Cory Doctorow on writing and publishing over at Locus:

You’ll probably screw it up (I did). You’ll probably learn and improve (I did). If you’re lucky, you’ll make some money at it (I did). If you’re very lucky, you might make a lot of money at it (not yet!). But, as with any arts venture and any entrepreneurial effort, the realistic odds are that you’ll be one of the people whose efforts fail to shake the world. The realistic odds are that you’ll earn more working a regular job in an office than you will trying to invent fictional worlds and then invent new ways of selling them. There’s only one good reason to do that kind of thing: because it makes you sane and whole and happy.

 

Getting people to care about the products of your imagination is a profound and infinitely complex task that will absorb as much attention as you give it. Every book and every author brings a different proposition to the negotiation with readers, but there’s one thing they all have in common: unless someone takes charge of doingsomething, something clever and active and good and slightly improbable, no one will care about the book or the person who wrote it.