Five Easy Questions: John Coyne, Part Four

"When I caddied for Hogan he gave me one piece of advice about golf ... that I found has helped me in my whole life.

Hogan told me that what's important is the next shot, nto the one you have just played."

That's the moral John Coyne's new novel, The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan. The quote is about a doomed love affair and a town's dark secret, but Coyne's advice works for writers too. Over the course of his career, he's always found another shot--writing everything from horror novels to this novel blog.

Coyne is a former Peace Corps volunteer, novelist, and editor of the web magazine, Peace Corps Writers, and this is his last interview for my deceptively simple feature: Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog:
Some people think the Internet has hurt the print writing market. As a writer with a long career, before and after the digital boom, what do you think the writing market will look like in another five years? How will you maintain your career in this new market?

John Coyne:
I read recently that there are now 35 million blogs in China. How does anyone find anything of value in that number?

The Internet has allowed everyone to be a published writer with P.O.D. [Print On Demand] and it allows writers with published books to reach audiences that they might not reach via the printed word.

However, the downside of that reality is that anyone can "publish" anything and there are a lot of written words that shouldn't be exposed to the public.

RSS helps focus interests, of course, but still we are being overwhelmed by a hurricane of words.

My guess is that we are moving back to the oral tradition where stories and tales and information, etc., will come to us via the spoken word and images on some sort of enhanced ipods and the written word will exist in memory and a few libraries that we visit as if they were museums.

» Five Easy Questions: Jenna Freedman, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
"I'm not even trying to be dramatic, but to the world at large, I am a freak. My voice is downplayed, ignored and/or made into a joke in the mass of verbal and physical disapproval that bombards me every... [Read More]

» Five Easy Questions: Michael McColly, Part One from ThePublishingSpot
"The result is a revelation," wrote New Yorker journalist William Finnegan after reading The After Death Room, Michael McColly's memoir about his life as an AIDS activist and yoga instructor. "An epic twenty-first-century canvas on which... [Read More]

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