Traditional publishing is dead, but those places might help get you into conventions and stuff to sell your book. Generally though regular old publishing houses are really poor at helping authors and really tend to open them up to scams like paying to join a club so you can vote on the Nebulas and get nothing else in return. Publishers don’t give you any help with insurance, taxes, and any other number of the side aspects of being a writer. Writers that work hard get ahead and most already in the traditional publishing world would self-publish if they could.
I personally think books are going to get more popular as people get bored of shitty videogames and movies. A book is literally like the most expensive and personal movie without any compromises or shortcomings that either of those first modifiers normally require. And self published digital books can be sold for like $4 and still come out good for the author so it’s a low investment for prospective customers.
If you like writing you should do it because you enjoy doing it, but also the goal of writing is to be read. It’s just imaginary without that. Remember that writing just for money sucks, if you really want to make money it’s about trying to find a market need, research it, it’s a lot of extra stuff.
Very few people get to be Stephen King and write piss and get paid for it.
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