After almost 100-years of publication, it appears that Writer’s Market — a sort of Yellow Pages for freelance writers — has folded.
The Web site was there just yesterday; I know that, because I stopped by to see whether the publishing news feed was being updated. Now, there are just links to bookseller Web sites and no links to site content; it looks like one of those barren, abandoned URLs that is for sale.
This saddens more than surprises, I suppose. Not only is there a steadily diminishing number of venues for freelancers, even honored, well-known names pay so little now that it’s hardly worth the effort to introduce onself. Even so, Writer’s Market is a venerable name that I, and a great many others, used profitably for a long, long time.
I guess there is no avoiding that the traditional publishing infrastructure is gone, now, and we are all our own brands.