Jul 12 2010
Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Writers Need to be Taken Care Of
The idea that writers need to be “taken care of” has become such a common phrase among agents, it has moved to being flat insulting for most of us out here.
I talked about this a little bit in another chapter, but lately I’ve been hearing this “justification” for frightening bad behavior on the part of agents. It just makes me angry, to be honest with you.
So for the second week in a row I’m writing a chapter of this book while angry and insulted. Stand back. If nothing else, this might be entertaining, as a number of people called my last chapter.
As I usually do in these chapters, let me start from some basics. And I’m going to number them to make sure I am very clear on my position.
Basic #1: Publishing is an international corporate business.
It is a business no matter how much you don’t want it to be, especially if you would like to have any decent number of readers for your work. Even writers who publish their own work are quickly learning just how much of a business this is.
And noticed I used the word “corporate.” Anyone who has worked in a large corporation understands the politics and the money-based drive that every employee deals with in corporations. Publishing is no different.
Basic #2: There are no secrets. It’s Just Business and Must Be Learned.
But as in any major profession, learning takes time. Mistakes are made. That is a natural part of the process. And it takes time to learn to write a professional level story.
As I have said over and over and over, when you want to be a local attorney, it takes seven years of school before you can even think of hanging out a shingle or going to work for a law firm. In a little local community. So why would you think that you need less learning, less training, less practice and time when working in an INTERNATIONAL business?
You need to learn the business you want to work in. It really is that simple.
(For a great free weekly business class, check out my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Freelancer’s Guide.)
Basic #3: Writers are always in a hurry.
Spend all that time and effort on your first novel and you want it published NOW. That’s like saying “I just spent all my time and energy getting through my first year of college, I passed English 101 and History 101 and I want to be an attorney NOW.” Doesn’t work that way and it’s just as silly thinking in writing.
First books are called first books because they are the first book a writer published, not wrote. My first book was book number four written, and I didn’t sell five or six.
Now I bet a bunch of people are saying “But I’m different.” No, you’re not. Write your million words of crap, as Mystery Grandmaster John D. McDonald said, and you might get to your first publishable word. And in the process, learn the business. You can learn to write and learn the business at the same time. Honest you can.
Am I sounding discouraging? I suppose. I am saying it takes work, it takes time, it takes a focus on learning. If that is discouraging to you, you don’t belong in this profession. Find a profession that the learning sounds like fun, the enjoyment is in the work, the desire to learn it all sounds like a wonderful time. That’s a profession for you.
But if writing sounds like fun, is enjoyable for you, and you have a vast desire to learn everything in both craft and business, then you are in the right spot.
Basic #4: Writers Control This Business.
I know that will just seem wrong for those of you lost in the myths, but the truth of the matter is that without books, without product supplied by writers, no publisher would remain in business. There wouldn’t be a business. This business exists for the sole reason to move writers’ stories to readers. That simple.
The top writers control what publishers do, stock prices of publishers rise and fall on book releases. I know of some writers who have taken their editors with them from one house to the next when they moved. And they weren’t even bestsellers
Writers make the most money, writers control.
Where the Myth of Needing to Taken Care Of Comes From.
In short, the myth comes from writers who are in a hurry and lazy and think they are “artists.” That’s right, we writers (as a group) caused this myth, as we do with most of the myths.
The big international business of writing looks “scary” and unknown, a long, dark road we are afraid to walk. Imagine a women in a bad horror movie in high heals going into a cobweb-covered mansion. That’s what it feels like to all of us, thus we do what is human nature, we try to find someone who claims they will take us through the darkness and dangerous animals and guys with large axes and chainsaws safely to the other side. We willingly and without thought hand these “guide” people all our money, our very livelihood, our art, our self-respect, and then close our eyes and hope.
Just like in the bad movies, it seldom works. Just ask any of Bernie Madoff’s clients how well handing over all your money works.
But sadly, in publishing, it’s normal to do just what I am describing. Except the people we hand all our money to are often young agents. Very, very young, and not regulated in any way. Many of them are four or five years out of an Ivy League school, and their only claim to knowing anything is that they live with a few others in New York City and know other agents and have lunches with a few editors.
Now granted, some agents have been around for a long time, know the business, can get a book in at higher levels. But they are not writers. They do not understand at any deep level what you do as a writer. Or how you survive. So you start expecting them to take care of everything and guess what? Mistakes happen, only they are not your mistakes.
And then all the horror stories we have been talking about in all the comments after previous agent chapters happen.
The bottom line is that all the agent horror stories happen because WRITERS WANT TO BE TAKEN CARE OF.
Somehow along the way I lost this attitude, more than likely during my publishing days with Pulphouse. Or even more likely, I never had it from the start. It just seems odd to me that anyone SHOULD take care of me. I’ve been on my own, making my own way in the world since I turned eighteen. No one took care of me, and I sure didn’t expect anyone to do so. In any business or venture over all the decades.
My first agent never said she would take care of me. Not once. I sold my own books, called her and told her who would be calling and what I wanted and she did what I asked. I was in charge. I hired her for her agency and help on chasing money and nothing more.
So now comes the 2010 publishing world. We have reached a day in this business where young agents are reading slush and losing money, where the publishing business is going through one of its normal tightening phases, where new technology is slamming into publishing like an iceberg ramming into the Titanic. Exciting times, actually, for writers, with new opportunities opening up almost every day.
But one of the upshots of this new world is that these baby agents and some young editors are out spouting off about how they need to take care of their writers. And they are spouting this garbage in public.
They started off doing this, I’m sure, to try to sell themselves to writers. But then they started to believe their own hype, they started to actually believe that they knew better than writers what writers needed.
And over the last ten years, this has become, to my view, an ugly trend that I have even heard directed at me.
Some young agent who wasn’t born yet when I sold my first short story told me last year that if I went with her as a client, she would take care of me. Of course, she would have to read and approve everything I wrote before she sent it out.
She was SERIOUS!!!
The attitude of needing to take care of writers had become so ingrained in her mind that the system just worked that way for everyone. She didn’t know any other way. She somehow thought in her deepest ego that she was giving me something I wanted to hear.
I managed not to laugh in her face, or insult her, but to be honest, that has bothered me ever since and I have mentioned it a few times lately. I should have taken her to task, maybe snapped her out of it a little bit. But I was nice, stunned, to be honest.
She believed that she should take care of a seasoned professional and even worse, she believed that I needed to be taken care of by her.
In other words, she thought I was too stupid to make it on my own.
Oh, yeah, let’s forget the last twenty years or more where I did just fine taking care of myself and making nice money writing fiction. She believed I was too stupid to make it on my own.
Yes, I was insulted.
Let me make this clear, very clear about this myth.
Every time an agent or an editor says that they will “take care of you,” they are saying to you:
“You are too stupid to make it on your own.”
Insulted? Yeah, you should be. But what stuns me even more is that writers just nod and say, “Yup, I’m dumb-dumb and must be bottle fed…change my diapers please while you are at it.”
Writers let agents get away with this insulting behavior. Until this post, I’ve never heard anyone question this at all.
Well, as I said last chapter, it’s time for writers to wake up and question everything.
WHAT CAN BE DONE?
1) Understand you are learning the business and that the learning never stops.
I’m still learning this business every day, year after year. I find learning exciting and I love that I will never stop learning in this business, both on the writing craft side and on the business side. Sure, it’s scary at times. That’s part of the fun.
2) Don’t be afraid of making mistakes.
No way to not make mistakes, but for heaven’s sake, make your own mistakes, and from those mistakes come learning and understanding. In publishing, nothing is fatal. Worse thing that happens is you change your pen name and move on.
3) Learn from those who are down the road you want to walk.
Other writers have walked ahead of you down the scary, fog-covered road to making a living at fiction writing. Learn from them, take lessons from them, take what works for you and toss the rest. Agents and editors are not writers. If you listen to their words as if they are gospel, you are doomed, just as surely as thinking you can learn how to create original fiction by sitting in a college creative writing class. Not going to happen.
4) In no fashion allow anyone to take care of you.
This doesn’t mean you can’t hire help, but for heaven’s sake, know what your help is doing and you approve everything. And never let them have your money before you see it. That stupidity has to be stopped quickly in this business.
5) Make it a rule to take care of yourself.
Sure, you might not know how to do something, so GO LEARN IT. Stop thinking that someone else will take care of it for you and learn what you need to know to get your work in front of editors, to understand what you are signing in a contract, to know how the business works. It will take time, but learn one thing a week or a day and eventually you’ll have it.
And the moment you catch yourself thinking that someone needs to take care of that for you, stop and do it yourself. Make that a way of life. Make it a rule in your writing life and business.
QUESTION EVERYTHING!
Writers, it is way past time we started questioning these myths. All of them that I have been talking about for twenty-five chapters now.
DEAN’S RULES OF BUSINESS IN WRITING
#1… You must learn and understand the business you want to work in.
#2… Learn from other writers on the same road, not editors or agents.
#3…It is fine to hire help, but never hand over responsibility.
#4…Never let anyone touch your money.
#5…In all decisions you are responsible for your own career.
You follow those five rules and you will be surprised at how many problems you avoid and how far those rules will take you.
Just remember, when some young agent says that they will take care of you, understand what they are thinking about you:
“Oh, I can take this writer’s money. They are a patsy.”
Or
“This writer is too stupid to do it on their own.”
Get insulted, and if enough of us stop taking these insults and start questioning everything and taking responsibility for our own careers, maybe we can start the slow change it’s going to take to back out of this current mess.
I’m a dreamer I know, but that’s also my job description.
And I know what I’m doing. And if you just believed in yourself, you would too.
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Copyright 2010 Dean Wesley Smith
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Because of the new world and technology, my magic bakery got a lot more valuable lately. This is now part of my inventory in my bakery. (Confused on that, read the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing post about making money with writing.) I’m giving you this small slice as a sample. I’m giving you a taste, but not selling any of the pie.
If you feel this helped you in any way, toss a tip into the tip jar on the way out of the Magic Bakery.
And I would like to thank all the fine folks who have donated. Once this book is done, I will send you a copy. The donations and the comments both after the posts and privately are really keeping me going on this. Thanks!
If you can’t afford to donate, please feel free to pass this chapter along to others who might get some help from it. Every week or so I will be adding a new chapter on the myths and sacred cows of publishing. Stay tuned. Upcoming are chapters on bestsellers, losing control of your writing, having it made, speed equals making money, more on agents, and so much more. This business has a lot of myths. An entire book full.
Thanks, Dean
Great post, Dean.
I was wondering if you could offer some tips on how to learn the business. I tried following various twitter accounts and blogs by publishing houses. Maybe I’m not doing it right, but I haven’t learned a whole lot.
Any magazines or books that might set me in the right direction?
Thanks.
I’ve already lost count of how many times writers in the past couple of years have said to me that I ought to become an agent.
This is totally MISSING the whole point of my own example and of everything that I say about it.
The fact that I can manage my own business as a writer does NOT mean that I should start managing other writers’ business, too, for goodness sake! It =means= that, all noisy “conventional wisdom” to the contrary, =writers can indeed manage their own business=. But too many writers see my example NOT as proof that it’s entirely possible for writers to take care of themselves, but rather as evidence that =I= “should be” taking care of OTHER writers as my professional endeavor. (weary sigh)
The fact that I write well does not in any way mean that I should become a professional editor. The fact that I can run my own business well does not in any way mean that I should become a professional agent.
I also wonder which of the following wholly erroneous (and, I agree with Dean: INSULTING) premises writers and aspiring writers are operating under:
1. The notion that it’s so easy to build and maintain a successful full-time writing career that I’ve got loads of time left over to manage OTHER people’s writing careers?
2. The notion that I’m so mediocre as a writer that I’d be better off chucking it to do something ELSE, such as agenting?
3. The notion that writing well is so easy but agenting well is so hard that the rarer and greater of my two gifts is business, NOT writing, and I should therefore chuck the writing (which, gosh, ANYBODY can do professionally) and instead become a literary agent (which, er, is something only tremendously talented, driven, and committed people can do?)?
No doubt I am taking those “you should be an agent” comments the wrong way. (But since I am indeed taking them THE WRONG WAY, it would be advisable for people to STOP SAYING THAT to me.)
More likely, writers saying this to me is a symptom of:
1. Fear: “This business is sooooo dangerous and soooo scary, there must be something Unique About Laura that she hasn’t been eaten by the monster under the bed. The obvious explanation is that SHE should be an agent and protect OTHERS from the monster!” Folks, I looked. Often, early, AND recently. There is no monster there. Lose the monster notion.
2. Laziness: “Laura’s advocating a big paradigm shift. That sounds exhausting. A much less tiring notion is that Laura should change HER paradigm. It’s not that writers can manage their own careers; it’s that SHE should be an agent, which individual shift would thus fit the existing paradigm without anyone else having to any heavy lifting.”
3. Tunnel vision: “Laura is a freakishly unique example whose own experiences have no possible wider application.”
4. Herd mentality: “What Laura’s saying is different from what Everyone Else is saying. So she must be wrong, and thus I don’t even need to think about this.”
5. Custom: “Agents do business and Are Completely Necessary. Writers are airheads who can’t take care of themselves. That’s how it has always been and always will be. Laura’s spitting into the wind, paddling upstream, and trying to reason with the sea.”
Wonderful comment, Laura. Thanks!
Jeff,
Frighteningly enough, business is business is business. Common sense business when you are running a small business on main street are the same common sense things to do in publishing. No great secrets. As for where to get started, read every one of Kris’s Freelancer’s Guide at http://www.kristinekathrynrusch.com. She talks in detail now for 60 some weeks about small aspects of business and has covered a ton of stuff and she gives lots and lots of links.
The best business course online for writers is that Freelancer’s Guide. Go to the tab at the top of her page and start from the beginning. She will give you lots and lots of help and different resources.
Dean, great post. I need to post the link to your article in several places. I’ve found that a lot of writers seem to think that writing the manuscript is the entirety of the job, and I’ve gotten the sense that many of them don’t feel they need to know the business, that they can hand off their product to an agent and call it good.
I have also gotten the sense that many of these writers are just too damned lazy to make the effort to learn the business.
