mainstream stuff will be perpetually getting harder to break into, the subcultures themselves will continue to grow and become larger. You could imagine a future world population of trillions, where the number of die-hard fantasy readers if greater than the current number of readers of everything put together. Each subculture continues to become more competitive for newcomers to break into as time goes on, especially since you're not just competing against current producers for people's time, but against all the historically produced works as well (I mean guys like Asimov and Jules Verne weren't really that great of writers, imo, and their ideas have probably been done better by other people since then, but we still read the classics if for no other reason than to see the historical influences and development, and out of respect for people who took what, at the time, were really radical leaps). I mainly just wonder that subculture diversification grows at a slower rate than the overall number of works worth experiencing, and at some point you hit a dearth of originality where everyone is mostly rehashing variations of older works. Not that I think we're anywhere near that point yet. Science fiction as a genre is relatively new, even while all the ideas in colonial romance or some such may have already been done, and human progress alone seems to be constantly opening up new avenues for creator types to explore.

I guess my conclusion would be that some genres will get worn out, but new ones will pop up. There's always the cyclical nature of things, too. Things tend to fall in and out of favor, so there's always the chance for people to revive forgotten genres and such.


----------



## Philip Overby (May 2, 2014)

> First, I think it's silly to think poetry is dead. Poetry is written music, and now that musical accompaniment is readily available, the bland, written form just feels incomplete. There are some great poems out there, don't get me wrong. But the more artistic ballads were an extension of the basic poem, and the basic poem has become subsumed by the music industry. That has stripped poetry of the support it needs to continue to develop.



I agree that poetry isn't dead in that sense. But I think what I was getting at is that in the hierarchy of things that sell in the market now (as far as fiction anyway) it goes like this:

1. Novels, Novellas
2. Short Stories (collections, anthologies, etc.)
3. Poetry

Poetry obviously still exists in music and even in prose nowadays. I was a poet most of my life (from high school through college) so I feel like I can say that the only people that ever showed interest in it were other poets. 



> Getting back on topic though, given the limited lifespan, I assume most of us want to focus on the best things. But with every billion more people, especially billions more educated people who aren't living in abject poverty, there are that many more people competing to produce the greatest works of art. It's inevitable that you end up with the vast majority of people focusing on the same few best works, making it perpetually harder for any given person to produce something that's really influential on a large scale.



There is a lot of "must read the best" out there. I believe that's why some people complain about the quality of things they pay for. They expect their money's worth for what the purchase. With all these different camps who define quality in different ways (artistic, entertaining, etc.) it gets harder to pinpoint what will work and what won't work. There's no science to creating influential art. If there was, people would most certainly be buying the book about it. 



> On the other hand you also have more room for diverse subcultures to spread out. For example, a lot of people just don't care about fantasy and will never read much of it, so you get communities like this one that have their own "greatest works" that everyone wants to read, versus other communities with more or less mutually exclusive hierarchies of importance. So I suppose while the more mainstream stuff will be perpetually getting harder to break into, the subcultures themselves will continue to grow and become larger. You could imagine a future world population of trillions, where the number of die-hard fantasy readers if greater than the current number of readers of everything put together. Each subculture continues to become more competitive for newcomers to break into as time goes on, especially since you're not just competing against current producers for people's time, but against all the historically produced works as well (I mean guys like Asimov and Jules Verne weren't really that great of writers, imo, and their ideas have probably been done better by other people since then, but we still read the classics if for no other reason than to see the historical influences and development, and out of respect for people who took what, at the time, were really radical leaps). I mainly just wonder that subculture diversification grows at a slower rate than the overall number of works worth experiencing, and at some point you hit a dearth of originality where everyone is mostly rehashing variations of older works. Not that I think we're anywhere near that point yet.



This is interesting to think about. I agree that I don't think we're at a point where novels are dead, but I do think over time things always change and we may see another form replace it. However, I do think you bring up a valid point. Even if it becomes harder to have wider appeal, I believe the individual communities may become stronger. While poets aren't selling blockbuster books, they do have strong communities, and I respect that. There's the whole saying if you get 1,000 people to like your writing, you can make a solid living off that the rest of your life as long as you keep writing books. I've always been intrigued by that concept. (those 1,000 people always buy your books and tell other people about it, etc.)


