“I’ve been writing professionally for twenty-odd years, and it’s become clear that I can’t depend on publishers to make me rich and famous,” Walter Jon Williams reflects on his blog. “Writers of mid-list fiction—which is pretty much everything but the best-sellers—are more or less obliged in these sub-lunary times to shoulder the burdens of publicity and promotion ourselves.” I know, I know, you’re asking yourself what else is new, but Williams is at least viewing the situation with good humor:
“What has to happen, it seems to me, is that I need a certifiably famous person to say that I should be more famous and popular than I am. Elmore Leonard was a fairly obscure writer until George Will wrote an entire column about how good Elmore Leonard was. Then Leonard became famous, and book and movie deals descended like unto manna from heaven… Does anybody out there know a truly famous person who could be persuaded to tell everyone that I should be famous, too?”
The analogy isn’t perfect—attention from Will and others thrust Leonard back into the spotlight in the mid-1980s, but he’d had some success with Hollywood in the late ’50s and early ’70s—but the basic principle is reasonably sound, as the contemporary example of Stephen King‘s enthusiasm for Ron McLarty and Meg Gardiner demonstrates. So far, Williams hasn’t been able to get that kind of nod, although fellow science-fiction writer Lawrence M. Schoen did quip in the comments, “Among a subset of Trek and Klingon fans I have a small amount of name recognition. I know it’s not much, but I routinely push your titles to the Klingon-speaking community and I’ll happily continue to do so.” Qapla’ batlh je, sir!