@ Jeff, if you haven’t already, check out Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace. They’ll give you insights into the deals going on daily in the publishing world. For more info on the business itself, a great place to start would be learning the ins and outs of copyright (http://www.copyright.gov/).
And keep asking questions.
What Jim said and what I said over and over. Keep asking questions. Question everything.
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks Dean, and thanks Jim.
I’ll jump on those FREELANCER’S GUIDE posts soon.
And Jim, you’re right on the money that most writer’s think that writing is all about the manuscript. That’s what I thought until I started reading Dean’s KILLING THE SACRED COWS posts, and almost every aspiring writer in all the writing forums I’ve participated in believe the same thing.
Dean wrote: “She believed that she should take care of a seasoned professional and even worse, she believed that I needed to be taken care of by her.”
I had a very similar experience–and a similar “What are you inhaling?” reaction, though I, too, kept it to myself at the time. (Mostly because I didn’t envision accomplishing anything by engaging with the agent about this.)
As previously discussed, after losing my fourth agent, I briefly looked for a fifth agent. And here’s one of the experiences which led to me realizing that I couldn’t waste time or focus on these people when I had a writing career to rescue, and it was past time to quit this business model:
On this occasion, for the first time ever,one of the things I decided to do was to explore what it might be like to work with someone new and (presumably) hungry, and for whom a writer at my career level would be (I hoped) a valuable client. So I researched new/young agents, and I chose one who handled my genre, who was at a very reputable agency (so I supposed she would be supervised by an experienced colleague), who had not been in the business long, and who had a modest client list.
And I was surprised to discover that the way it notably differed was that this agent was one of the most unprofessional people I’ve ever encountered during 22 years of querying agents and submitting projects to editors! (And that’s a list that includes some pretty bizarre experiences.)
I communicated with the agent via her business email address–the one that clients and editors use–which I got from a client I knew. But throughout this period, I could get no answer or acknowledgement of my follow-up messages to the agent, trying to make sure she had received my query and asking when I might expect a response. Meanwhile, the agent was posting regularly on her blog, wherein she solicited slush, talked there about how much time she was spending reading slush, and wrote lengthy critiques of the slush she received. More weeks past without any response to my attempts to contact her.
Since I was using her business address, the one that editors and clients use (i.e. not the public slush address on her blog), I thought it was obvious cause for concern that someone (me) could email her multiple times at that address without ever getting a response. That alone made her someone I couldn’t possibly work with; I do too much business for that kind of behavior to be viable in my business representative. After six weeks, I sent a letter saying I was withdrawing my query and just wanted her to acknowledgment receipt fo this information (so I wouldn’t wind up with her writing to me seven months to say she had just read my query). Still no acknowledgment. So I sent an email to her boss, a well-established agent who handles a number of my friends (in another genre). This head-of-agency responded the same day, saying she’d make sure the young agent responded within a day or two to wrap this up, and apologizing for my experience there.
So the HEAD of the agency had time to answer a business email from me. But the young slush-reading/blogging agent had ignored me for weeks.
Then, to top it off, having been told by the head agent that I was withdrawing my query… the young agent finally got off her duff and, er, REJECTED my query–(eyes rolling) a query which, hello, I and her boss had both told her was no longer available to her for consideration. (It was obvious in the contents of her message that the boss had indeed told her.) But rather than just let it go, the agent felt compelled to make a point of REJECTING my work–and here’s the punchline: She said she had started reading one of the books in my query package and felt that it really could have benefitted from her editing.
Er, this was a PUBLISHED and WELL-REVIEWED book, which had, moreover, been edited by an executive editor with 20 years in the biz… but this young agent with very few sales under her belt… … felt that what that book REALLY needed was HER editorial touch.
(blink)
Actually, her boss had been VERY apologetic to me–unlike the young agent, her boss had also gone to my website, looked at my career, read my book excerpts there, and written to me again to say she was REALLY sorry that things hadn’t worked out between me and her agency, and she was also sorry that she herself didn’t represent my genre, because she loved the writing samples on my website. [See previous discusson on this blog about the problem of how narrow agents' market niches are.] So although I have no idea whether the young agent quit or was asked to leave, or whether any tension arose between the young agent and her boss over the young agent’s unprofessional handling of my query, in particular… I’ve always suspected that my experience with her may not have been totally unrelated to–what a surprise–the young agent LEAVING that agency 2-3 months later.
About a year later, I bumped into the one client of that young agent’s whom I knew (the one who had given me the agent’s business email). And I was not surprised to learn that my friend had fired the agent. As with my experience in my query, this PROFESSIONAL, EARNING client had simply not been able to get the young agent’s attention away from slush-reading long enough to, oh, DO BUSINESS for the writer.
With these discussions bringing that experience to mind, I recently looked up the young agent. She’s at another reputable agency (her third)… but going back in their sales announcements (posted on their website) for the past YEAR, I could only find -one- sale that this agent has made.
So let’s see if we can piece together the enigmatic mystery of why low-level and/or young agents are having trouble surviving professionally…
Jeff, I’d say a good place to learn and keep up on the business is my Writer’s Resource Page. Plenty of info there (recommended books, websites, blogs, workshops, etc.) for writers at all levels of self-education about the craft and the biz:
http://sff.net/people/laresnick/About%20Writing/Writers%20Resource.htm
Rules? I love it! And we’re supposed to question them too? Man, talk about a koan for the new millennium. Can’t you just give us something that we can uncritically follow and be your groupies? No? Too bad (note: tongue is embedded in cheek at this point).
On a historical note, the esteemed and lauded graybeard Robert Silverberg has weighed in on the question of how science fiction authors made a living back in the 1950s and 1960s, and on the idea of “the days of the full-time novelist are numbered.” Interesting reading, if you haven’t seen it already:
http://www.blackgate.com/2010/07/09/robert-silverberg-on-are-the-days-of-the-full-time-novelist-numbered/
“First books are called first books because they are the first book a writer published, not wrote. My first book was book number four written, and I didn’t sell five or six.”
Nora Roberts’ first published novel was the fifth she wrote. A friend of mine who’s an NYT bestseller sold her 11th completed MS as her first book. A friend of mine who’s currently working on her 20th (or so) published novel wrote nearly 20 novels before writing one that was saleable (though I think she has since rewritten and sold her 14th and 17th MSs).
Yes, Gabaldon’s OUTLANDER was her first-ever novel MS, but as she often points out, by the time she wrote it, she had been writing (and also editing) professionally for years, particularly in comic books and computer mags–so she was new to fiction, but not to selling professional-quality writing.
It’s not unknown for someone to sell a first-ever novel, just as it’s not unknown for a first-time book to be a bestseller. But it’s VERY unusual. It’s on a par with beating the house at roulette. It -can- happen… but if you go into a casino with THAT as your plan and expectation, 99.9% of the time, it will end in poverty and tears.
And, yes, almost everyone I meet who’s recently completed their first-ever novel MS thinks they’ve Done The Work Now and expects to be published. (Indeed, it’s pretty common to meet people who HAVEN’T EVEN COMPLETED a novel who talk about it that way. It’s also common to meet people who haven’t even STARTED writing a book whole nonetheless back me into a corner to tell me how good it’s GOING to be.) Meanwhile, statistically, most people who talk about writing never actually WRITE anything; most people who start a novel never complete it; most people who complete one novel never write another; and most people who actually SELL a novel disappear from publishing forever within two books.
This is only a viable profession for people with endurance and commitment.
Dean,
Wonderful post! You’re right–I run into the “I’ll take care of you” attitude far more often than I can stand. When it happens, I immediately fantasize about running the person down with a bulldozer, lol. My method for dealing with this attitude is to politely ignore it, then next, discuss an issue on which I’ve been proactive, hoping they’ll get the hint. Alas, I’m probably being naively optimistic. You’re correct that we should be more firm about stopping the practice.
Laura, I had to laugh (painfully), because what you describe just happened to me a few weeks ago at a dinner of writers. I was describing what I felt was the best process for handling an issue that crops up frequently in the business–can’t remember what it was, at the moment–and another writer said, “You should become an agent!” Now I have to admit, she went on to explain that she felt I understood the business better than most agents she had met, so I actually don’t think she was intending to insult me. But the end result was the same as you describe–she was assuming that simply because I understood the issue and had a process for handling it, I should become and agent and handle it for other writers. Rather than writing, which I’m pretty certain I’m darn good at (though of course I can always improve at).
Keep up the good posts, folks. You’re helping me remain sane.
–P.J.
Laura said, “This is only a viable profession for people with endurance and commitment.”
100% accurate. About once a month a discussion will come up between me and Kris that has the phrase “what ever happened to…” in it. Often the person was well published.
I would add only one thing to that statement out of just looking at those of us who have made it for more than 20 years.
This is only a profession for people with endurance and commitment and the ability to stand on their own two feet.
No one survives very long being taken care of by someone else.
“Now I have to admit, she went on to explain that she felt I understood the business better than most agents she had met, so I actually don’t think she was intending to insult me.”
PJ, you’re right, of course, and you’re being much more fair and less cranky about this than I am. (Be it remembered, I am a curmudgeon and misanthrope.)
But that’s wherein we need a major paradigm shift. Instead of the idea being that writers who understand business should enter a professional overpopulated by people who don’t… WHAT IF writers, oh, STOPPED hiring or paying agents who don’t understand or handle business well, and WHAT IF writers started learning the business better in order to handle their own business better!
Such a concept.
And Laura, that’s the exact concept I’m dreaming we can start toward.
Writers taking responsibility for their own careers like any other business person. Wow, who would think that would be possible, but I am dreaming. As you are.
Thanks, Laura, I appreciate it. Also, I appreciate ALL of your comments around here. Very helpful. Gives me tons to think about. Your post on the number of novels different writers wrote before they finally sold one … very inspiring. Thanks!
Man, I love this place.
Laura,
No criticism intended at all! First of all, I love curmudgeons; heck, I’m one myself. And second, I’m in *complete* agreement with you. I told Dean just the other day I felt I came down seriously in your camp regarding the use of agents. (More on that very soon, when I feel I can speak more freely! You’ll find my story horrifyingly interesting, I believe…)
In the meantime, please, please remain a curmudgeon and misanthrope; I’m depending on it!
–P.J.
“In the meantime, please, please remain a curmudgeon and misanthrope; I’m depending on it!”
Oh, believe me, you can INDEED depend on it! (In fact, for over three years, I wrote a column that the editor named “The Comely Curmudgeon” when asking me to do it. My personality is well known to my peers. (g))
Laura
Dean said: “Writers make the most money, writers control.”
This morning, while drinking my coffee I read a USAToday article, in which the writer was suggesting that entrepreneuers stop looking at th e “glamorous” jobs, and instead go for the “golden” ones, the ones where you could actually make the most money. In the article, she said:
“…Let’s say you’d like to be an author, artist, or professional golfer. Yes, you can make a living at one of those appealing jobs. But the numbers show you’d make a much better income instead being an agent for authors, artists, or golfers…”
I nearly had to replace my keyboard. Now, I don’t know about the artists and the golfers and their agents, but I simply couldn’t come up with any logical way to figure that the person who earns 15% of their client’s income is making a better living.
I’ll add my thanks as well. Inspiring, I guess because it only confirms I’m on the right track. Two published books, a third coming out this year, and I’ve written a total of six in the last five years (hey, I do work full time as well), I must be well on my way though relatively speaking I’m a newbie.
And on top of it, I love doing it. Why else would I have spent hours each week over the past five years with minimal return financially so far, in addition to my job? I’ve plenty to learn, no doubt, but what all this tells me is very simply: keep plugging away and learning, and eventually I will get there. Maybe sooner than I think.
I only wish I had started this when I was in my teens or twenties.
“Look, Ma. No agents!”
Hi Dean,
A bunch of stuff you’ve touched on before, but always good to get even more detail.
I’ve *long since* stolen, er adopted your motto that “A Writer is Responsible for her own Career”.
Two questions from a Devil’s Advocate here:
Sure the entire purpose of the publishing business is to get the product to the readers. BUT seeing as there are a glut of writiers out there (no, not alleging that anyone can do it, but as you’ve pointed out, there are tons of one-book-wonders) and even most of those in there long term seem to refuse to band together, don’t the publishers actually have the true power? At least until ePublishing takes off even more and all writers publish their own stuff.
You often point out that editors edit and agents agent, but I know some who are also published novelists. So when you tell would-be writers to listen (with discretion) to other writers, shouldn’t that include those agents and editors?
THANKS, Dean!
Deborah,
The idea that there is a glut of writers comes from the young agents and young writers. What is interesting is that in this modern world, to fill the machine, it takes hundreds of thousands of writers, and there just aren’t that many working out there that can do quality work consistently. The publishing machine is so huge and it must be fed with product. So the idea of a glut is just a myth as well.
(Think lawyers again. You need a good lawyer, you going to hire a first year undergrad? Nope, no matter how many hundreds of thousands of first year undergrads claim they want to be a lawyer some day. Problem is that the writers in the early stages are wrapped up in the undergrad process and can’t see the big picture.)
As far as publishers having the power, again it just feels that way to the beginning writer. But have a book or project that is desired and see how that power shifts completely. Or be a bestseller and see how that power shifts completely. The producer of the product is always in a power situation, which is also why this new author becoming a publisher is worrying so many publishers. Suddenly the author, the true power, is starting to figure out ways to just ignore the publisher part and take over that duty. You can’t have power, true power, when you can be done away with at a whim of a producer.
Power in writing is in two places. One, the writer. Two, the reader. They run everything and dictate everything and the fine folks in between the producer of story and the consumer of story are just there at the whim and loyalty of the writer or the reader. Nothing more.
This new electronic distribution system is interesting in this respect. A writer produces a story, uploads it to site that allows a reader direct access to the story. Writer easily does the duty of the publisher, electronic device takes the place of the distributor/bookstore. See why the publishers are scared of this? If they had real power, they wouldn’t be concerned at all.
Wow, this post definitely hit some hot buttons for me. First off, I’ve never understood how someone could want someone else to ‘take care of them.’ Not to sound like a jerk but little kids need someone to take care of them. I’m an adult, I can take care of myself. This is an attitude that I think is actually becoming more prevalent in all areas of life but I’m not going there.