----------



## skip.knox (May 2, 2014)

Will writers overtake readers? We would if they'd just slow down!
The proper question is, "is the theater really dead?"
Alternatively, the only people who listen to professors are students. So there.

OK, I'm done with being flip, Mr Wilson. It's true that once upon a time poetry was considered literature while prose fiction was a mere diversion. But that was many centuries ago. At least since Bunyan, novels have been respectable.

Might some new form of literature emerge? Maybe. There were hopes back in the heady days of the 1990s when people thought hypertext story telling might produce something genuinely new. But I doubt it. The really, genuinely new form of story telling, of course, was video. Different medium. As long as it's words, then I think it'll be novels and short stories.


----------



## ThinkerX (May 4, 2014)

I look at the hundreds of thousands of fantasy stories listed on the likes of Wattpad and I wonder:

who has the time to check even a tenth of those stories, let alone read them through?

 Even if most of those entries are serials, that is still a lot of tales...and on their forums I see lots of complaints about tales not being read.


----------



## skip.knox (May 4, 2014)

Writers now find themselves in much the same position as musicians. Too many songs, not enough ears.


----------



## Snowpoint (May 5, 2014)

Game of Thrones is popular today, but remember it was written 30 years ago. It has only now become mainstream. Although the market might feel saturated with content, there is a large demand for content. Look at how many Billion dollar movies are based on comic books. Hollywood doesn't have the luxury of saying, "There aren't any good ideas this year, lets not make a movie." 

Movies have become so expensive producers don't want to risk money on original ideas. They want to invest in comic-book movies because they have an established audience, brand recognition, and Proof of Sales. Producers want to put their money in projects that have already made money - books. So, there needs to be a wealth of new books each year to test the market and see which one will get optioned into a Billion dollar movie. -- It just might take 30 years to happen though...


----------



## buyjupiter (May 5, 2014)

Snowpoint said:


> Game of Thrones is popular today, but remember it was written 30 years ago.



Wait, what? I'm pretty sure pub dates are from 98 at the earliest, although GRRM may have had the ideas 30 years ago...

But more on topic, poetry was mentioned as being dead. And up until late last week, I would've agreed. Then I saw someone performing their poetry, and the key is performance. Poetry, for a while was a written thing, but now it's come back around to being a live experience.

Novels, stories, plays, etc may all take the same path. I can say that audio books are very popular in my house, and a bad narrator can kill my love for a book/author. Alternatively, a good performance will make me forget some of the things that would normally irk me, like repetitive name use in dialogue, or physical tics.


----------



## Steerpike (May 5, 2014)

buyjupiter said:


> Wait, what? I'm pretty sure pub dates are from 98 at the earliest, although GRRM may have had the ideas 30 years ago...



First book was published in '96 or '97. I believe. I remember buying it on a whim when it first came out.


----------



## ThinkerX (May 5, 2014)

First GOT book came out in the mid 90's.

There was a serial featuring what became the first Dany chapters in Analog or Amazing a few years prior to that.


----------



## Devor (May 6, 2014)

According to Wikipedia, Game of Thrones was published in 1996, and the TV show premiered in 2011.  But it was popular with fantasy readers before the show came out.  And according to Wikipedia,



			
				Wikipedia said:
			
		

> According to David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the two came up with the idea of adapting George R. R. Martin's novels to the screen in 2006, after Benioff began reading the first novel, _A Game of Thrones_.



...so it took ten years for GoT to reach a point where they wanted to make the TV series.  That seems like a better benchmark to go with to me.


----------



## Snowpoint (May 6, 2014)

Ok. For whatever reason I though it was 1986. Just remembered it wrong. which is still only 25 years, but still. It took 10 years for a very popular book to make it into the hands of someone who could actually bring it to television, then another several years to sell the idea to HBO.

Harry Potter was published in 1997 and made it to film in 2001, which is almost instant turn around. So, boo-who I'm wrong again. Sometimes these things get picked up really fast.


----------



## ThinkerX (May 6, 2014)

And the 'Lord of the Rings' was around for a good half century before being made into a movie with live actors....and 'The Hobbit' is just now coming out.  

Terry Pratchets 'Diskworld' books have yet to make it past the animated movie stage, despite considerable popularity.

GRRM spent a lot of time writing screenplays, and had the connections to build off of.


