Travel Blog

A friend, a Polish emigrant and gifted writer, sent me an e-mail recently about an idea he has for an online literary venture.

It used to be that writers wrote and let others - newspaper barons, magazine companies, publishing houses - handle the distribution, marketing, and selling of their work. Many novelists and poets were notoriously sensitive, distracted, eccentric, impractical - in a word: artistic - and not suited for the clamor of the marketplace.

Today, writers need the very talent - a head for business - that has traditionally been seen as alien - in some ways, detrimental - to the process of creating art. No longer are we removed from the economics. Talking with a friend recently about the increasing difficulty of making money through writing, I remarked: "We're all poets now." But in reality, we're all entrepreneurs. How that will change what we write - and who ends up writing - remains to be seen.