THE CAREER NOVELIST
Now, look farther. Imagine you can plug your device into fiber
optic telephone or cable TV lines and access all the on-line data
bases and services in the world. Sound good? Okay, now throw away
your hardware and put on a helmet with a visor screen, and wired-
up gloves. Now you can walk, float, swim, or zoom through this vast
virtual universe, your finger pointing the way.
What will our electronic future be like? Travel is obsolete. Global
business leaders sit down together in picturesque surroundings—
all without leaving their offices, or rather, homes. (Offices are now
obsolete.) Safe sex? No problem. Want to visit Disney World during
the busy season? Do it at home. Shopping for a new house? Don't
leave your chair. Want a good novel? Fly around the stacks at Barnes
& Noble or Borders.
Actually, most electronic forecasters don't see a place in their
brave new world for the novel. To them, novels will be quaint relics
of a bygone era. And novelists? If any survive they will be fringe
entertainers, similar to poets or oral storytellers.
Luckily for us, that day is still far off. How far off is difficult to say.
For the moment, though, let us stick to what exists now and what is
likely to happen in the next five years. What are the key issues for
novelists? What is selling in the electronic marketplace, and for how
much?
THE ELECTRONIC REALITY
First, what are the formats that work for fiction? PC programs on
floppy disk and CD-ROMs are, for now, the only possibilities.
Prices? The news is not thrilling. One of the largest electronic-
rights sales to date was for a nonfiction title, J. K Lasser's Your Income
Tax. A natural for electronic editions, its rights sold for nearly
$500,000. That probably sounds good, but let's look deeper. Rights
to eight Betty Crocker cookbook titles went for a total of $30,000.
The Baedeker Guide rights went for $15,000. Hmmm ... not too
impressive. And those are nonfiction titles, too.
In the fiction field, prices are generally very low. They start at five
hundred dollars (maybe less, for all I know) and creep up from there.
Not very exciting, is it? The worst news of all is that outside of the
children's book field, very little fiction has sold at all.