W. P. Kinsella - Career Interruption

Career Interruption

W.P. Kinsella was involved in a car accident in 1997 which almost resulted in the end of his fiction writing career. He was struck by a car while out walking and suffered a head injury when he hit the ground. He would not publish another novel for 14 years.

In a 1999 interview with the University of Regina's student newspaper, Kinsella explained that he could no longer write as he lost his ability to concentrate. The injury also robbed him of his senses of taste and smell. Kinsella said he went from being a Type A personality to Type B. After the accident, he didn't feel like doing the things he had done in his normal routine and didn't care. He did write book reviews to keep his name before the public.

Kinsella's 14-year-long exit from the world of published fiction also may have had economic roots. He was cited as an archetypical victim of changes in the publishing industry during the late 1980s, which accelerated during the 1990s, that made it more difficult for well-regarded "mid-list" writers such as Kinsella to remain in print. Changes to the U.S. tax code affected by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 discouraged publishers from maintaining inventories of titles in their back lists, as they were taxed on warehoused books. This led to the thinning out of back lists and the more rapid remaindering of books. The publishing industry underwent a wave of consolidation in the 1990s, as publishers were acquired by big communications companies seeking marketing synergies. The new publishing houses poured more capital into higher-paid, best-selling writers and celebrities who could guarantee "hit" books as well as media tie-in novels. Mid-list writers with first-rate reputations but mid-range, non-spectacular sales suffered accordingly as they were ignored by the newly publishing conglomerates.

Commenting about the state of the book industry in a 2010 interview with Macleans Magazine, Kinsella said, "The publishing industry today is just—I couldn’t break into the market today if I was just starting out. The publishing industry is down to a few dozen mainly adventure and romance writers. There’s still some academic fiction out there, but it has an incredibly small audience. Nobody really cares about it."