How Publishers' Devotion to the Bottom Line Has Curtailed Writers' Freedom of Expression

The road to success has never been easy for any creative artist. The percentage of those who receive the recognition that they deserve - at least within their lifetimes - is always small. All cultures need artistic expression to enable them to grow and to change in response to new challenges that arise with the passage of time, but much of what is already established works always to maintain the status quo. The result is that any work of art that challenges the familiar, that departs from what has been seen and heard before, faces immense resistance - resistance that it's often unable to overcome in order to find its place in the world.

This unfortunate dynamic is well illustrated by the character of our modern publishing climate. For decades, book publishers have been unable to afford taking chances on works that could not be easily labelled, categorized, and put on the shelves alongside similar (or nearly identical) books. How ironic it is that genres like fantasy and science fiction, which are built upon an impetus to paint new wolds of the imagination in the minds of readers, can typically only be marketed to the extent in which they resemble creative statements that were made in the past.

Every established genre in literature began with a groundbreaking work that few people, at the time of its creation, knew how to categorize or even explain. J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, nearly went unpublished because no one (including its author) understood who its intended audience was. Nowadays, imitations of this seminal work comprise the bulk of the very popular Epic Fantasy genre, and whole shelves in most major bookstores are filled with books by newer authors who've emulated the archetypal quest that Tolkien first popularized. The sword-and-sorcery genre has similar origins: much of its modern character has been shaped by recycled elements and themes from classic - and highly original - pulp stories by authors like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber.