There is only one constant in the entire universe and that constant is constant change!

So you need to adapt to the changes; and indeed new attitudes!

Which includes people without the requisite attention span/language skills/literacy numeracy, to do their own research, wanting all their research (essays, homework/study, exams) handed to them on a platter, downloaded on a device, by someone else?

I suppose there could be a (free market) lucrative niche publishing market/service provision, right there Don?

Perhaps a good commercial name could be. Plenary pleonasm personified and proffered on a post doctorate platter?

If only to upgrade some reading skills? A must for anyone wanting to read you!?

And good luck with that; and or, your first E book.

Failing that, OLO needs volunteer Editors with you level of precise language skills?

Get you back in the saddle so to speak and expose you to some entirely out of the box thinking?

Hopefully, occasionally maybe, perhaps; bugger, sorry?
Rhrosty.

Sorry Don, but I am in full agreement with the change after Whitlam. If one wishes to be paid rather handsomely by the taxpayer to lecture at university, it does seem fair that they should be too damn busy to be writing books, except on weekends. After all, that is the only time most taxpayers get to indulge in their hobby.

I hope you are not offended with your writing being described as your hobby. To me any activity unable to earn enough to fully support you is a hobby.

I can see your problem, but I think you have missed one other little problem with writing books for a living. That is the net. So many things I have always wanted to learn about, & perhaps understand are now easily available on the net that that I have gone from reading 4 or more books a week, to rarely opening one.

The start of arthritis curtailed my mother's voracious reading in her late 60, & I in my mid 70s have cancelled my subscription to a number of monthly magazines. Holding them up had become painful to my hands, & reading them on a desk causes neck ache.

So Don, unless you can find an economically viable way of publishing fiction on the net, where I can enlarge the print with a click of a mouse, I am afraid it is heading the way of the Dodo bird. Well all but the majority of global warming articles we see here. They most definitely do qualify as fiction, but I doubt your ethics would allow you to publish such rubbish.

Unfortunately most high selling Aussie politics books these days are biographies, autobiographies-memoirs by politicians or other public miscreants who have very recently left power.

Take Bob Carr or Gillard for instance. But even then many/most? of their print runs end up remainded (flogged for $5).

For current academics, making their own books compulsory set reading for students in courses they teach, always helps sales.

Thanks for the comments. For Hasbeen, yes it is my hobby. I have published now more than 2.5 million words but could not have lived through them. But I like writing and people pay me for doing it — not much, it is true, but it helps. And I am aware of the Net. There is a Kindle version available of the novel, and everything I wrote from now on will have an electronic option.