One of the great things about writing in 2017 is one can reach one's fellow indy writers. I know a bunch, including I'm glad to say the High Sparrow of indy writers, Chris Nuttall. I think he gets a royalty just for his name of the holy sepulcher being typed.
Anyhoo, recently I was chitchatting with my friend James Young about our halcyon days reading sci-fi. Now back in the 80's [oh good god, not another 80's post-Ed] one had two places to get books. Walden Books or B Dalton and that was pretty much it.
James and I were huge military sci fi fans at the time, but frankly the genres was hard to find. To their credit both chain book stores had pretty good sci-fi sections, but the shelves didn't carry a lot of books about space marines, and star carriers, and warp dreadnoughts and such. We both accumulated fairly large libraries of military sci fi, but this took decades. Even now my 80's-90's era collection fill just a few boxes. These are of course the works of David Drake, SM Stirling, David Weber and for me, his most benevolent eminence Jerry Pournelle.
If one goes to Amazon and peruses the digital shelf one will find a bountiful list of books that fall into the military sci-fi category. Their one nearly universal trait (Drake and Pournelle and Weber are still going after all), they're almost all indy writers. There they are, tales of Space Marines, and imperial interstellar battle fleets and dare I say, alien invasion.
We, the indy writers, much maligned by the traditional writers and the Big 5 publishers, are writing the novels we were looking for in our youth. And you know what? We're making money doing it. Man, the Big 5 publishers really missed the boat on that one. Oh well, they'll always have The Devil Wears Prada.
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