The Agony and the Ecstasy with Vancouver artist and writer Michael Kluckner

Canadian Authors--Metro Vancouver hosted Michael Kluckner at WORD this year. An attentive audience enjoyed a talk by this cartoonist-painter-writer. "Remainders of the Day" described the highs and lows of his years working to stay afloat. Authorship, he told us, is "a niche market," and one that is constantly changing.

His advice? Stay flexible, develop a thick skin, and don't take resounding indifference personally. Following these principles, Kluckner has survived and thrived from his early cartooning, through the vanished days of making money at magazine writing and the halcyon ones of winning prizes for a beautiful book that catapulted him from his "regional" status when it hit Toronto running, and got him promoted to a "Canadian" writer.

Before the late nineties, an Indy bookstore might carry 4000 titles to serve its local community and book prices were  stable, netting authors about 10% of the retail price. Conditions changed dramatically when Chapters megastores listing 100,000 titles beat back the small booksellers, demanding not only a 50% discount, but a 3-month return option on unsold books. Compounding the problem, Costco and some grocery stores normalized selling books at discount prices. The downward pressure on book prices hit authors and publishers hard.

Less than ten years after the book-buying public was slapped with GST (in 1990), book prices were pushed down and "royalties fell off a cliff." An illustrated coffee table book that would have fetched $40 in the eighties was priced at $35 three decades later. Amazon had become the "poster child" for the online sales model: the platform makes the money, while those who produce the art get next to nothing.

Now that writers and publishers can no longer afford to produce large colourful art books, Michael has moved on. His current genre is the  graphic novel, and his work features archived material, such as newspapers from 1910. Sold at comic fests as well as indies like Black Bond and Book Warehouse, his new work includes a biography of WWI ambulance driver Julia Henshaw, and Toshiko, a fictional Japanese Canadian protagonist in war time. Graphic work, being easier to read, also has the merit of being accessible to a wider and younger group of people, as well as those for whom English is not the mother tongue.

So what's a writer to do? Have a website so people can find you, maintain faith in your solitary craft, and enjoy your community as you find it, both fellow writers and fans. In closing, Michael posed an interesting question. Are contemporary people more interested in authors than books? Whether or not this is true, many now have a "vicarious desire to be part of a creative process."