I think another part of this mentality is people not wanting to work for anything anymore, which relates to what Laura said about our field requiring commintment. I talked with an acquaintance the other day about writing and he wanted to know how many rejections I’d had. I told him I had no clue how many I had total but told him about my worst day ever (I swear the Dell magazines had a freakin’ rejection party or something, I got rejections from all of them for stories that were mailed months apart) and I told him about two stories I just got back that I was pretty sure would sell that didn’t. He asked what I had done. I told him I sent the stories back out.
His response, even though he wants to be a writer? He said he would’ve stopped right there because that would mean he had no talent. The weird thing is it made no difference when I told him both rejections were personal, and I had only gotten form rejections from these markets before (I felt like had leveled up in a video game or something) he said he’d still quit. About half way through trying to persuade him that this was actually a fairly normal experience for writers I realized two things: 1) He didn’t think it was normal 2) He thought I was probably a crappy writer ( he’s never read anything I’ve writtern) and that HE would do much better with his immortal prose. Which,in all honesty he might, I have no problems with that but he won’t even send anything out for God’s sake.
I really don’t understand that. I, mean, even if I turn out to be someone who can’t learn to write publishable fiction EVER, then, hell, at least I tried and I know for sure. I couldn’t stand not knowing, that would eat at me for the rest of my life. It actually makes my stomach do flip flops just thinking about it. =shudders=
=sighs=
Dean and Laura, I’m not even a pro and I feel your pain.
Funny thing, up until fairly recently I was still trying to find an agent. One thing that changed my mind about needing an agent was the change in technology, a shift that gives more power to the writer (not that the power wasn’t there all along, just that with e-publishing it seems more upfront). And Dean’s blog helped push me in that direction, too.
But the big thing that really pushed me happened a few years ago when I explained to my wife what a modern literary agent does.
She looked at me with something akin to a glare that said, “Are you an idiot?” But the actual words out of her mouth were something like “I can do that! And it won’t cost us 15 percent!”
I went on to explain to her how she couldn’t “do that” because agents have connections and know people and she doesn’t.
Her response: “Big deal. They have a few lunches and call people on the phone. Give me the phone. I’ll have a publisher at least reading one of your novels within the half hour.”
Guess what? She did it. Okay, maybe it was 45 minutes, but she still managed to interest a publisher enough that they asked me to mail them a package. No, they didn’t bite in the long run, and possibly they just agreed to it to get my wife off the phone, and yeah, someone is going to say I burnt a bridge and that secretly I’m on some blacklist now. But they agreed to it. And it didn’t cost me anything more than a little postage.
Now, my wife is my agent. But I’d argue it’s costing me more than 15 percent.
lynw: “I simply couldn’t come up with any logical way to figure that the person who earns 15% of their client’s income is making a better living.”
The secret is to have multiple clients. Fifteen percent of ten clients’ incomes means you’re making 50% more than any one of them makes on average. It’s like running a dairy – you don’t have one cow and try to get 100 gallons of milk per day from her, you keep 20 cows and take 5 gallons each. It’s easier on the cows so they can keep it up longer, and if one dies you only lose a fraction of your income until she can be replaced.
Dean,
I have to disagree with you on the electronic distribution on one point: you’re not skipping the publisher, you’re publishing through a separate company.
Amazon, for example, would love to be the only publisher on the planet. So would Google. The financial smoke-blowers (excuse me, pundits) are now talking about how important “utility computing” will be in the future, on the assumption that ISPs and “content aggregators” will the equivalent of the poorly-regulated oil and electricity companies of the early 20th Century. Here we go again.
I agree that writers have power, but in the interest of contrariness, I’d point out that, if you talk to a dairy farmer, the cows have a lot of power too. They are the content producers, the farmer is the content aggregator. And when a cow is too old to produce, she’s sent to the glue factory….
Whether we’re authors or (gag) content producers, we still have more in common with the cow than the farmer, I’m afraid.
I’m loving these posts even though they are a little scary. I just have to remind myself that I don’t have to know everything all at once. It’s a process of learning. In my day job I work as a secretary and take care of everyone else, why the heck wouldn’t I be able to do that for myself?
I definitely agree that if you want to be successful at writing, you have to be in it for the long haul. Even with haphazard effort in the past I’ve managed to sell over two dozen short stories. No agent helped me do that. It was all me.
With the emerging ebook market, this is the most exciting time to be a writer. We are at the beginning of incredible opportunities and I love the idea of being able to bring my work to readers directly.
Thank you for these eye opening posts, Dean, and thank you, Laura, for all your wonderful comments. All of the stories about agents have really been enlightening and enabled me to make my own decision about whether or not to use one. They’ve also been a little horrifying, which is really something from a horror writer like me!
Keep on waking us up!
Dean, let me argue this a step further. If writers truly don’t need to be taken care of, another possibility that now makes sense for some people (*not* everyone) is skipping publishers altogether. That’s _really_ taking ownership of your career.
I wrote a blog post about this yesterday, in response to Michael Shatzkin’s most recent dire prediction (on Sunday) about the future of brick and mortar bookstores, which is btw the main reason why I am very seriously considering bypassing traditional publishing with at least my first work, and not even submitting it anywhere. I think that a new writer has to think ahead at what the marketplace will be like when their first work might hit the shelves years from now, and what they want over the long term.
We hear about J.A. Konrath a fair amount (making over $100K a year with ebooks), and his success is often written off for various reasons, such as that he had a traditional publisher before, etc. This obscures the reality that there are a number of indie authors also doing well, many of whom have no platform at all.
Someone who comments here at times, Scott Nicholson, recently told me that he’s making nearly as much as he is in his day job from his independently released ebooks and POD books, and expects to reach that level in September.
I’m not a cheerleader for self-publishing, but I do think it may now be the right move for _some_ fiction writers. Before Amazon and Apple raised ebook royalties to 70%, I wouldn’t have thought that, but now I do. I said quite a bit about this in my blog post, though, and I’d be honored to hear your point of view on it.
Thanks for another great post and discussion.
Steve, I’m afraid you learn quickly as a pro to nod, smile, and walk away from people like that. Not a darned thing you will ever say to convince them. You just have to let them go. Sadly.
Ty, LOL. But interestingly enough, many many couples do exactly what you are talking about. And I guarantee you didn’t burn any bridges or get on any mythical blacklist. (grin) Many, many writers have their spouse do the business side of things because that keeps the spouse involved and working and if the writer is one of those “artist” types, the spouse can often do the hard business stuff and not get in the way.
heteromeles, wow, you do have a stake in holding onto that myth, don’t you?
First off, Amazon is not a publisher, they are a distributor. Nothing more. A publisher (either a writer or a New York publisher or someone in between) must format, do covers, and distribute the work to Amazon, either in hard form or electronic form. Amazon has just recently (with Konrath as a first) stepped into a publishing imprint, following a New York model. But for 99.9999% of what they do, they are just a distributor. Same as Baker and Taylor and Ingrams and so on. Same as a bookstore. They distribute product to readers. Nothing more.
In your poor example of cows, you are assuming that writers are like cows and CAN’T THINK. Now, I understand that I complain about the mass nature of writers here a lot, but the truth be told that when you go up the road a ways and become a bestseller, you control everything your publisher does with your work. Sorry to keep trying to tell you that your belief that writers have no power is a myth, but it honestly is. (Guess I should do a full chapter on this one.)
As a beginning writer, you have no power in mainstream fiction because you have no sales and usually no ability to tell stories that sell. As you go up the road, you start selling and start controlling more and more of what happens across the contract line with a publisher. And at any point writers these days can jump and take over the publishing duties.
Go ahead, in your stupid analogy, try to show me a cow who runs a dairy.
Yup, I’m getting annoyed so guess I need to do a chapter on the myth that writers don’t have any control in publishing. Sigh…
Exactly, Rebecca, you don’t have to learn it all at once.
And mistakes can’t really kill you in this business. In fact, over the past twenty years, I haven’t heard of one writer making a bad mistake representing themselves, but I have heard thousands of bad mistakes made by writers letting agents do things that hurt them.
So the mistake is in trusting an agent and not paying attention to your own career. The mistake you might make with a publisher is minor in comparison.
Moses,
A well-reasoned blog post. And your key is telling writers to find what is the right path for each of them.
Right now Kris and I have up in electronic format about 50 short stories (through WMG Publishing) and we’re working toward more and toward getting the books up. The advantages of doing this are not disputed anymore.
The fact that New York traditional publishing will change over the next ten years is not disputed either. It’s going to happen. And, oh, yeah, it’s happened every ten years for the history of this business. And writers always claimed that this “was the end” of all things we know. Nope. But things will change. No doubt. (And for some writers, it may be the end of all things THEY know.)
Did you know that in the history of publishing, there was a distribution collapse so bad that in many cities there were running gun battles between truck drivers of rival distributors trying to get territory. 1958-1963. My lifetime. I don’t think this one will get that bad, but for many out there it will be drastic.
Am I pushing authors to only remain in traditional publishing? NO!
Am I pushing authors to leave traditional publishing completely for self-publishing? NO!
We are at an interesting point here, folks, where the main post on these comments is even more important. My main point in the big post is that writers need to take control of their own careers. Writers need to make decisions for themselves. Many writers are saying “Hey, this is more fun over here in electronic publishing.” At least that’s a decision they are making for their own writing.
I just want writers to take control of what they do for themselves. No matter which way they go in this new world.
Gun battles, whoa! No, I did not know about that. I guess that’s another reason why we’ve got it much easier today
Hey Dean, I’ve been wanting to ask you about something else. I was thinking you could give me 15% of everything you earn. In exchange, I’ll tell you if I like what you write, tell you what to do better, put postage on your envelopes for you, hold onto your money, and decide whether or not you should try to sell your stuff. You’ll be my first client. I only make people offers that they can’t refuse, so about it?
Disclaimer: There are some good literary agents out there, too.
I have to say that I love the little community of writers that’s building around this blog. It’s like a little island of sanity in the ocean of BS that surrounds the publishing industry. And don’t worry I won’t be suggesting that we all sing Kumbaya anytime soon. Just really liking the discussions.
Oh, and one quick question: Ty, is your wife taking on new clients?
“His response, even though he wants to be a writer? He said he would’ve stopped right there because that would mean he had no talent. ”
IMO, someone like that shouldn’t submit at ALL. People who KNOW they’re going to give up that easily should just get out of the slushpile altogether and make room for people who have what it takes to be professional writers: perseverance.
There are many excellent things to do with one’s life besides writing. People who aren’t cut out for this profession should go look for what they ARE cut out for.
“If writers truly don’t need to be taken care of, another possibility that now makes sense for some people (*not* everyone) is skipping publishers altogether. ”
But a publisher doesn’t take care of me or pretend to be a caretaker or my pal. A publisher says, “You’ve got a marketable product, and we think it’s so potentially profitable that we’re going to pay you money up front for it, as well as negotiate your share of additional earnings, in exchange for you letting us invest our national/international, professional, specialized resources in editing, packaging, producing, selling, marketing, and distributing your intellectual property–and, if things go well, your next book, and your next book, and your next book. Our goal is to get your book in every format in every market, and to build toward 100,000 people looking for our next release of your next book.”
I don’t have the resources that a major publisher does to edit, package, produce, promote, and distribute my work. Self-publishing has become so affordable and technology feasible that it’s appropriate for uncommercial procucts (such as backlist) that can’t find a home in the competitive professional marketplace; but I’d have no realistic shot at my career goals by uploading my new novels to e-venues, with my own low-budget editing, packaging, marketing, etc., and hawking them myself. Nor do I want to be a packager, designer, market, etc. What I want is what I actually do: to write full-time while a lot more money and resources than -I- have handy are invested by my publisher in getting my work into the hands of (currently) tens of thousands of readers and (we hope) someday perhaps hundreds of thousands of readers.
So. Now I’m a cow. Mooooo!
Cows can’t stop putting out milk. I can stop writing, if I decide to do so, though it would be emotionally straining.
Cows can’t leave one farmer and go to another. I can leave a publisher and go to another, within any contract stipulations I might have been stupid enough to agree to.
Cows can’t sell their own milk. Even with Amazon’s help. I can. My writing, that is. Not milk. I don’t think Amazon will sell milk, at least not yet.
Cows don’t have cover artists. Well, technically neither do I. You’ve got me on that one. But my publisher has cover artists!
What Laura said. I was about to respond in the same vain, but got distracted on a project.
Publisher’s don’t take care of you. They are your partners in moving your product to the readers with the terms decided and agreed upon in a detailed contract. Nothing more, nothing less.
BTw, talking lately with yet another steadily-contracted longtime career writer who… can’t get an agent. This exact scenario–a WORKING career novelist who’s unable to get a literary agent–has become stunningly common.
Gosh, who can possibly explain the enigmatic mystery of why agents say they’re struggling to make ends meet.
Laura
Dean and Laura,
I agree with you that publishers don’t necessarily try to “take care of you” and/or treat you like a child. Mostly, I agree. However, I believe there are a couple of caveats to that statement, so I’m going to jump into this discussion with a few opinions (feel free to shoot me down!):
First, it depends on the editor. I know of a current situation in which a very powerful editor is “taking care of” her writer, and actually causing huge roadblocks in that writer’s ability to self-promote. The editor claims “we’re taking good care of you” but then little or nothing is happening. That writer’s book sales are decent but not stellar, and it’s now a fight to keep from being dropped.
And second, I’m going to venture a bit further into disagreement with you regarding the relationship between NY publishing houses and writers relatively new to the business, such as myself. As many well-established authors have told me (and a friend of mine in a similar situation of trying to get established in midlist), “I don’t know how a writer can get established these days.” In other words, publicity is nonexistent in most houses for new writers, now far more than ever. And in the case I mentioned above, the writer was firmly discouraged from doing their own publicity, while no publicity was done by the house. In other words, the writer was set up to fail.
And by the way, I do mean NO publicity–no advance copies sent to reviewers, no press releases, to effort by the corporate sales staff to get the word out on the books, no interviews, no blog tours, no ads, no nothing. No publicist assigned, nothing except a listing in the catalogue distributed to booksellers. When the writer presented a marketing plan to offset these, she was told “it wouldn’t be appreciated” and “that’s the job of the sales and publicity departments”.
