[Retric]

Weekly newspapers showed up over a decade before Shakespeare died. The feasibility of “mass market” books on a technical level are debatable, but he would have effectively been guaranteed a hit for the time based on his skill and reputation even if it was quite expensive for regular people.

> most of the Great Works were written without copyright

English copyright showed up in 1710, US soon followed. So you must have a very different list of Great Works than normal.

As to the economics today, the average advance on a book is ~60,000$. Now you’re going to have to do reasonably well to keep getting those advances but plenty of people are buying books. The percentage of readers are down but there was less than 1/2 as many Americans and under 1/3 as many people globally in 1950.

[dredmorbius]

There may have been something called "newspapers" during Shakespeare's time, if only just barely (Wikipedia's list begins in 1605, four years prior to his death, and in Germany: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_newspapers>). The first British paper didn't emerge until several decades later (1641, in Scotland).

But most who take even a generous view of that topic put the emergence of the first true mass-market, to use your favourite description, popular newspaper, disseminated widely, published daily, sold cheaply, reliant on mass advertising, and featuring lurid (and often entirely fabulous) reportage, was the New York Sun, published by Benjamin Day.

My earlier reference to Hamilton Holt's Journalism and Media (1909) describes the massive rise of advertising-supported media, and its pernicious impacts on the trade, beginning in about 1860. Mass-circulation required mass literacy, mass-advertising, mass marketing, large-scale print runs, and good which could be sold across a wide area through advertising and mechanised transport. Much as Viagra dominated early online advertising (particularly email), it was patent medicines (usually themselves ineffective, fraudulent, and/or dangerous) which served as the mainstay of early advertising. The book is short (115 large-print pages), information dense, written by an expert practition of the trade of which he writes, and engagingly written. I'd strongly urge you to take it in.

You seem strongly wedded to your views and unwilling to consider alternatives. But that's my whole point: as Schopenhauer notes, and he's hardly alone, the financial motive perverts the art:

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

Commercial journalism is imploding as advertising and attention flee elsewhere. The resulting landscape has a small number of winner-take-all commercial enterprises (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, in the United States), with most other even major-city papers suffering (Washington Post, LA Times, Boston Globe) if not utterly eviscerated (Chicago Tribune), or vanished entirely in news deserts. The Tribune's local competitor, was acquired by that city's NPR affiliate which was paid millions of dollars to take over the paper. And it's non-profit initiatives which are increasingly serving as the bulwark of journalism, such that it survives, in much of the U.S.

(That those non-profits, notably NPR and PBS are now under direct attack from the present US administration is hardly surprising.)

Again, whether or not you accept that the commercial motive is a negative, what other models for supporting authors might you find attractive. A couple of years ago on discussion of pirated books on Amazon, the question was asked "Would you continue writing novels if you got UBI of equivalent size and weren't allowed to charge for your books?". Writing here, author Charlie Stross (cstross) answered, "That's what I'd call living the dream!"

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35765198>

[Retric]

> Wikipedia's list begins in 1605, four years prior to his death, and in Germany

I’ve generally seen it listed that Shakespeare died in 1616. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare

> No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.

That requires you to reject all the people we just talked about. It is to suggest the world would be no lesser without Moby Dick etc etc.

The most generous interpretation is it’s a delusional take where the people he admires must have written it for the sake of art despite living off their art for years. A classic true Scotsman argument devoid of substance.

> You seem strongly wedded to your views and unwilling to consider alternatives.

I’m perfectly willing to engage with reasonable debate but you keep bringing up inaccurate or meaningless points. Books sales aren’t dependent on mass market advertising, you can make a good living if 25,000 people buy your book that’s an infinitesimal fraction of the market.

There’s ~1 Billion English speaking book sales per year, most people can’t hack it despite today being the easiest time to be an author ever the arts are difficult. It’s not a problem of publishers, it’s not a problem of readers, it’s solely an issue of people deluding themselves into thinking they are more talented than they are.