Guardian - a new report commissioned by Arts Council England revealed that collapsing sales, book prices and advances mean few can support themselves through writing alone.
The report found that print sales of literary fiction are significantly below where they stood in the mid-noughties and that the price of the average literary fiction book has fallen in real terms in the last 15 years.
The growth in ebook sales in genres such as crime and romance has not made up for the shortfall in literary fiction
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In the '80s Terry Pratchett, later Sir Terry, OBE, was writing his wonderfully funny and humane Discworld novels, which not only made him a multi-millionaire the hard way, but were also "the most-shoplifted books" in the UK. Unlike Rowling's, his books were (a) well-written and (b) not relentlessly hyped to the skies, in the US being practically ignored except by readers who eagerly bought them from shops in Canada and the UK.
Could the decline in fiction sales be related to his death in 2015, aged only 66, from complications from Posterior Cortical Atrophy?
Kroeber explained the end of cultural eras as the exhaustion of a pattern. Nobody wonders at the downward trend in Greek tragedy after Sophocles. Or the demise of Hollywood movies. Reading has become more important than ever with the internet but this is an era of the tweet and the blog.
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