The point I’m trying to make is that writers who are starting out today with NY–unless they are the rare debut writer who garnered a six-figure advance and the house is scared NOT to publicize them–have little chance of building their careers successfully. Writers such as you two, who have been at it far longer, started in an timeframe when at least SOME publicity was being done, and SOME effort was made to get behind your books, building sales and name recognition slowly over time. Publishers today give you one or maybe two books to get established and generate relatively large sales, while at the same time hampering your efforts to do the publicity to make that happen.
Maybe I just don’t have a good perspective on what it was like to break in when you two did, but the more established authors are telling me they don’t see how anyone is doing it today, compared to even fifteen years ago.
None of these problems in the e-book market. Though you are correct that publishing houses offer professional staff to edit, produce, print, and distribute your book, those skills can be hired for the e-book market. And in the e-book market, since you control the publicity and pub dates, you control the ability to effectively market your product. I’m not saying this market is easy or the complete solution, or even that very many of the books are of excellent quality (although you might be surprised how quickly this is changing). But I did want to raise the points above, because new writers are really getting hammered by NY right now. And I suspect it won’t improve any time soon, given the stresses on their business model.
I predict that in the near future, you will see a lot more of the Big Six editorial staff trolling venues such as Amazon and iBooks, just like film folks do, looking for those self-published writers who have managed to establish themselves and have impressive sales. Acquiring someone who already has sales is cheaper (in terms of cash flow) than picking up a promising new writer, paying them an advance, and then paying for staff to produce the books. It’s also a safer bet, which makes any corporate bean-counter’s eyes glow. I think this is a sad trend, but I’m already seeing e-books by unknown writers being acquired by NY editors.
Just my two cents, for what it’s worth!
–P.J.
Hey Moses, if I signed up with you would you wipe my chin? LOL
If not, I’m hiring with Ty’s wife too! Or should I say asking if she’ll take me?
Publishers don’t try to “take care of you” in the way that some agents offer to, but they do take care of you in many ways. They design your cover, they lay out your text, they do many things that you then do not have to do. There are _some_ indie authors who enjoy doing these things for themselves.
Naturally, doing things on your own is an even more independent path, in which you make the final decisions on everything. But even that isn’t something that you want to do completely on your own. For example, I already have trades worked out with two professional editors (one is more of a copyeditor) for my work, and I plan to use their services whether I submit to publishers or publish the novel myself. If my own book cover wasn’t good enough, I’d hire someone for that, too.
That independent route is not for everyone, and I’d bet it’s not for most, either.
I’d have fun with it, though. I learned how to publish a magazine from scratch when I was in college. I sold the ads, I wrote many of the articles, I designed the style and logo, I laid it out, I took it to the printer, I carried it to most of the places it was distributed, and I made all the profit (and that was my job in college). I had a learning curve to go through, but it was a nice-looking, respected tabloid with a circulation of 13,000 in Athens, GA by the time I was done with it, and it took only about nine months before it looked really good.
At the same time, I wouldn’t at all mind having a good publisher to work with, either, but I _am_ pretty independent by nature. I currently work for myself, and I do things on exactly the schedule I want to (yep, I’m spoiled that way), which is how I work best. I’ve started organizations, websites, conferences, a consulting business, and I’ve loved doing all of that stuff on my own.
On the book project, for example, I’ve already designed a cover for my book (@6/29 on my blog, though I’m still working on the artwork and title a bit), and although I’m still tweaking and improving it, the response to it really has been overwhelmingly positive from at least 50 people. I took care of that, and for me, that’s fun and it’s rewarding.
If someone is wired like I am, and they commit totally to running and marketing their own publishing business, I think that person at least has a realistic chance to earn a decent living if they are smart about it and persevere.
What’s cool is that’s a realistic option now for fiction writers, and not just for some beer money. There are people making a decent enough living this way.
Worst case scenario, you fail, except that I would never look at it that way, myself. If I write books I’m really proud of, and some people enjoy them and I make some money, things could be much worse.
For some comic relief, this is pretty hilarious from our friend Zoe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5OodRBcuHE
Hmmm, I think I’m mired in the writers/power myth. >:-( Or rather, the myth that they don’ t have it. The thing is, I understand what you’re saying about how providing the product means the writers *do* have the power. BUT I just don’t see writers (and I mean successful novelists who’ve sold 10, 20, 30 books) acting like it. So if writers don’t actually act like they do have the power and use it, well . . . Do they really have it at all?
Which means, well, hmmmm, maybe writers really DO need someone to take care of them after all.
PJ, some of your assumptions are wrong, so let me try to give this a little light.
First off, assuming when you get a $10,000 or even $50,000 advance that there will be publicity is just flat wrong. Writers make this assumption all the time without understanding any kind of profit and loss statement of a publisher, let alone the position of their book on the imprint’s list. If they end up top of the list, they will get publicity, if in the middle of the list (midlist) for that month, no publicity.
But, also you are assuming publicity where you, the writer, will see it. That’s another aspect of what causes this “I got no publicity” silliness that writers believe. And it is silliness.
Have you seen a publishing imprint catalog? Even a book without a publicity budget is in the catalog, more than likely sharing a page with another book, but it’s in there. That catalog for the season is critical because it’s what EVERYONE orders out of. Bookstores and all sales folks get it. The cover flat is also put with other covers and shown to sales buyers from all the major areas, chains, and so on. The book is slotted through to all the Baker and Taylor and Ingrams and other distributors, it is put on Amazon, and so much more. Again, all without what an author calls a “publicity budget” of any kind. All this is standard. And 99.99% of all authors don’t have a clue all this is going on because, as I said in this post, they haven’t bothered to even learn how the business they want to make money in actually works.
Because they didn’t see an ad or have page proofs sent out they think nothing was done for their book. Silly thinking. Why?
Duh, it’s a business, that’s why. So explain to me why, in business terms, a New York major publisher, would give an author $10,000 and then spend another $80,000 producing a book without expectations of it making money? Of course they wouldn’t. Duh. A midlist or second list or front list book in any imprint has a sales base that the in house publicity machines get out to retailers, distributors, and so on. If they think your book will sell 10,000 mass market, they will produce 20,000 and it will get slotted into the right slots to sell that many copies with that much market penetration.
An author might be able to do your little self-aggrandizing promotion and sell an extra hundred copies to make yourself feel better, but New York publishing just snorts at that and ignores it. New York publishers know where and when to spend the money on promotion and they do it inhouse, where it makes the most good, so that the sales force get the books to the right places in the right stores and the right distributors.
God I wish authors would learn this business, understand how publishers actually work, what a profit and loss statement is, and just simply read some studies on what works for promotion of a book and what doesn’t work. But then I would be back dreaming.
And I stand by my statement that New York publishers don’t take care of you. And you shouldn’t expect them to. But you should expect them to do what you went into partnership with them to do. And if your advance is under 50,000 per book, don’t expect them to promote your book in any way that you can see unless you ask for the in house promotion material and season catalog and so on. Trust me, no New York publisher buys a book and then doesn’t do what’s needed to make a profit. But authors just don’t understand how that’s done.
So, a quiz: What is the most important, the #1 thing that sells a book? (Supported by dozens of studies and common fact to all publishers.)
Got it?
Got it?
The answer…..
Author name recognition of course. Duh.
Second on the list…. Word of mouth.
Third….. Great covers and blurbs.
And by the way P.J., New York is not hammering new writers right now. In fact, in all the years I’ve been watching this business, it’s easier and better for new writers right now than any time in publishing in New York. But go ahead, listen to the agents if you want. But the new writers selling first novels that I know (which numbers over 30 in the last four years since I teach workshops of young professionals) are all doing far, far better than at any time before.
Sorry PJ if I got a little blunt in that last comment. I just get really, really tired of this age-old complaint that writers go on about no publicity, when they wouldn’t understand publicity if it bit them in the butt.
So with a stab at this myth (which also needs to be a chapter I guess), let me simply say this: The publicity that sells books in large numbers is not publicity that any writer can see. (Unless they understand the business.)
Here’s what I get tired of…
Writer…”My publisher hates me, didn’t do any publicity for my book.”
Me…”What was your advance?”
Writer…”$10,000.”
Me…”Did you get some reviews?”
Writer…”A few.”
Me…”How do you think those reviewers got those books?”
Writer…”I don’t know.”
Me…”Is your book close to earning out?”
Writer…”It earned out barely.”
Me…”How many copies did your book sell in mass market?”
Writer…”24,000 copies.”
Me…”If the publisher did no publicity, how did your book sell 24,000 copies to earn back your advance?”
Writer…”I DON’T CARE about the facts, I just know my publisher didn’t do any publicity for my book.”
Me… (shaking head and walking away)
Rebecca, for 20%, you’ve got a deal.
Yeahbut…
“…business is business is business…”
Almost everyone working a nine-to-five believes that if they do their jobs, keep their noses clean, put in their time, and don’t get caught crawling the web too often when they should be working, they’re bulletproof. They can’t be fired. “Someone is watching out for me.”
This might actually be the bigger myth, but you’re already drawing enough fire from hitting the smaller ones. Still, it’s worth keeping this one in mind because the security thing is pounded into us from a very early age. As a result, if every other job has this (false) security, we KNOW that the job of writing must have it, too… somewhere… if we only look hard enough.
Most of us have bought used cars. We know the drill. There’s always someone out there who’ll tailor their story to fit what they believe we want to hear, insulting as it may be.
I’ll be generous:
Writers who feel that someone should be watching out for them may simply not believe that they’ve started their own business.
Writers who feel an agent is necessary may simply not believe that they’re claiming the business model MUST be a partnership.
(Not all partners are bad. Some are quite good. Unfortunately, they ALL claim they’re quite good, when we know they’re not… they all claim to have that one elusive car that’s only ever been driven to church. How can we really tell?)
If you produce a product, you’re a business. If you feel you need a partner in that business, fine. Just understand that picking a partner should never be done lightly, that there are always alternatives, and that partnerships are often the most risky forms of business… since an innocent mistake by either partner can kill the whole thing, and since not all mistakes are necessarily innocent.
It’s not rocket science. It’s business.
Rick
PJ, so glad you wrote in, and I hope you stick around here with all of us. The question you asked and the position you took is a common knowledge kind of thing–and this is exactly the place you need to come to learn to tweak this conventional thinking to make it work for you.
Your line about Laura & Dean coming up in a different time under different circumstances made me immediately think of a Laura R post under another Agenty Entry post. I cut-and-pasted it to my “drafts” folder so that I would always have it and, with proper acknowledgment to Laura, I’m going to paste it here to address that specific point to see if I can convince you to see how self-defeating that viewpoint can be to an up and comer. Here goes:
[QUOTE=Laura]When the student is ready, the teacher appears. Appearing =before= the student is ready, though, the teacher just gets asked to wait outside in the street. And approaching students who will never ever appreciate or agree with this lesson? Well, the teacher just gets swatted like a fly.
Thus, always keep in mind that if you talk about this subject (i.e. working UNagented as a viable and reasonable way of managing a writing career) to people who aren’t ready to hear it, you (or I, or anyone else) will always be dismissed for one of these reasons:
1. You’re an aspiring writer, not a professional, and therefore you don’t know what you’re talking about.
2. You’re a professional writer, and therefore you don’t know what it’s like for aspiring writers. (Sort of overlooking the fact that you had to be an aspiring writer to -become- a professional writer, and you can scarcely leave the safety of your own home without stumbling over aspiring writers in droves, so it’s not as if you’re isolated from their experiences.)
3. You’re a midlist writer whose name/work is unfamiliar to them, ergo you are clearly not successful and thus don’t know what you’re talking about (even if you’re making your full-time living as a writer and have sold many books).
4. You’re a bestseller, and therefore you don’t know what you’re talking about, because what applies to YOUR exalted status doesn’t apply to others (even if you BECAME a bestseller by handling your own career).
5. You just worked with the wrong agents. (Even if you worked with, oh, FOUR and had BIZARRE query experiences with many others, and have been the confidante of many, many professional writers by now with problematic and nightmarish agent anecdotes.)
6. There’s something wrong with you. (Well, yes, guilty on that charge. I’m a WRITER–of COURSE there’s something wrong with me! I keep warning my friends not to let their children hang out with me, but no one listens.)
So for any writer or aspiring writer who is not ready to consider working UNagented even as a theoretical plausibility, never mind as a possible avenue for themselves, there is ALWAYS a Really Good Reason (see above) to dismiss you as being ignorant and full of crap on this subject. [/quote]
This is a golden insight about a certain mindset (not your’s specifically, I hasten to add) that justifies refusing to listen to the voice of experience. Consider how ridiculous it is as Laura so brilliantly illustrates.
And, like I said, stick around. Read all the Myth-Slayer articles, they’ll make you think and they help–they changed my career.
Dean,
A couple of corrections: I actually DON’T expect any publicity as a new writer. What I expect is to have a partnership like you describe, in which everyone does what they should, and does it well. I also expect to be allowed to do a good job with my part of the business, not thwarted. And I’m actually well aware of everything you described that happens inside a publishing house–I know about most of what the house does, the editorial and production processes, the print processes, who their sales staff talks to, the catalogues, the book covers, the use of–though I now think they may be defunct–white boxes, when or if a writer gets a publicity budget, and so on.
I think you may have jumped to some conclusions about what I said. I’m not that inexperienced or that new to the business; I’ve been in book production and publishing for decades, only in fiction for the seven years I mentioned. I was published as early as 1989. And though what you say about the publishing house’s investment in the book is logical, my experience is that it doesn’t always work out that way. And further, given the current turmoil in the publishing business, brought on by a tightening economy and a business model that is under pressure from e-books and online venues, I believe the ideal/logical situation you describe is happening less frequently these days.
Houses invest in a writer, then fail to effectively sell the book to the corporate buyers because of sales staff turnover or some other internal problem, or fail to send out the standard press releases to newspapers across the country, or whatever. They do a wonderful job of copyediting and proofreading, only to have the printer ship all the books with a signature missing. I know of a recent instance in which a writer had four different publicists assigned to a book in four months–each publicist quit and didn’t leave the next publicist the information he/she needed to determine whether the book had even been sent to the standard review outlets, whether press releases had occurred, whether the advance copies went out to Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly, and so on. (And by the way–the only reviews on MY latest book happened because I sent out copies of the book to reviewers after it was published and after I found out that none had been sent out–the task slipped through the cracks, somehow. A lot of things were handled well for that book, but reviews weren’t one of them.)
