Online haters in the low-budget literary biz

I’m a big fan of John Lennon (the American author, not the English musician, but, sure, I’m a fan of the musician too). I’ve read most of his books, and it saddens me that literature is such a niche interest that even a versatile, talented, and accessible novelist such as Lennon can’t make a living out of it. OK, I understand the economics: if there were more money to be made from writing fiction, more people would be doing it, there’d be more competition, so it’s not clear that Lennon himself would thrive in that environment. But still. Lennon’s an interesting case in that he’s had a certain amount of success–early books being published by serious commercial presses and getting respected reviews, and these books made it into stores to the extent that readers such as me came across them), he gets asked to write for the London Review of Books (all they ever publish of me is letters!) and he has a comfortable job teaching at an Ivy League university–but his fiction nowadays . . . ummm,…