What do I want from my writing?

Oh wow. I've just been reading some pretty sad news for wannabe authors like me. For example, according to online sources, the average published author in Canada earns $500 per year in royalties.


Scary, huh?


Or try this one: even if a book is published, it has a 1% chance of being stocked in the major book retailers.


Or this one: the vast majority of promotion and marketing for new books is done by the author, not by the publishing house.


Or this one: The average book published in Canada sells between 5,000 and 10,000 copies over the course of its lifetime.


Scary scary scary scary, especially if you're one of those authors who hopes to make a living through your writing.


Thankfully, I've never really "hoped" anything of the sort. I knew from the start that it is only a very small minority of published writers who earn enough from their books to "quit their day job".


I still find the statistics just a little bit depressing.


My research only serves to confirm a conversation I had last week with a writing colleague at the post-book-launch party in honour of a new collection of stories by a mutual friend, Rob Gray, called Entropic.


This author colleague is, himself, published with a small east-coast publisher and he told me that, from his experience, the publishing house worked very hard to gather sufficient arts grants to pay their own staff salaries, to pay their overhead and to produce the books. After that, the publishing house considered its work to be done -- it's up to the author to sell copies of the book.


He also said that few of the authors he knows have any expectation of selling huge numbers of books: they just feel it to be important to write quality literature and get it out there to the (often few) people who are interested in reading it.


I'm not sure how I feel about all that. And it's made me think pretty intently about why I write and what my goals really are. I spend an awful lot of my time writing, thinking about writing, promoting my writing, talking about writing and all the rest: what do I really hope to get out of that investment?


I love to write. I love the creative process. I love the thinking and dreaming and researching and planning that goes into creating, from nothing, a story for other to enjoy. I love to read other people's writing and to think about why it works (or doesn't), how it is put together, what decisions the author made or should have made to make the piece what it is.


But (and I hate to admit it), at the base of it all, I write because I want to see my creative work published by a real publishing house. For all the success I have had self-publishing and promoting my Abigail stories, I really want to have a professional publisher with a known publishing house say to me, "We want to publish you.; we think you're work is worthy of taking the risk."


Is that too much to ask?