Where I agree with you and Laura is in respect to agents’ roles–the majority of agents do nothing to support the shepherding of a writer’s book through this process, or to educate the new writer as to what to expect and what not to expect, thus putting the new writer even more at risk. As one author recently said, “There’s no apprenticeship program for writers; you learn as you go, often after it’s too late.” If the editor or the agent is doing a poor job, many times as a new writer, you don’t know until it’s too late, because you didn’t even know the right questions to ask.
What I did say in my prior post, simply, is that there are numerous recent instances of NY houses making it very difficult for the books of a new writer to succeed. I have friends who have had editors –and house publicists–who were very helpful and coordinated with the writer to put together useful publicity that worked. I have had friends who were harmed by the way the house handled certain aspects of the process, causing all kinds of problems. Like any business, it depends on who you end up working with, how competent he or she is, and whether that house is currently undergoing some kind of turmoil that makes them less than productive. As I said, it depends on the editor and his/her philosophy about promoting your books. This determines whether the house wants you to participate in the publicity or sit on the sidelines. Some editors are more “traditional” and think whatever the writer can do in terms of self-promotion is virtually useless; others believe that participation can be very useful. At least one house now writes into its contracts a requirement for its authors to do blog tours, for example.
And by the way, I have actually had editors tell me, “Don’t worry, we’re taking care of you.” Just like agents do. And I always believe it’s a huge, red flag when ANYONE says that to me.
So please don’t take my comments wrong; all I’m saying is that it’s very, very difficult for a new writer to succeed at this time in NY. As recently as 2007, that wasn’t the case, and I would have agreed with you–many new writers were getting a chance. That was then. Today, the Big Six have tightened their belts, slashed their advances and print runs, and most importantly, slashed their acquisitions. Those who feel they can produce and publish a quality e-book now have a second market in which they can participate and generate income.
As Joe Konrath would say, “It’s a great time to be a writer.”
–P.J.
Fascinating article on the legal slugfest going on about THE SHACK. Get a load of this mess:
“It wasn’t until Hachette came around that Windblown Media and Young even put their publishing agreement in writing….
The dueling lawsuits have left Hachette in an awkward position. If they pay Young additional royalties, Windblown might file suit to reverse that decision. But if they continue to pay Windblown according to the terms of the original contract, Young might also press on with additional litigation.
In the first quarter of 2010 alone, “The Shack” earned nearly $1 million in royalties, with more money accruing daily. So on May 11, Hachette filed its own lawsuit in federal court, stating in its filing that “as a result of disputes that have arisen … [Hachette has] a real and reasonable fear that distributing the funds would expose Hachette to multiple claims and liabilities.”
This means that neither Young nor Windblown Media will be able to touch any money earned by “The Shack” until there’s a clear ruling on who is entitled to the funds.”
The full story can be found at
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-the-shack-20100713,0,6240949.story#
It’s well worth reading for the complete backstory.
I’m still stunned about the writer involved not having a frickin contract drawn up (under the oversight of a good lawyer) with Windblown Media before letting them publish it in the first place.
PJ, sorry I didn’t really take your comments wrong, just using them as a jump-off point to try to dispute a few myths. (grin) And the biggest of all myths that I keep hearing over and over and over is that it’s harder today for new writers in New York. Hogwash, if new writers don’t get lost in the agent whirlpool of going nowhere.
You’ve been around a while as well and you know you have heard this same statement over and over and over through the years. For some reason new writers WANT it to be harder for them than any other generation before them. Those old-timers like me had it easy back in the day. (snort)
I agree with Konrath completely, and that includes New York publishing. It’s a great time to be a writer. New or old-timer. And not just because of electronic. But I have to admit that helps. (grin)
And yes, I have had editors say, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.” Always makes me worry more and double-check to the point of being paranoid.
Self-promotion, as I did a chapter on, can be a huge waste of time these days. It can help a little, but not much. Not enough to even dent a New York published midlist book.
Yup, watching the lack of business of a writer is fun, isn’t it? I’ve been following that case as well.
It’s why Kris and I constantly tell writers to always plan for success. Clearly this writer thought the book was a failure, so guess what? No plan for success. And now lawsuits. Typical.
Dean,
With regard to self-promo, I couldn’t be more in agreement. Here’s an interesting data point for you: for my most recent book, Bantam paid co-op dollars to have B&N place the book in the towers at the front of the store. And surprise, surprise: I have GREAT sales at B&N. The B&N corporate buyer LOVES the series. I am very, very grateful that Bantam spent this money; in one fell swoop, they generated more sales that I could have by signing in every B&N across the country.
And yes, Nathan, I plan to hang around, no worries there! The more I can talk to writers who have been in this business longer than I have, the better. It takes a village, as everyone says these days…
I believe the current publishing model has to undergo some fairly radical change to remain viable, but maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I’m under no illusion that the Big Six will disappear or go down in flames; I do believe, however, that the next several years are going to be chaotic, especially for midlist writers trying to establish themselves in print.
Hey, Dean, you’ll like this: Through a fair amount of serendipity, and through letting it be known–after reading your chapters on marketing subsidiary rights–that I was now marketing my own film and audio rights, a friend just connected me with a Hollywood film producer. We’re meeting next week. If nothing else, it will be a kick to talk to her. And who knows? Maybe she’ll want to made a movie out of my latest book! (A gal can always dream, lol.) Or at least pay me option money while she thinks about it!
–P.J.
~“His response, even though he wants to be a writer? He said he would’ve stopped right there because that would mean he had no talent. ”
IMO, someone like that shouldn’t submit at ALL. People who KNOW they’re going to give up that easily should just get out of the slushpile altogether and make room for people who have what it takes to be professional writers: perseverance.
There are many excellent things to do with one’s life besides writing. People who aren’t cut out for this profession should go look for what they ARE cut out for.~
I think that is a little harsh on that poor guy, and on many writers who think like him; our culture’s misunderstanding and misuse of the term and myth of “talent” (ref. a few KSCOPs back) versus the reality means a lot of writers believe the wrong things about the writing profession. There’s even a difference between writing as a hobby (with a long and proud tradition of amateurs producing high quality stuff, as in SF’s beginnings) and writing for a living wrapped up in the myth of talent, too.
I feel a little sorry for that guy, because I used to be more like him than I am now, in buying the talent myth whole. I wrote, subbed to agents and editors, and got some good rejection letters, but then I started taking in advice from other writers and aspiring writers. Since I didn’t sell right away, I thought: I need to slow down. I need to polish more. I need to come up with a great idea, a blockbuster idea, with my debut novel, or I was going to fall victim to publishing by net. The midlist was a dying and disappearing thing. I need to pitch to agents more. …you get the picture, every writing myth, combined with every talent myth out there.
Then the myths brought me to a screeching halt, and I was miserable, not writing. Then I shoved all the myths I’d heard into a corner, or at least beat them back enough to write again, if slowly, and then, to start applying my business brain and common sense to the writing industry, and found Dean, Kris, and other mythbusting writers who were not exceptions that proved the rule, but a source of business advice and inspiration and modeling for my own career.
You never know if this guy will throw off the myths in a few years and wake up into the real picture.
Perhaps the reason young agents want to take care of clients is that they are the product of “helicopter parenting”…. they’ve grown up having parents take care of their every need and have never been thrown into the deep end of the pool….and allowed to fail. The young generation doesn’t understand failure, because they’ve always received a blue ribbon or a trophy just for participating. Then they graduate from college and real life slaps them in the face.
I think writers and others in creative industries understand failure better than any other group… and perhaps that’s what young agents cannot understand. So they may simply be trying to do for writers what their parents did for them.
Laura wrote:
Oh, believe me, you can INDEED depend on it! (In fact, for over three years, I wrote a column that the editor named “The Comely Curmudgeon” when asking me to do it. My personality is well known to my peers. (g))
Hey, Laura – You should put those columns together in an ebook called The Comely Curmudgeon. I’d buy it!
I think the whole “it’s harder now than ever for new writers” is something mostly new writers tell ourselves so that when whatever we’re doing isn’t working for us (or isn’t working as quickly as we’d like it to, which is often the case), we can just pull a version of the fox and the grapes.
Some of these myths, like the one about someone stepping in and “taking care” of things, are just a giant security blanket full of excuses for why whatever isn’t going the way we want. So far, personally, I’ve found that when I’m clinging to a myth it’s probably because I’m using it to excuse myself from doing something I don’t want to do or from looking closely at why I’m not getting the results that I want. That’s why reading these myth posts is bittersweet. On the one hand, great information
On the other… my excuses keep getting holes blown right through them. Gee, thanks Dean *grin*
Randy, that is a startlingly good point. I have just shaken my head at the new school methods where no child fails at anything. I think you may very well be onto something there.
P.J.
And with Hollywood, remember never write for free and don’t start writing until the check clears. (grin) Good luck and have fun.
I’m not sure what you mean by the big six? There are six major conglomerates in publishing in the international world, if that’s what you mean. But their imprints can bid against each other and are often stand-alone companies with dozens if not hundreds of imprints in each company. So it doesn’t function like a big six. There are thousands and thousands of imprints, all working on their own, with their own editorial staff.
But I do agree that publishing is in for another “adjustment” just as it has a five or six times in the last 100 years. Always a fun time until the dust settles.
Pati, have you read Laura’s “Rejection, Romance, and Royalties?” It’s a brilliant collection of her articles on the writer’s life.
“Writers such as you two, who have been at it far longer, started in an timeframe when at least SOME publicity was being done, and SOME effort was made to get behind your books, building sales and name recognition slowly over time.”
This is a common misconception, along with the notion (which I heard again today) that I’m able to represent myself because I am somehow better connected than other longtime career writers (including those with far more book sales than I have). And indeed, I think the people saying, “I don’t know how it’s possible for a new writer so make it these days,” are the same people prone to saying, “You MUST have an agent, and don’t listen to Laura Resnick, who’s only able to get by without an agent because there’s something freakishly unique about her.” It’s all very much a message along the lines of, “Be afraid, be very afraid, because -I- am afraid.”
My fourteenth published book was the first-ever attempt by a publisher to promote my work. (And, er, when I say “promote” the “official marketing strategy,” printed right there on the cover flat, was “The author is female,” and the book comprised 1/8 of a B&W “summer releases” ad from my publisher in a small trade journal. This gives you some notion of the level of push and promo devoted to my 14th book, and it was, as I say, the most that had EVER been done by a publisher for my career up to that point.) My previous 13 releases had consistently been treated as “one of the books we’re releasing this month,” and it was always sink-or-swim on my own; my first 13 releases were at 3 different houses, one of which folded and 3 of which dumped me.
However, my 15th book, which got about that same level of promo, was delayed in editorial (not due to editing; just due to collecting dust on the editor’s desk for over a year) and production (due to production being sluggish about putting back in the 5,000 words they had accidentally dropped during typesetting), and so the book missed its release date (and also its reviews deadlines). Bookstores thought it just hadn’t been published and told readers so. Then when it showed up the following month, it wasn’t expected and no one really knew what to do. My 16th book, 6 months later, had much lower sales–quite possibly due to the stuff that went wrong with #15. My 17th, 18th, and 19th releases were with small presses (both of which were shutting down their programs around the times my books were published, hence no promo), and my 20th book (with a major house) was dumped on the stands like a dirty secret with a bad cover and such a total absence of promo that (literally) my own family and friends didn’t know it had been published.
Currently, at DAW Books, I’m being published -well- for the very first time in my career. And I worked really long and hard in this highly competitive industry, over a period of 20 years, to get that opportunity, and was having the “no promo experiences” from the start (1989) and pretty consistently until, oh, last year. And while you hear writers saying that publishers don’t want them to promote, I hear writers saying that they’re actively pressured by their publisher to promote–so it’s six-of-one half-a-dozen-of-the-other, and it ALWAYS HAS BEEN, ever since I made my first sale in March 1988 (and no doubt for decades before that). People say that the way Louis Lamour broke out and built his career was to go around meeting the jobbers (truckers who put books in the wire racks) and pressing the flesh in person for years, showing up at truck stops and distribution venues under his own steam and on his own dime. Bestseller Raymond Feist has talked on. In the late 1980s, Brenda Joyce spent about $40,000 (she came from money) on a promo campaign, which was what got her out of the obscure midlist and onto the bestseller list. (Not coming from money, I’ve had to do this the old-fashioned way–writing good books for years, building a reputation and repertoire, and searching for a publisher that would finally publish me well.)
“It’s different for us now than it was for you back then” is a refrain I’ve been hearing ever since my very first book hit the stands. I’d been a published author for less than two months by the time I was regularly hearing that I didn’t understand what it was like for aspiring writers, because the market was “so different now” (spring/89) than it had been when I started submitting (summer/87). And by the time my third book was out, I was hearing that I also didn’t understand how much harder it was for new proessional writers than it was for an established writer like me–at a point when I had been a published professional for all of one year.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Pati, the Comely Curmudgeon columns -were- collected, along with some of my SFWA columns, and RWR articles, in a book called REJECTION, ROMANCE, AND ROYALTIES: THE WACKY WORLD OF A WORKING WRITER (Jefferon Press, 2007) in trade paperback:
http://www.amazon.com/Rejection-Romance-Royalties-Working-Writer/dp/0977808645/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1279079215&sr=1-1
I’ll be releasing an e-book of that book this year.
“you are assuming publicity where you, the writer, will see it. That’s another aspect of what causes this “I got no publicity” ”
Good point, Dean. One of the reasons I know how much my current house is doing for me is that, in addition to what I can -see- (ex.: for the time time in my entire career, a bunch of copies my new release was in a front-of-store “New Releases” dumps [big cardboard display case] in stores, rather that there just being two copies stuck straight onto the regular midlist shelves at the back of the store; ex. a Border mailed discount coupon campaign urged readers to buy my winter release with the coupon), this is also the most communicative publisher I’ve ever worked with (also the most reliable; it’s the only house that’s kept every promise to me), so I know more than I usually do about what this house is doing that the writer DOESN’T see (such as sending out bound MSs and bound galleys to key sales accounts, holding multiple sales meetings to discuss how to position the book, making sales presentations, etc.).
