I'm travelling about Europe with my family, which is why my blogging frequency is now approaching zero.

Looking about local bookstores in Germany and Switzerland, it struck me what a disaster it must be for a good writer to be born into a place where few people use the language. A fairly large number of books in the local Buchhandlerung are translations from English language works. Considering how little money there seems to be for English language writers, even given the huge English language reading public, the income of a German or, OMG, Czech or Turkish author must be miniscule. How do these people cope?