I've wanted to write and i can see how much opportunity there is now with the ebook market. It's a shame I've always proctastinated and can't really write well
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But one of these days I'll finish one nanowrimo, damnit.
Depends on what you mean by "opportunity"
It used to be the case that the big publishers justified the cost of their publications by saying it was an assurance of quality, something to the effect of: "We're a business, we invested 200,000 into paying various professionals to make sure this story is excellent, so we're reasonably sure it's worth $10 of your time, and it won't have glaring spelling or grammar errors either." But recent books have tarnished this reputation somewhat: the divergeant series was rushed to market with known plot holes which no one bothered to fix because publishers wanted to capitalize on its cinematic qualities (basically, they wanted a movie) and wanted to compete with the hunger games during a lull. 50 shades of grey has several serious spelling errors.
My father is a "real" novelist and can talk for hours on how the profession has changed since the 1980s and 1990s. He and I are divided on the nature of whether the big publishers know what they are doing or not....probably because the publishers bought his stuff and would never buy a book like this. So yeah in that sense there is an immense opportunity because it's now possible to do an end run around the publishers and get your own stuff out there. Big publishers are terrified that eventually new authors will just default straight to amazon to publish their first works, but they're not taking many steps to reverse this increasingly certain course of action.
The problem that goes hand in hand with this is there's a coming literary anarchism that makes the old men of the profession very nervous. Not to brag, but this book took me 3-4 years to write and research and involves the complex interplay between the scientific method and religious inspiration, two disciplines that I studied extensively in college and in graduate school (which I paid a lot of money to attend). It also features a story arc set in taiwan, where I lived for 2 years. I paid my meticulous, equally well-educated best friend quite a lot of money to edit it. However, even my wildest projections for the success of the book have it losing to beefcake fanfiction some girl from Kansas city who has never left her parents house hammered out in a month. ...and really, who's to say that my stuff is better than hers?
So what this means is that we're living in a golden age of opportunity provided you're humble/don't take yourself too seriously, and have an alternative means of supporting yourself. For precisely this reason, it doesn't matter anymore whether you can write well, so I wouldn't let it stop you
![Grin ;D](http://aurora2.pentarch.org/Smileys/classic/grin.gif)
But to be completely honest, a lot of the science fiction greats couldn't write well either. I just finished a big run through of the old masters of the profession: Doc EE Smith who wrote the "Skylark" novels and pioneered the space opera genre was actually not a very good writer, in my mind. Asimov, while an excellent and very poetic writer of nonfiction, couldn't characterize to save his life so even in his best stories, all the main characters are cardboard cutouts. with sci-fi, it's all about premise.
What i've written is character-driven fiction that is "realistic" up to the point that it isn't. The most common complaint I've gotten so far is that there are "Too many characters' and "too much talking" but I say people need to deal.
![Roll Eyes ::)](http://aurora2.pentarch.org/Smileys/classic/rolleyes.gif)