“I think the whole “it’s harder now than ever for new writers” is something mostly new writers tell ourselves so that when whatever we’re doing isn’t working for us (or isn’t working as quickly as we’d like it to, which is often the case), we can just pull a version of the fox and the grapes. ”
I think there’s a lot of that. Mostly because that vast majority of people who want to be writers don’t have what it takes: perseverance and true grit. A person can having a solid working career as a writer if he’s got these things -and- a professional level of writing skills, even if he’s got modest or marginal talent (which is, in any case, so subjective that I make no attempt to codify how much talent anyone does or does not have). ESPECIALLY because that vast majority of people who think they want to be writers have NO IDEA how much perseverance and true grit is needed to break into this highly competitive profession, let alone STAY in it. No idea at all.
I bypassed that problem because I grew up in a professional writer’s house. My dad is science fiction writer Mike Resnick, who’s been writing professionally for well over 40 years now. So among him and his writers friends (who were always in our house), I saw exactly what was required–how hard you had to work, how long it took to sell a good book, how many things could go wrong in a writing career, etc.
That’s why, when I started out, my plan was: I will write at least six books before I consider quitting; and I will hope to get enough feedback on the rejections of the first three books to help me make the second three books potentially saleable.
Compared to the plan that most aspiring writers whom I’ve met for the past 22 years tend to have, which is: I’ll write a book, it’ll be great, a publisher will acquire it right away, and I’ll be successful.
My plan was based on having grown up around the business and imprinting what it was actually like, from a very early age. Not many aspiring writers have that advantage, and so not only are their expectations unrealistic, they’re also fostered by the Cinderella media stories, which are the ONLY stories that get into the media, and which are statistically on a par with breaking the house at roulette. Ex.: Jacquelyn Mitchard dreams a story, writes it, sells it, gets on Oprah, becomes a major bestseller.
Or they only know PART of the story, and therefore mistakenly think its a Cinderalla tale: Ex. Nora Roberts is a regular mom and wife without a college education who has become one of the 3-4 bestselling writers in the world. (Actually, Nora wrote four MSs before writing one she could sell; she sold more than 60 books before making the NYT bestseller list for the first time; she’d made previous runs at The List, so it was a relief when she finally got on it, rather than a fairy tale story; despite several NYT bestsellers, her publisher didn’t think she was “ready” for hardcover release, and this was such an impasse that she had to leave (without an offer waiting in the wings) and go elsewhere to get into hardcover. Ex. Patrick Rothfuss’ first-ever novel because a huge international bestseller and achieved almost cult-like status, and hundreds of thousands of people are eagerly awaiting his next novel (scheduled for 2011 release); but Rothfuss wrote for (I believe he said) 14 years before making his first book sale, and works on -that- novel for 7 years before selling it (and then did extensive rewrites under his editor’s guidance before it was published). Ex. After she was already a published author, it took Judith McNaught four years to find a publisher for what became her first NYT bestseller. Ex. Not only did multi-published, award-winning Jennifer Crusie have multiple rejections for her first big seller, she also had the guts to turn down low-level offers for it, having decided that she’d only sell it when/where she was sure it would be handled right–and that took a while to find; Jenny then went on to become a hc NYT bestseller with that publisher. (One of the “author power” issues Jenny often talks about, and which I completely agree with, is that the writer ALWAYS have the power to say “no;” it comes with consequences, but it’s a power we always have.)
But those sort of details don’t make it into the popular (and wholly erroneous) zeitgeist among aspiring writers about how the biz works.
However, here’s another BIG reason aspiring writers think it must be “harder now” than it used to be, or hard for them than it was for me, or for whoever broke in 2-5-7 years ago (or, as I heard often when I was a new pro, er, SIX MONTHS ago, etc.) is also that… aspiring writers don’t SEE what they’re up against.
Compare this to an actor. A young/new actor starting out, or breaking in, or still at the “general call” phrase of his career SEES, at every audition he attends in his attempts to get a job… just HOW MANY other actors of a similar height, weight, build, age, type, etc are ALL trying out for the EXACT same ONE role (or for 4 spots in the chorus, or whatever). An actor who arrives at a general Equity call audition can -see- that 500 other people have shown up JUST THAT DAY for -one- role (ex. a supporting role in an off-off-Broadway show–because there wouldn’t be an open call for a Broadway lead role: the people seen for that sort of audition have already emerged from this kind of a mass crowd, via their successful auditions and performances). If you spend a year or two doing that–SEEING hundreds of other people at every audition you go to for modest roles in modest shows… And you know VERY WELL just how competitive your profession is.
But aspiring writers rarely have any idea just HOW MANY other aspiring writers they’re competing against to break in. Just as they have no idea how many writers -I- compete against to hold my current publishing slot, or how many writers I’ve repeatedly competed against to find a new publishing slot after every occasion that I’ve lost the one I had. I used to think it would be helpful if we could conduct field trips into the Tor Books offices. I don’t know what the place looks like now (it was emptied out and remodeled after I visited in 2002), but it was so overloaded with MSs that it was a fire hazard (and, indeed, I think it unlikely a fire marshall would have let it keep operating). When I visited, the walls and rooms were so thick with piles of MSs that towered over my head that a person any wider than me would not have been able to walk around there (and, indeed, in a few places, I had to SQUEEZE my chest through tight gaps to get from one place to another).
That was 8 years ago. When things were supposedly “easier.” When I broke into the business, I was pulled out of a slushpile of 6,000 MSs. How “easy” does anyone actually suppose that was?
“Fascinating article on the legal slugfest going on about THE SHACK. ”
Wow. What a MESS. Indeed, “mess” is much too inadequate a word! It’s MULTIPLE messes, all revolving around one book! Egad.
My first reaction is that someone who didn’t even bother to get a CONTRACT from his publisher (or who chose to work with a publisher that didn’t bother to issue a contract) is an example of someone who really NEEDS an agent.
But then it occurs to me… someone -that- incapable of basic business sense would probably have hired a con artist “agent” who’d have taken everything from him anyhow.
I’ve been following that legal case now for a time and yup, a prime example of what I’ve been talking about. You need to know business because this is a very, very large business.
And this also illustrates how so many writers plan for failure instead of success. Clearly both parties in this were planning on failure, never this problem.
Beginning writers do this also by sending manuscripts to places that reject quickly. Excuse me? Who gives a rats you-know-what how fast they turn a story around. You are sending them the story FOR THEM TO BUY IT!!!!!
That silliness just makes me snort and shake my head.
~aspiring writers don’t SEE what they’re up against.~
I agree, Laura. I got a peek at the slush pile of an online pub that had just started taking submissions, and it was incredible how many subs they’d had, and how bad/inappropriate so very many of them were.
Editors and publishers need material to put out, and there is a LOT of crap to wade through just to find competently written and constructed stories. Agents make finding stories less like drinking from a giant firehose, but then editors can’t find anything “fresh” and “new” and “exciting”.(1)
Very good point about the big name authors. No matter how authors may like to gloss their beginnings and their successes, behind their successes are a lot of struggles. (2)
The straight dope, for serious writers, imo, can only be heartening and encouraging–it’ll take hard work, guts, determination, and persistence to stick it out for most, not writing and hoping to hit it big with your first tilt at it.
[(1)(2) to keep this comment on topic, expanded elsewhere]
Meant to finish by saying that those who get discouraged by the top names’ setbacks should indeed get out of the game and stop muddying things up for the rest of us, heh.
“Beginning writers do this also by sending manuscripts to places that reject quickly. Excuse me? Who gives a rats you-know-what how fast they turn a story around. You are sending them the story FOR THEM TO BUY IT!!!!!”
Yeah, this whole “I don’t want to wait for a response” thing among aspiring writers baffles me. Why NOT, for goodness sake? Of all the mistaken things to focus on–the waiting period? (shaking head)
P.S. I waited for 11 months from a response from a major house when I started submitting. So what? The point is that they BOUGHT the book after 11 months, not that I waited 11 months. The point is ALSO that during those 11 months, I wrote 2.5 more books–because I was planning for success: Whether or not I sold that book, I was writing and sending out other books, too. My plan was to get a sale; preferably multiple sales (which I did). WAITING was a side effect of the plan, not the plan.
Regarding publicity, a little clarification please
Ok, so Dean lists all the behind-the-scenes publicity that the author never seens unless s/he asks, and maybe not even then. But it is nonetheless happening because of course a publisher isn’t going to put money into a book and then *want* it to fail. Totally makes sense to me. Maybe I jumped to conclusion, but that sounded to me like saying publishers DO always do publicity.
BUT (yes, has to be a “but” right?
)
But then Laura described how often that didn’t happen. And I’ve heard that from other writers as well.
So I guess my question is, should writers “worry” about that aspect of it or not?
Having fallen into the frustration of it years ago, I think the “I don’t want to wait for a response” syndrome is brought about by the “you can only submit to one publisher at a time” syndrome. I don’t see it quite as often as I used to, but the guidelines for a number of book publishers used to stipulate something like they would only consider your work if it wasn’t currently sitting elsewhere. Considering it sometimes takes a publisher 6 months or longer to reply to submissions, under those rules it could take a writer years just to get his or her submission around to the top publishers.
I don’t fall for that one anymore. I don’t blanket every publisher in the world with submissions when I have something new, but I don’t send them out one at a time and sit and wait for a year or two before sending out the next one.
I think Laura just brought up another myth or two in writer’s heads.
*snip*
One of the “author power” issues Jenny often talks about, and which I completely agree with, is that the writer ALWAYS have the power to say “no;” it comes with consequences, but it’s a power we always have.
*unsnip*
Myth 1: The writer should never say “No” to a deal when starting out, no matter how awful the terms.
Myth 2: Boilerplate publishing contracts, no matter how unspeakably bad, are non-negotiable.
Hmm, as I’m writing this, I just realized these two are sub-myths that tie into the core myth that “Writers have no power.” Which ties in with why Jennifer Crusie was arguing that writers need to realize they ALWAYS have the power to say “NO.”
Exactly, L.M. Exactly!!
And you would be stunned at how much you will get by turning your back and walking away in negotiations. You have to meet in the middle and sometimes they don’t come after you, but when you know you can say no and walk, you take all the power and hold it. Exactly.
And on saying no, I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have said no to projects. I was offered last spring to write a novel for a major television show, but after talking with the young editor who had never worked with Hollywood and after hearing what Hollywood wanted, I knew the “hassle factor” was far, far too high for the money, so I politely said I couldn’t work it in and walked away.
I learned a long, long time ago that you should never write anything you don’t want to write for terms you don’t want to write for. I’ve purposely and knowingly taken a lot of crappy contracts because I wanted to write for the project and didn’t care. And I’ve turned down great contracts because I didn’t want to write the project. When you put your writing first, it also adds power. You can walk away and just write something else. No big deal.
Writers are people who write. When you keep coming back to that one truth, it solves a great deal of problems.
Ty, it’s perfectly fine to do as you are doing and send out to many BOOK publishers. Keep it one at a time for short fiction since there is no logical business reason to do otherwise. They can’t compete for your story and if two want it, you have made one angry.
But book publishers can compete and it’s normal, so you want to have two book publishers wanting your work. That’s a good thing.
Deborah,
No, no point in worrying about it. Sure, crap happens and you hear about it. But think business….. No publisher, for any reason, spends upwards of 100,000 total costs on a small genre book (and a ton more than that on higher books that get 20,000 advances and up) and purposely does no inhouse publicity. The intentions and profit and loss numbers are there to do the publicity. Mistakes happen, sure. It’s a big business. Write the next book.
Writers have had ugly things happen in this area, sure. My wife, Kris, had one of the ugliest I have ever seen. A book titled Hitler’s Angel back in 1995 was sold under Kris Rusch to St. Martins. Editor scheduled it and a couple dozen other books he bought, sales force did a great job, it even got a full page review in the New York Book Review. All positive. Except the editor didn’t get the book into production along with dozens of others (and was fired when this was discovered…he’s now an agent…not kidding).
Book was rescheduled and came out nine months later, but the stores in the early days of computers said, “We already ordered this and no copies sold. Why would we want more now?” And so the book sold about 500 copies and sank like a stone, along with the Kris Rusch name.
Fast forward 15 Years. Out of a major mystery imprint in Great Britain, here comes Hitler’s Angel, same name, same author. Bestseller lists, huge and wonderful reviews, and will hit the States in January. And finally the book is getting the attention it deserves.
If you understand the magic bakery and how it works, no writing is ever gone. You roll with the ups and downs of the mistakes in the big business and just keep going.
The problem is that writers are such whiners these days that when their “baby” has something happen to it, they stop instead of understanding that things happen and just writing the next book.
Writers are people who write. Publishing is a big business and mistakes happen. Just keep writing and it all levels out.
Laura wrote: Pati, the Comely Curmudgeon columns -were- collected, along with some of my SFWA columns, and RWR articles, in a book called REJECTION, ROMANCE, AND ROYALTIES: THE WACKY WORLD OF A WORKING WRITER (Jefferon Press, 2007) in trade paperback
Ah, yes. I have that. Good book.
But I love the title The Comely Curmudgeon. Maybe a blog? ComelyCurmudgeon.com?
Ha! Hadn’t thought of submissions from that angle, Dean. Thanks for the advice on magazines, ezines, etc., though I rarely submit blindly to any of them anymore. I don’t write much short fiction of late, and when I do it’s usually only because an editor/publisher has asked if I want to be a part of an anthology or something.
Dean wrote: “Except the editor didn’t get the book into production along with dozens of others (and was fired when this was discovered…he’s now an agent…not kidding). ”
You need a beverage alert on this one. I almost sprayed my keyboard! LOL!
“My wife, Kris, had one of the ugliest I have ever seen. A book titled Hitler’s Angel back in 1995 was sold under Kris Rusch to St. Martins. Editor scheduled it and a couple dozen other books he bought, sales force did a great job, it even got a full page review in the New York Book Review. All positive. Except the editor didn’t get the book into production along with dozens of others (and was fired when this was discovered…he’s now an agent…not kidding). ”
1. Not at all surprised to hear that editor is now an agent. Alas, that’s where too many incompetent editors go: agenting.