----------



## Noma Galway (May 6, 2014)

ThinkerX said:


> Terry Pratchets 'Diskworld' books have yet to make it past the animated movie stage, despite considerable popularity.



That's not true...I've seen Hogfather and Going Postal, and there are others. The guy who plays Tywin Lannister in GoT plays Lord Vetinari in Going Postal.


----------



## ThinkerX (May 7, 2014)

> That's not true...I've seen Hogfather and Going Postal, and there are others. The guy who plays Tywin Lannister in GoT plays Lord Vetinari in Going Postal.



Dang...when did this happen?  I be way behind the curve here.


----------



## Ruby (May 7, 2014)

2,200,000 new books were published worldwide last year.
292,014 in the USA
149,800 in the UK
(Source: Wikipedia for the complete list).
Of course, this is an approximation and how do we know if these figures are accurate?
How many of these books will you read?


----------



## Philip Overby (May 7, 2014)

One way I think we can avoid too many stories and not enough readers is to continue to spread the word to reader and non-reader friends alike about cool books. I think there's always the problem of "do I want to spend time reading this?" when there are so many other forms of entertainment nowadays. I do think there are some voracious readers out there and I think they should be elated that there is so much to choose from nowadays. 

That's why in the article I wrote not too long about about "Is Fantasy Too Safe?" I put out there the idea of writing things that are too similar is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that readers that like that sort of thing never run out of stuff to read. A curse because some of these books aren't getting people who don't read to read. Harry Potter did that for sure. I think every author should thank their lucky stars for authors like J.K. Rowling. Seriously. As long as blockbuster authors exist, books will continue to be sold and readers will continue to read. It's when things get slow is when it might become a problem of not having enough readers.

That's why I'm trying to take the advice my friend got when he took his manga in to be evaluated by an editor here in Japan. The editor said that manga that win competitions are the ones that are "the most something." Meaning the cutest, the weirdest, the craziest, the most inspirational, etc. I've decided I want to put that philosophy on my own writing. Part of it comes from that advice and part of it comes with my recent fascination with Jodorowsky. His style is so out there that it can't help but be interesting for me. I really, really want to get some of his comics. They look completely bonkers. 

Anyway, rant over.


----------



## ThinkerX (May 7, 2014)

> 2,200,000 new books were published worldwide last year.
> 292,014 in the USA
> 149,800 in the UK
> (Source: Wikipedia for the complete list).
> ...



Gah!

That many!

Wonder if it includes the likes of Wattpad?

And at best, I'll get to maybe five hundred of them...and probably less.

Even a couple decades ago, I doubt I got to a thousand books a year.


----------



## writeshiek33 (May 8, 2014)

sadly where i m books tend to disappear from bookshops year by year the fantasy/scifi section decreases to small size


----------



## Jabrosky (Jun 7, 2014)

I do believe writers will someday overtake readers if they haven't already, but my reasons for believing this are different from the OP.

Humanity has always and probably always will enjoy stories, but frankly most kids these days get their stories not from written literature but from movies, TV, video games, or maybe comic books. Unfortunately all of these latter media require more money, resources, and various artistic skills than the majority of young people possess. On the other hand any ignoramus with a word processor can type out a few sentences. Ergo, you have a lot of kids in this generation who set out to be writers not because they have any inherent love for literature, but because writing _looks_ easier and more economical than Hollywood, game design, or the comics industry.

Of course there are still plenty of young people who read (otherwise you wouldn't have all these movies adapted from popular YA novels), and of course anyone who actually has writing experience can tell you that it's not as easy as it may appear.


----------



## Gurkhal (Jun 7, 2014)

Myself I don't think that readers will ever overtake writers but that's because I have a more narrow definition of writers than many may do. For example while I myself can and do put together shorter pieces of fiction I wouldn't call myself an author untill I'm professionally publiced.

But if you mean that anyone who writes some sort of fiction in any kind of form and under any circumstances, then yes, writers hav probably overtaken readers by now. But since writers also tends to be readers it might even out anyway.


----------



## pmmg (Oct 21, 2022)

Well this is a depressing thread.  I would say only that its not really a one on one match. One who reads can read faster than one who writes can create. So one person can read many more books than one writer can create. And while the total number of written works increases. Some/many fade into oblivion.  Not sure what it all means. I dont need many to like my work. Just enough of some to make it a profitable exercise.  It would suck to put in all the effort for no one to see.


