CJ Cherryh, l'auteur de Forteresse des étoiles ou Cyteen, a publié un article sur ce blog.

Voici le début :
"I started out in this business officially back in 1975. That means I’ve been at it 35 years, and don’t plan to quit.

But the business has changed. A lot.

In 1975 there were far more publishers doing science fiction: DAW was newborn. There was Ace, Ballantine, Pocket, Bantam, Warner, Belmont-Tower, Lancer, among others, and various magazines, including the venerable Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog.

Well, they weren’t quite the good old days. Belmont-Tower used to buy “all rights”, meaning the writer sold his copyright to the publisher, and got about 300 dollars for his effort. Flat. A writer I knew well used to do a novel every time the rent came due. There was only paperback publishing for science fiction, and the idea that a genre writer got to see his copyedits or had any right to correct them, well, that didn’t happen. A science fiction novel was 75,000 to 80,000 words, skinny, printed in fine type, and cost a buck twenty-five. Earlier than that—well, one book in my possession was all of thirty-five cents cover price. So 300 flat wasn’t quite as outrageous as it sounds, because trying to get a living out of 3 percent of thirty-five cents was pretty hard."