Go back through any list of the great works and you’ll find a great deal of populist authors. Shakespeare, Dickens, Herman Melville, etc were producing the exact kinds of works you’re looking down on.
Perhaps something fundamentally changed, but it seems more likely bias is talking here.
Dickens pioneered the model of serial publication on which other authors of his time (notably Tolstoy) made much comment.
You've failed to mention Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was constantly in debt, damned near killed himself with one of his two possessions (a revolver, the other being a nickel), broke and unemployed in San Francisco. His relative financial flush later in life was largely due to his father-in-law's support. And asses-in-seats on the lecture circuit.
Melville, like many other authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald of Gatsby fame comes to mind) saw a greatly-increased fame after his death, with Moby Dick becoming reestablished on the centennial of Melville's birth, some 28 years after his death. Melville worked during his life as a clerk, sailor, and farmer. His writing career met with very limited financial success. His works were great, no doubt, his income failed to measure up, and could hardly be considered his chief incentive. Later in life, like Twain, Melville benefitted by inheritance and lectures.
Further we never got to read a book by Shakespeare because of the lack of copyright at the time. Imagine a world where he had more time to devote to such things.
Similarly Dickens was hampered by being paid by the word.
Melville on the other hand wrote Moby-Dick through the commercial success of less famous works. What happened later in life isn’t particularly relevant here, what’s generally considered the greatest work of western literature was completely dependent on someone being paid for their writing. It wasn’t some breakout novel from a new writer it’s the culmination of serious refinement of his talents that takes not just inspiration and life experience but time.
Book sales at the time of Shakespeare would have been hampered by a number of factors, including the slow rate of printing presses (about 60--120 impressions/hour), the cost of books (cheap pulp-based paper had yet to be invented), and low literacy rates (25% or less of the population).
It wasn't until all of those were developed, largely during the 19th century, in which printing rates increased roughly a millionfold (wood grape-crush presses to electrically-powered, steel-framed, Linotype-set, continuous-paper-roll web presses), cheap paper, and 90%+ literacy rates), that owning more than a handful of books became common. Development of the paperback further accelerated this, often through the re-issue of out-of-copyright "classics" in low-cost libraries for the everyman.
Even the notion of a bookcase or bookshelf as a notable item of furniture is a surprisingly late development, largely since 1860, and growing markedly in prevalence after 1900, judging by Google's Ngram viewer:
<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bookshelf%2C%2...>
(A methodology with issues, but a methodology all the same.)
Sales of modern books are largely all but nonexistent. It might not be only a dozen copies (the famous quote fails to account for multiple ISBNs existing per title), but even a few thousand sales isn't going to support much of a livelihood, and there are ~300k English-language titles published traditionally per year (and have been since the 1950s), expanding to a million or several including "nontraditional" publsihing, going off numbers directly from the US Library of Congress's Copyright office, annual letters, and ISBN issuer Bowker.
<https://writingcooperative.com/half-of-all-traditionally-pub...>
Bowker: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150415233658/https://www.bowke...> (2013)
Office of Copyright: <http://www.copyright.gov/reports/annual/2015/ar2015.pdf> (2015)
Library of Congress: <https://www.loc.gov/static/portals/about/reports-and-budgets...> (2023)
My point wasn't that populist works cannot be created. It's that there are other rationales to writing, that most of the Great Works were written without copyright, that chasing dollars leads, as Schopenhauer expresses far more elegantly and cogently than I can, to sludge (now AI-generated sludge, such as these services <https://www.childbook.ai/> <https://www.createbookai.com/collection/mothers-day-books>.
I'm not opposed to great literature. I'm not opposed to authors being paid. I'm not even opposed to reasonable copyright terms. But I'm pretty well convinced that the existing system actually serves all those goals poorly.
Sure, the occasional author goes stratospheric.
But for most people, the reasons for writing a book differ:
- They can't not.
- It's a calling card. (See the parallel HN submission on business books. Most are extensive advertisements for consulting services. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43940747> Other books essentially sell businesses or systems.
- The writing fills other aims. Book -> Film (asses in seats, or subscription revenues). Advertising bait (mainstay of the publishing industry from ~1860 to, variously, 1950--2000, see my fave Hamilton Holt writing in 1906: <https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>.
- Part of some other job. Academics write for tenure, to meet public communications targets, for recognition, or other goals.
- Propaganda. There are organisations which write and sell publications effectively to spread faith and doctrine. Some in the original religious sense, others with political, social, or cultural goals.
- Vanity. Though that may be less successful than other options.
- It's cheap. If the story or idea is in you and can't keep from coming out, why not commit it to the page, or electrons in the cloud? Writing and publishing are cheaper than they've ever been, and if you can break through there's that ever-so-small chance of winning the lottery, sometimes big, often small.
- The materials already exist. A surprising number of books are assembled from lecture notes, speaking points, or essays on numerous topics. (Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is based on his course lecture notes, taught for several decades at the University of Edinburgh. Feynmans Lectures in Physics similarly. These may not be trivial to edit into shape, but working from an existing structure is often quite useful.
At the same time, chasing a buck gives AI sludge, formulaic genre fiction, tired professional and technical books, straight-up bullshit (Depak Chopra, John Gray (the Venus hack, not the philosopher), Erich von Däniken, etc., etc. One thing about pseudoscience is that its authors and publishers are often grifters taking advantage of gullible audiences and markets. Their bullshit books are actually a sorting and marketing mechanism to other goods and services (e.g., fortune-telling, pyramid schemes, cults, and the like.) All of that is driven by profit, without any regard to quality.