----------



## Gurkhal (Oct 21, 2022)

Hail to you, Necromancer. Why have thou summoned this thread from the sleep of death?


----------



## Demesnedenoir (Oct 22, 2022)

It is interesting to look at this question eight years later and I think it's safe to say that the answer is no, at least for the time being.

I've also had a lot of conversations with readers, and to be frank, the greatest number of them, self-professed avid readers, don't see themselves as writers. Everybody has a story in their head, but putting that down on paper (computer) and doing it well is another beast. Booktok and other book-themed social media demonstrate the novel as being alive and well, and despite the ease of publishing, most—normal, sane—folks don't seem inclined to take that step.


----------



## FifthView (Oct 23, 2022)

Maybe we should work to reduce the cost of ghostwriting. Or do we just wait for AI tech to improve even further?


----------



## pmmg (Oct 24, 2022)

FifthView said:


> Or do we just wait for AI tech to improve even further?



Not sure we can stop the approach of AI. There is a bit of it out there now, and already its impressive.

Hey, but maybe AI will want to buy and read my stuff so...


----------



## Ban (Oct 24, 2022)

I don't see the rise of AI as a competitor as at all likely. I've played around with AI "writing" apps and so far they're incapable of even making two successive sentences make sense, let alone an entire novel's worth of text. To my mind, the only way for an AI to ever write convincing prose is for it to either 1. Be heavily guided by a human writer, or 2. Be equipped with the equivalent of a human brain. In both cases you end up with, effectively, a human writer being the source of the product. Thus, nothing would have changed in the grand scheme of things. The only difference is that some of our writers possess more screws and bolts than others.

And as for writers overtaking readers, the last 8 years have proven that we have nothing to worry about. Echoing Demesnedenoir, the amount of people willing to put in the years-long effort of becoming less than crummy at writing and finish a novel worth reading is small as can be. You'll always have more people daydreaming about doing something than actually doing it, simply due to a scarcity of time, energy and willpower.

Lastly, on the OP's "Only other poets read poetry" .... well ain't that the truth haha.


----------



## Prince of Spires (Oct 25, 2022)

I think Brandon Sanderson proved that the written word isn't dead when he created the biggest Kickstarter of all time with a bunch of books. It is still very much alive and kicking. And when I look at my own kids (7 and 5), they still very much like reading. There is still something magical about diving into a fantastical world. Yes, there is competition from all other forms of media, but it's not a zero-sum game. Someone can like both movies, computer games, and books.



Ban said:


> I don't see the rise of AI as a competitor as at all likely. I've played around with AI "writing" apps and so far they're incapable of even making two successive sentences make sense, let alone an entire novel's worth of text


First they came for the cover-artists, and I did nothing, because I'm not a cover artist.
Then they came for the editors, and I did nothing, because I'm not an editor.
Then they came for the writers, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me...

I think the first two are reasonably easy to get decent results with AI. Cover art follows a lot of genre rules and trends. Same with editors. As long as you don't mind sounding like a generic writer AI can help you craft sentences. Writing a whole novel is harder, simply because the internal logic is much more important. It's not just within a single sentence, but between chapters and even between books. I think getting to that level is still a long way off. That doesn't mean we're far away from AI assisted novels, where an author creates the idea and what needs to happen in a paragraph, and the AI fills in the blanks and does part of the editing. It probably wont get you any literary prizes. But if your aim is to get generic stories out fast, then I can definitely see it happening.


----------



## Puck (Nov 17, 2022)

It depends what you mean by a 'writer'.

If you have written something on facebook and someone else reads it - you are technically a writer.  You might not be a pro, but you wrote something, you published it and an audience read it.

There can never be more writers than readers because all writers will also read.

At the end of the day, there will always be a need for writers as long as people like reading.  Writers are also one of the few happy professions that can't be replaced by AI.  Yes you get auto-content generation tools - but they are rubbish except for the more workhorse bog standard content (and potentially dangerous if you don't keep an eye on them).  But strong creative content?  Only a human writer can produce that.  

AI assisted novels?  Don't hold your breath on that one.  Maybe someday BUT by that time we will have self aware robots walking around the place.  So, not until I Robot is real.


----------

