Canelo / Arts Council England

Canelo / Arts Council England | 
50

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
33
. 
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
34
. 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. 
33
http://www.thebookseller.com/futurebook/frankfurt-amazoncrossings-10-million-translation-bid-314605
34
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vcPBUincOjwgIQBjq_qhMPb9QYitgeyl6gQUM1hWQUw/edit 

---