What the Film and TV Writers' Strike Means For Novelists

A Literal Literary Loser Laments Looming Loss

The Writers Guild of America is on strike. That means members are forbidden from penning movie scripts, television scripts, streaming content, etc….

The only thing they can do is walk a picket line, reconnect with the families they never see during a normal production season (TV writers’ hours are basically 24/7)… and write their novels.

Novel writing isn’t forbidden by a WGA strike. And writing novels is easy!

Every film and television writer has always meant to pop one out - as soon as they found the time. And now they have the time!

Currently, about one million books are released annually by traditional publishers, with another three million being self-published. About half of those are novels.

Among the traditionally published, that total is only one percent of all the books originally submitted for consideration to agents and/or editors.

According to this Medium article: One 2014 report taken from Digital Book World and Writer’s Digest Author Surveys took data from 9,000 respondents, and concluded that of those who completed a manuscript, 23% succeeded in becoming traditionally published (13.4% of the total sample).

That was almost 10 years ago. It’s unlikely the odds have grown since.

And that was before the competition included striking film and television writers.

Or, even worse — striking film and television actors.

Because the actors are on strike, too, in solidarity with the WGA.

And while they may not have the scribe experience of their writer colleagues, they have something even better: Name recognition and face recognition.

The kind of name and face recognition that gets people invited on talk shows and inspires gushing, long-form magazine features, maybe even a cover story.

And what can actors wax poetic about on their talk shows and in their gushing, long-form magazine features? Why, the book they’ve just written! Because writing — it’s so easy!

You don’t even have to be a super-successful actor.

Rachel Bloom’s television show, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” left the airwaves as literally the lowest-rated program on any network. It was still enough to get her “I Want To Be Where the Normal People Are” book of essays published.

But we were talking about novels.

Britney Spears wrote a novel. Chris Colfer wrote a novel. Isla Fisher. Tyra Banks. A whole bunch of Kardashians and Jenners. Sharon Osbourne. Naomi Campbell. Steve Martin. Hilary Duff. Molly Ringwald. Blair Underwood. Ethan Hawke. Madonna. 50 Cent. Tom Hanks. Jim Carey. Spike Lee. Nicole Ritchie. David Duchovney. Snookie. Pamela Anderson.

You may not know who one-fourth of these people are. But I bet you know that they had more than your one-fourth of a chance of landing a publishing deal.

Get ready for whole new wave of competing books to hit the querying trenches - and the bookstore aisles - from striking writers and actors.

And my God bless us all - every one.