2. NOW I get it! A few years ago, I happened across a copy of that book. And I thought, “Whoa! Why haven’t I ever heard of this book?” It was by someone I know -and- it’s subject matter that I’m interested in, so I was surprised it had never even made a blip on my radar. I read it, and it’s a darned good book, very interesting and well-crafted. Which made me even MORE surprised that it had been out for years without my ever hearing about it. NOW I get it. AGH.
“I love the title The Comely Curmudgeon. Maybe a blog? ComelyCurmudgeon.com?”
Terey Daly Ramin gets the credit for that great title. When Evan Maxwell resigned from doing his NINK column after 5 years and they were looking for a replacement, Terey, who was NINK editor at the time, approached me and suggested that title to me. Great title (and perfect fit (wg)). I suggested it for the book, but it didn’t get used, since it was too non-descriptive (i.e. it doesn’t in any way tell you that the book is about writing professionally).
When I became a NINK columnist again last year (I had resigned when I left for grad school, Jerusalem, etc.), I thought about using it again. But that was then, this is now, lots has changed, including NINK, Ninc, and me, so it seemed better to start fresh with a new title (now I’m “The Mad Scribbler”).
Hi Dean,
Wow, you read a lot into my post about cows. I don’t assume that authors can’t think (nor do I assume that cows can’t think). I think you were responding mostly to your own assumptions, not to what I was saying. I probably believe less in the myth than you do, considering that I haven’t published anything yet and therefore have no investment in the existing publishing system in any form.
What I do assume is that, like cows, yeast, fruit trees, musicians, inventors, college professors, and factory machines, authors are PRODUCERS.
As with any other productive system, there are a couple of ways to make a living. One is to simply to produce it, and to use your product to trade for the services and materials you need but can’t make yourself. This is the way of the subsistence farmer, but it was really pioneered by bacteria, oh, about 3.5 billion years ago.
Another way to make a living is to take what producers make, either through eating them, pirating their wares, or (ideally) doing a trade with them, exchanging services or materials. This is what agents do. Ideally, they provide services for the writers in a way that both benefit. In the real world…this is another ancient way of making a living.
A third way is to aggregate producers and to make a little bit off of each of them. This is what dairy farmers do. Their cows are producing product. They keep the cows happy, then take the milk and market it. The parallels with publishing should be obvious, I hope, but I will point out that this ain’t new either.
The first green algae scooped up some nice, happy photosynthesizing cyanobacteria around 400-600 million years ago, gave them an environment where they could reproduce, and held them up to the sun, so they could make carbs for themselves and their hosts. Today we call these early production aggregators plants, and they run the world, along with fungi and bacteria. The cyanobacteria inside plants are called chloroplasts. A big chunk of their genome now resides inside the plant nucleus, so a chloroplast is no longer a free producer, but a mere organelle. I’ll leave the metaphorical associations between this example and authors’ status to be worked out by anyone interested, but it’s worth pointing out that free-living cyanobacteria are some of the toughest organisms on the planet.
The big point is that none of these strategies are new, and one can learn a lot about economics by studying simple things like plants and bacteria. They’ve been fiddling with this stuff for billions of years, after all.
As for Amazon… Amazon works by shortening the supply chain, and when we get to the point where I sell my eBook to (or through) Amazon, I think arguing about whether they are a publisher or a distributor is a waste of time. The bigger problem is that they may become one of the only games in town, and that is disempowering for me as a producer. When my publisher/distributor starts trying to grow itself into a public utility with a legalized monopsony (as with power, water, or health care), that can be problematic for me, particularly if I want to influence that business to my own benefit.
“The problem is that writers are such whiners these days that when their “baby” has something happen to it, they stop instead of understanding that things happen and just writing the next book.”
I don’t believe that this is a “these days” phenomenon, just as I don’t believe that wanting to be taken care of is generational or new.
I think that writers STOPPING because something goes wrong is one of the two top reasons that about half the people I met when I broke into the business are no longer around; something went wrong, and they didn’t regroup and keep going. They STOPPED.
Similarly, not long after I sold my first book, I was invited to a PR luncheon where some popular romance authors gave casual talks and then mingled with attendees (readers). I still remember my stunned amazement as two of those authors talked at the podium about how they didn’t understand the business or care about it, they didn’t read their contracts, they didn’t know about sales or the market, they let their agents “handle all that,” because, “All I care about is writing my books.”
Well, in a perfect world, that might make some sense. Just as, in a perfect world, I could eat whatever I want, lie on the couch all day, and yet have a well-toned size 10 figure. But we live in THIS world, ladies.
At subsequent conferences, among PROFESSIONALS, I have ever since then met people who don’t understand their contracts, who don’t READ their contracts, who are “afraid” to ask their agents questions, who are “afraid” to ask their editors questions, who pak it in and quit the first time something goes wrong, or who keep submitting the same dead-subgenre for years without a sale because “it’s what I write,” etc., etc., etc. I’ve met formerly-published writers who’ve whined about how their careers were “destroyed” because, er, an editor rejected an option proposal. Or who talked about losing all confidence and quitting the biz because of how “badly” they were treated, i.e. the editor thought the book was a mess and requested extensive rewrites.
And I’ve been encountering this steadily since my first few months in the biz, way back in 1988 when I made my first sale.
In fact (and this is in my book RRR), very early on, I had a big relevation. After making my first sale, I was feeling very uneasy as a new writer about how often I came across old out-of-print books by writers whom I’d never heard of (including books with phrases like, “The incredible international bestseller! 34 weeks on the NYT list!” on the cover), and also by how many articles I found in back issues of publishing trade journals (ex. Romantic Times, Romance Writers Report, SFWA Bulletin, etc.) by writers who had completely disappeared since then. Where had all these writers gone? Why were so many writers disappearing?
Then one day a friend introduced me to one of these writers. It was someone who’d had a good article in a HOW TO WRITE book that I’d read as an aspiring writer, who had since then completely disappeared–after selling only 2-3 books. We talked over lunch… and The Secret of where all these writers were going became apparent. This author had sent in an option book, her editor hadn’t liked it… and the author, DEEPLY embittered about that, never wrote or submitted anything else, at that house or anywhere else.
And in the subsequent 22 years, I have come across that sort of scenario again and again and AGAIN and again and, indeed, again. Yes, it’s very common now. But in my experience, it was VERY common back in the 1980s, too.
Just as writers who said, “I want my agent to take care of me, and my publisher to take care of me, and I don’t want to have to know anything or take responsibility for my career or my business” in any way were also, in my experience, every bit as common 20+ years ago as they are now.
Oh, P.S. The other two two reasons? Most people simply STOP even WITHOUT something going wrong.
Most people who talk about writing a book never get beyond JUST TALKING about it.
Most people who start writing a book never finish it.
Most people who write one book never sell it and never write another.
And the thing that’s even RARER than actually -writing- and -selling- a book… is writing and selling book after book after book after book. Doing THAT is really the creme de la creme.
One book sale is a huge hurdle. But statistically, it’s not what separates the women from the girls. It turns out that lots of people who had the endurance for one book… don’t have the endurance for two, or for three. And so they just… STOP. The well is empty, and it never refills.
A writing career is about writing book after book after book. And it turns out that quite a few people who write one or two books–even one or two books that they manage to SELL… don’t have more books than that in them (or don’t have the stamina to keep writing the book ideas they may have).
(And to be clear, I’m only relating information, not judging or denigrating people who stop writing after a book or two. By writing and selling a book or two, they’ve achieved something very challenging that VERY few people ever get beyond JUST TALKING about, and I respect that. I’m just saying that since a writing career is about writing book after book after book, this turned out not to be the career for them–and usually the difference between someone like this and a career writer is ONLY apparent when someone is indeed writing and selling their third, fourth, fifth, etc. novel. Mostly, you just find out by DOING, and editors just find out by waiting to see IF you do it.)
Typical example, I read a first-time novel a couple of years ago that I really liked–original idea, fresh story, polished writing, witty, sexy, engaging, off-the-wall, good pacing. I bought several copies of it and gave them to friends, because I thought this new writer was such a find. But…. the copyright date on the book was already several years old, there were no other books available by this writer, and I couldn’t find anything about her or any upcoming books on the Web. The author had mentioend her editor on her Acks page, and I happened to be slightly acquainted with the editor–so I emailed the editor to say, Hey, LOVED this book, giving copies away to people I liked it so much, when will we see this author’s NEXT book?
And the editor–a likeable and highly respected editor at a good major house (one that I always wanted to write for but never managed to sell to, and where several of my friends write and are very happy) wrote me back and said (I paraphrase): “Yes, isn’t it a terrific book? But the author disappeared on me. I’ve tried to keep in touch, I’ve asked what she’s working on… but she’s not working on anything else, so it looks like this was the one book she had in her. Oh, well.”
“Having fallen into the frustration of it years ago, I think the “I don’t want to wait for a response” syndrome is brought about by the “you can only submit to one publisher at a time” syndrome. I don’t see it quite as often as I used to, but the guidelines for a number of book publishers used to stipulate something like they would only consider your work if it wasn’t currently sitting elsewhere.”
Which is a little bit like someone saying, “You aren’t allowed to let anyone else look at your house until I’ve looked at it and decided whether to buy it, and I currently don’t know when I can get out there to look at it.”
IOW, there is NO CHANCE of me cooperating with such an unreasonable expectation, and there never was. (The power to say “no.”)
Also, well worth keeping in mind WHY some publishers had/have such a policy: They’ve had too many experiences where they’ve read a MS, liked it, called the beginning author to make an offer… and been told, “Oh, I already sold it elsewhere.” At which point, the publisher is (understandably) FURIOUS to realize it has TOTALLY WASTED ITS VALUABLE TIME in -reading- the MS (in most cases, -multiple- people had to read it for a first-time buy to be authorized), discussing it, running a profit-and-loss calculation on it, and putting together an offer.
Rather than allow myself to be treated like some drooling nitwit incapable of conducting myself in a professional manner, I have always instead simply MADE IT CLEAR in my cover letters that I know what I’m doing, by using some version of this phrase: “Please be advised that this is not an exclusive submission [or query]. I will, of course, inform you immediately if there is an offer elsewhere, so that we can discuss what to do next.”
In all the years I’ve been doing that, NO publisher has ever had a problem with it (nor has a publisher had a problem when, upon making an offer, I said, “I’m very interested, but can’t give you an answer just yet; I need to contact the other houses where this is in submission,” NOR has any publisher ever gotten snippy when I’ve said, “I have an offer on this project, so I’m contacting you to ask if you’d like a little more time to read it before making a decision–if so, do you think you’d be able to respond by next week?”).
And in all the years I’ve been doing this, only ONE agent has ever had a problem with it… and that agent, in fact, APOLOGIZED to me about a year later, admitting he’d been out of line.
P.S. I’m speaking about book submissions, not short stories. I know very little about short story submissions, having only gone through that process a couple of times. (I’ve sold about 60 short stories, but almost all of them were on commission.)
Dean – and Laura and all others providing the invaluable insights in these posts and discussions:
Just gotta say thanks. As a fledgling novelist, about to wrap up my first novel, I began investigating the business some months ago, to start to get a feel for what to do once the novel was finished (besides start the next one, a given). My instincts were along the lines of these terrific Sacred Cow posts, but I found myself swayed by the tidal wave of crap from the sheep, and assumed I’d be getting an agent.
I found a reference to these articles in a fairly out-of-the-way place (a discussion board at the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards Community page), but, my goodness, I’m glad I did. I am now invigorated to follow my instincts and pursue my own business endeavors with my MS. Hoping for success, of course, but excited about success, mistakes, learning from failures, exploring possibilities, whatever shapes my acumen and helps develop my skills, my power, and my fun, as the Source of Product. As someone who has written volumes of business and technical stuff for my nine-to-fives over the past thirty years, it’s thrilling to embark on this business. It is indeed a great time to be a writer!
I’ve had a strange ongoing experience in the past few months.
Before having my lawyer deal with problems involving two of my (four) former literary agents, I looked those agents up on their websites, to make sure all my contact info for them was still current. It was. The weird part was that I got totally SUCKED IN to their websites.
Wow, what fabulous career-building agencies! What cool, savvy, pro-author agents! Hey, =I= want to be a part of these agencies! I want to work with these supercool agents!
And then I remembered, er, oh, yeah… I DID that. And the upshot was that I fired them and fled, and now I was having to pay a LAWYER to deal with their messes, thanks.
Indeed, my experiences as their client were so bad that if either of those agents came crawling to me now (which would never happen; but let’s go with this imagery for a moment), apologizing to me for their behavior, begging me to give them a second chance, and asking me to become a client again… I would CLUB them with a heavy object and run away as fast as possible.
You probably think I’m kidding.
And yet, even having been on that ride and feeling the way I feel about it, I found their websites incredibly seductive.
After reflecting on this oddity for a while, I looked up the websites of my other two former agents, both of whom I would also club and run away from if they ever came anywhere near me again. And I had the same reaction again. (Actually, one of them is retired from agenting and now writes/lectures about writing and publishing. But my reaction was, “Wow! What a great agent this person must have been!” Etc.)
And then I started looking up the websites of other agents, too. In particular, I looked at the websites of agents with bad reputations among writers I know, agents whom I’ve met and thought seemed foolish and poorly informed, agents whom my friends and aquaintances have fired, agents whom I have (when asked) advised writers to fire (or not to hire), agents whom former clients have advised -me- in the past not to hire, agents whom editors have said they don’t consider very good agents, a couple of agencies engaging in unethical practices, etc…
And ALL of their websites were SO seductive. They ALL made me want to be a client at these agencies and work with these agents! (Until rational thoughts along the lines of “oh, wait, nine of my friends have fired this nudnik” entered my head.) And I speak as someone who DOESN’T EVEN WANT another agent!
It was an eye-opening experience about the seductive appeal of, as Dean had dubbed it, the Agent Myth.
Laura. Thanks for that! it is amazing, very amazing as you pointed out, the difference between reality and business with these agents and the myth.
