Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 

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Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction

what constitutes an entertaining, say, crime novel; hence the value in a 

publisher of literary fiction is not simply distributional, it is a judgement 

of worth. This is why when the Kindle charts are analysed self-

published writers are commonplace; self-published writers of literary 

fiction are not. The upshot is that although it is eminently possible to 

self-publish literary writing it’s very difficult to make money doing so. 

A more promising area is the new world of publishing. Even as big 

publisher ebook sales shrink, there are strong signs that Amazon’s 

own in-house publishing is growing fast. Moreover, this isn’t just about 

genre fiction. Amazon Crossing, their translation arm, has, for instance, 

become reportedly the most significant publisher of translated fiction 

in the United States, hardly an area traditionally seen as a goldmine

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. 

For writers who are willing to rethink what they do and how, the 

opportunities are astounding, at least creatively speaking. For years 

there have been mobile-only stories in Japan that attract a mass 

audience. In China writers are earning millions of yuan writing so-

called ‘original fiction’ for an online audience. Interactive storytelling 

from Inanimate Alice to the Frankenstein app, the iPad edition of 

The Wasteland to a novelistic experience like Arcadia, is coming on 

leaps and bounds. Meanwhile other forms of entertainment like video 

games are moving to a more literary quality. Games like Bioshock 

or Heavy Rain were praised for their high-minded aesthetic and 

storytelling sensibilities. Yet despite this the pace of innovation has 

slowed markedly in recent years. Video games may be extraordinarily 

sophisticated but there is evidence they feel the need for literary 

writers. Producing an app or any kind of digital project takes specific 

skillsets and often costs a good deal of upfront money. Working alone, 

writers are unlikely to have either. 

As with everything then there are rays of light, but the picture is 

genuinely mixed. Go to the Google Document mentioned earlier listing 

digital publishing startups

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. Looking at the creative and commercial 

energy on display, it’s hard not to feel buoyed. Each company tends 

to have a unique and new model. Many will fail, but thanks to the 

sheer quantity of new activities in the area some will work. A site like 

Wattpad, which lets users post and share stories they have written 

from small fragments to vast sequences of novels, has 60m monthly 

active users spending 15bn minutes on the site every month. 64,000 

new stories are uploaded daily, adding to a corpus of over 400m works. 

It may not be literary; but it points in the right direction, suggesting 

that digital technology can greatly facilitate new modes of writing and 

reading. 

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http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/frankfurt-amazoncrossings-10-million-translation-bid-314605

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   https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vcPBUincOjwgIQBjq_qhMPb9QYitgeyl6gQUM1hWQUw/edit 

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