You might have noticed the Books site going a little strange last week, after we handed the keys to Neil Gaiman. But it wasn't his weird podcast, or the collaborative story or even the haunting images of his friend Dave McKean which got me thinking – it was his bleak assessment of the future for writers.

Gaiman turned futurologist at the Guardian's morning conference, where he sketched out a version of the speech he gave at the London Book Fair, outlining Cory Doctorow's notion of the dandelion career. Now that the cost of distributing a piece of work is basically zero, Doctorow suggests writers should be more like dandelions. Instead of lavishing time and energy on each project, like a mammal nurturing its young, they should do many and various things and cast them into the wind, hoping some of them will find fertile ground.

Now this all sounds very lovely and creative and organic, but the point of the dandelion's evolutionary strategy is that most of its seeds fail. That may be fine if you have the kind of following that sends people dashing after your tabletop doodles, but how is this going to work for authors who can't match Gaiman's reach or commercial heft? How are they ever going to make enough money to live on? It's even worse for writers who are only just getting started. The self-publishing revolution may have blasted down the barriers to publication, but how does a young author find the time among paying work and other commitments to produce enough seeds for one of them to stand a chance of flowering into a career which will give them time to, um, write?

Gaiman's answer is a stark "I don't know." In historical terms the ability for anyone to make a living out of telling stories is only comparatively recent, he argues, the printing press and copyright law combining for a couple of hundred years to make it possible for writers to distribute their work widely enough to find an audience, while retaining enough control to ensure that audience consisted (mostly) of paying customers. For Gaiman the logic of digital distribution has blown that cosy settlement apart. "Maybe it was just a blip."

If writing is a craft which takes a certain amount of time to learn – as many first novels attest – then what does the landscape of literature look like after the blip has passed? Is there anything of value which will be lost? Gaiman speaks himself of how he started by ventriloquising writers he admired, how it took him time to find his own voice. Unless some model can be found to reward the kind of mastery which takes time to develop, our dandelion future will be full of writers whose first seeds fell on stony ground, of authors who never found the time to write the second act.