Last night in a wonderful discussion of the future of writing with a dozen professional writers who are here for a workshop and a couple from the local area stopping by for a chat, one of them asked me if I saw the future with agents and traditional publishing changing at all with the problems agents bring and the new electronic world allowing authors freedom.
My answer: The myths are too powerful. 99.9% of all writers coming in will never question any of it until banged around, and even then would rather let their career die than question the myths. 99.9% of all writers will walk the traditional road, will believe in only writing under their own name is all that is valuable, will believe that agents and editors take care of them, will think that putting a book up electronically on their own is too much work and so on and so on. Laura and I and a number of others in the business are trying in one way or another to say “Hey, look, there are other ways.” And we will help a few writers jump to the next level. But that’s all we can hope for. 99.9% will stay in the seductive myths and never question anything.
Personally, I can’t fathom why anyone would be part of that 99.9%. These dead cows littering the internet are the most encouraging things I’ve ever found as a writer. Nothing is more liberating than the freedom to disbelieve lies.
Thanks, Dean, and Laura, for resurrecting my hopes and dreams from a decade and more of believing what I was told.
And don’t worry, I’m not looking at any agent’s website except for Sydney T. Cat’s.
Your posts really make me hungry to get into this business. I really want to study copyright and fully understand the Magic Bakery like you’ve talked about before. I want to take full advantage of what writing as a business has to offer because I think that will lend itself to me writing more and more instead of the occasional chances I find myself with. The more I learn to conquer these myths, the more I’ll get to do what I really love to do.
My ship is moving up to Washington at the end of this year. I think that might be the perfect time to take advantage of a workshop or two while I’m there. Even if I’m not yet fully ingrained into the business, at least I’ll be able to get a head start on it. And maybe end up on the right track instead of the wrong one.
I remember a while back, when I read the book On Writing by Stephen King, he says he used to lock himself in a room with a typewriter and force out 2000 words a day even when he didn’t feel like it. I find it hard to develop that sort of focus in my writing, especially with everything going on around me. Life is happening and it doesn’t slow down just because I need to. And these days offer three times as many distractions from shiny metal objects to bright flashing lights. Netflix is only nine dollars a month and much easier than writing a book.
I’d be curious to know what you do to stay focused on your writing, Dean.
JD, my writing is not something I have to force myself to stay focused on. It’s just what I do. Period. Even when I was working day jobs, all my focus and attention was on my writing, the business of writing, how to get better at it. Never occurs to me to try to stay focused on the writing. It’s just so much a part of me it would be like asking “How do I stay focused on eating?”
However, that said, no writer ever does enough writing in their own minds. We always feel we should do more. That’s a different question and one that the answer depends on the life around you to solve. But if you would rather watch NetFlix than write, you might want to think about doing something else for a living. Honest, the people around you should be forcing you at times to watch a movie instead of writing, not the other way around. That’s the kind of passion that it takes to become a full time writer.
Okay, this brings up something that I’ve been wanting to talk about for a long time but keep forgetting. First off, I love writing. It’s something that I love to do at the end of a long day to blow off steam and relax. Actually, if I go too long without writing or writing enough, I start to get irritable. This became particularly noticeable towards the end of my time at my old job because there was so much BS I got caught up in that I wasn’t writing. But when I got focused again and was writing at normal levels, my stress dropped. Weird.
Anyway, something I don’t get (and this isn’t directed at JD, I think that his situation is different) is there are people who say that they want to be writers but they seem to totally hate writing. I’m not talking about struggling with a story concept or being frustrated that what’s on the paper doesn’t match what you see in your imagination, no, these people seem to absolutely HATE writing. I don’t get this. That would be like me going repelling every weekend. I don’t like it, I don’t do it. My dad on the other hand has freakin’ repelled down radio towers. So to each there own.
Steve, you sound like you are like a great deal of professional writers. We have an “addiction” to writing that actually comes across as an addiction. Kris has it far worse than I do and gets tough to be around after just a few days of not writing. But my addiction to it is there as well.
Doesn’t mean the fear and the myths can’t overcome that addiction. For the longest time some of these myths made going to my computer and writing a “what’s the point?” exercise. And that made writing hard. Along the way all of us, no matter how addicted, and how much we love the process of making shit up, run into aspects of the business or a myth that makes it hard to actually just sit down and write.
And at one point or a dozen points along the way, we all lose the “having fun” aspect of writing. Again usually caused by business or a myth. The key for most is just go have fun. Worry about the business and the myths later.
But if a person just hates writing, and yet is still trying to become a writer, they are wrapped up in a very bad myth that concerns many of us who grew up lower middle class. We were taught that work was something to be hated and just do to make money so that we could have the weekends off and then retire. That is a very, very deep belief in a large segment of society and I was no exception to the rule early on. Then one day something sort of snapped in my and I asked myself “Why should I work at anything I hate?” And from that moment forward I quit any job I didn’t like. Period, no exceptions. But even with that, the old thinking sometimes crept in with writing.
“How could writing be my job? It’s fun? Therefore it has no value.”
That belief is very, very deep in many of us and hard to fight at times. Which is where comments like “I want to be a writer but hate writing” come from.
There’s also a fairly common mentality (that I run into anyway) of “if you aren’t suffering, it isn’t art”. It’s easy, especially as a beginning writer, to feel unappreciated a lot and there seems to be an idea that if you aren’t struggling and suffering enough then clearly you aren’t really working and producing anything good. The MFA program I dropped out of was full of writers who seemed downright annoyed that I had fun writing my stories while they were agonizing over theirs. (Though I think some of that had to do with my getting over the rewriting myth around the same time while they were definitely still trapped in it).
And sometimes, I do kinda hate writing. Sometimes nothing seems to be working out and the stuff on the page looks totally different from the stuff in my head etc… There are days when it is not fun and I’m slowly learning when to push through that (because honestly my writing doesn’t seem to really suffer in quality when I’m hating on it and I doubt I could tell you what chapters I wrote while annoyed and which I had a blast doing after a year or two) and when I should just take a break. That kind of knowledge about work habits comes with time I guess.
I’ve also found that writing gets a lot more fun as I improve my writing/storytelling skills. Being able to see progress definitely helps…
Dean, thanks for the comment, it helped me look at things from another angle. I really appreciate the things that you and Kris do for new writers, and especially THIS new writer. You helped me see through a lot of myths with plain old common sense and I think helped me see the part that critical thinking plays in this industry (which a lot of writers see to lose somewhere along the way). You’ve definitely helped me get started building a firm foundation for a career.
Not saying that I won’t make mistakes along the way, everyone does, but at least I’ll be less likely to make a career ending one.
Thanks, Steve. Much appreciated.
Hmmmm, think it might be time for me to do a post on mistakes. Kris has a wonderful Freelancer’s Guide chapter going up tomorrow on mistakes and I think maybe the Sacred Cows might want to tackle that as well. You see, no mistake can end your career. That also is one of the wonderful things about writing. The only thing that stops writers is the fact that they stop writing and mailing work.
Yup, that needs to be a chapter… Thanks!
This is completely off-topic, but I have to point out something I am finding comical about these comments.
I use Google Reader, and I get notifications on my home page whenever new comments go up. Unfortunately, the comment title doesn’t always fit in the reader, so it gets truncated.
For this post, the titles are shown as, “Comments on ‘Writers Need to be Taken….’”
I just smile whenever I see it.
LOL, Jeremy. That is funny.
I need to be taken! (swoon)
The most consistent fun I ever had WRITING was back when I was an aspiring writer. Although I had professional intentions and ambitions, since I was aspiring, writing was at that time my hobby rather than my profession, and whatever time I spent writing was strictly voluntary. So that era was the period of the least amount of intersection that has ever existed for me between the creative aspects of writing and the business aspects of it.
I wouldn’t want to go back to that–I LIKE being published and paid, and this was my goal from the very start, after all. But, as a friend of mine often says: Writing is like sex; the exchange of money alters the nature of the activity.
Which is perhaps why one of the ways I’ve gotten myself out of a DESPERATELY frozen, blocked, stopped, dried-up creative place as a writer on more than one occasion is by writing stuff I don’t have any clear intention of ever submitting or showing to anyone. On such occasions, I write random scenes floating around in my head for which I have no story, no plot, no career plan, no title, no intentions. And doing so… manages to remind my lizard brain that this is essentially FUN, something I ENJOY, and a form of PLAY, which enables me to like it enough to get back to doing it on professional projects for which I -do- have story, plot, plans, and deadlines or a professional objective in mind.
The most stifling element in my creativity as a professional has been (surprise, surprise) an agent. For a variety for reasons.
One of the reasons being that this agent placed me with an editor who was a buddy of the agent’s, and it was far and away the worst, most stressful, most destructive editorial association of my entire career; but the agent repeatedly blockaded my requests for reassignment.
Meanwhile, the agent who had placed me in that destructive association and then insisted on my staying there (despite my many, loud, and specific protests) had an additionally stifling effect on my writing with two key habits. One of these was to belittle and refuse to send out most of my new/other work. The other was to stop me in my tracks anytime I wrote, started writing, or pitched a new idea.The agent would demand I =justify= having written (or my plan to write) a project or proposal, with questions along the lines of, “How do you see this complimenting the books I’ve already placed for you? Do you really see yourself be able to write -well- if you attempt to do more than -just- the books I’ve already placed for you? Who do you imagine would be interested acquiring in material like this? What makes you think anyone would want to read it?”
These are fairly energy-draining questions to get from one’s agent upon sending a new proposal or pitching a new idea (all the more so when I thought it was, er, the -agent- who was supposed to figure out who might be interested in acquiring a book from me); and it was even more shriveling when the agent dismissed, negated, or ridiculed all the answers I came up with, which was how these exchanges usually went.
Thus, under the influence of an agent who I had seen (and still often see) widely described as “brilliant” and “prestigious” and “top level” and so on, my creativity withered–and I grew to HATE writing. So I decided to quit.
That’s how bad a joyful process can when it winds up being pressed persistently beneath a negative weight.
However, once I decided to quit… I became free. The main reason being that, having decided to quit, I no longer cared what this agent or the editor-pal thought or said or did, I regarded them in their proper perspective, I made my own decisions without reference to them or their reactions, and as soon as I could, I got them both out of my working life, regardless of the potential consequences of doing so (in fact, there were NO negative consequences; =every= consequence of my making these choices was 100% positive and productive, from my creativity, to my career, to my income, etc.).
But even upon renewing creativity and my pleasure in writing, I must admit, it’s never been as much fun since my first sale as it was the the days when it was my hobby. No regrets. This is definitely what I sought and wanted, and I like having it. But I’ve never felt quite as free again, I guess, as I felt when writing was just my hobby and my ambition, rather than my work.
Laura, I agree completely. For the first time in a very long time I am also feeling free with my writing. And I agree, not as free as when I wasn’t selling, but close, real close. I also had to walk up to the door of quitting a few times before I finally figured out where the mental weight was coming from. And it also was agents. And the system itself.
My fiction has always been slightly off center. So this new world of electronic publishing has freed me back up completely to not care about the system. If I write a story that fits in a larger publisher’s magazine or line, I’ll send it, but if I write something that doesn’t, it goes to electronic through WMG Publishing. Total freedom for me again and I am enjoying writing again, having a blast. So for me it was giving myself permission to not have to deal with agents and to not have to deal with the system in general when I wanted that let me become free in my own head.
Folks, I know a lot of this sounds silly. But trust me, writers work between our ears, and when something creeps in there and blocks the brain in any way, it sends us down roads we don’t want to walk.
@ Dean: In regards to writing slightly off center, it seems to me that back in the “good ol’ days ” a lot of SF writers wrote stuff that was slightly off center, or at least the ones I’ve read. That’s what I loved about them. Guys like Keith Laumer, Roger Zelazny ( who is quite possibly my favorite writer), Christpher Anvil, Michael Moorcock, etc. (Insert your own favorite author from back in the day). They seemed to be able to push the envelope and make you think and still be entertaining (I’m thinking of a Keith Laumer story that I think was called the Great Time Machine Hoax, actually I think the novel was the Great Time Machine Hoax and the short story was something else).
What I’m hoping will happen is that with more authors turning to digital publishing, there will be lots more slightly off center writing in the future, because:
1) I love to read it.
2) I love to write it.
Steve, the writers you mentioned were off center and would never have found much of an audience, sadly, today. Editors, especially in science fiction, but in all publishing in general, can’t buy off center anymore and haven’t for decades outside of smaller presses. Kris and I started Pulphouse for this very reason in the late 1980’s and we published some fantastic stories, including While She Was Out by Ed Bryant that never would have found a home anywhere else. The editors and publishers in science fiction are still mostly older generation and believe that if has been done in 1958, you can’t do it again, and if doesn’t fit in the sales force idea of what will sell, no chance. So yes, with electronic publishing and authors taking back more control, you will find the off-center writers finding more outlets and more readers for their work. And this is a very good thing.
Thanks, Dean, that actually answered a question that I’ve had about why there aren’t very many writers like that these days (though I do think are still some excellant ones and some great publishers like Pyr who look for stuff like that). To clarify, is this a matter not enough people wanting to read this stuff anymore or is it just the editors? Sadly, it sounds like both.
Also, you’ve got me thinking, how does a writer who is ’slightly off center’ build a career these days? You’ve obviously done it Dean, so have Mike Resnick ( though Mike started out ages ago), Jeff Vanermeer, Jay Lake, etc. The reason I ask is that I want to be prepared ahead of time because I know that I can’t write to market, I’m not built that way. Not saying there’s anything wrong with it, just that my brain doesn’t work that way.
I think one thing that might help, too, is that I’m not restricting myself to just SF; I’d like to publish in the mystery/suspense genres as well and most of the other genres. So I think that might help but who knows. Oh, and which workshop would be most likely to cover this type of info?
Thanks,
Steve
Steve, even if you could, a writer should NEVER write to market. That way lies boredom and bad writing and dated work. Write your original work and then work to find a place to publish it, or build a company and publish it yourself if no one will look at it after a bunch of tries. But what is amazing is that writers don’t know their own work and many writers who think they write off center actually write down the middle of a genre and sell easily. Let the editors decide. Mail it to them. Write more. Only secret.
That makes sense, Dean. So I’ll just go back to what I was doing and go from there. Thanks.