Onward with thinking about the coming new year and new decade. I’m still sort of stunned that this is my 5th decade in publishing coming up. I honestly don’t feel that old and felt very old and behind when I started. I have no idea how that works. Just one of the head-shaking things about fiction writing.

Remember, read the first 6 posts in this series if you really want any of this to make sense.

A good title for this post might be “More than One Goal.”

So now, if you are getting serious about this writing thing for the coming year, you’ve figured out your writing speed. You have figured out how much time you can carve out of a day or a week regularly. You know about how many words/pages you can write in a normal writing hour. Then you have gone and looked at your long term dream and worked backwards from there to a weekly writing goal. A realistic goal, one that will not only allow you to make it happen, but will advance your movement by the end of the year toward your dream.

That far, right?

“Getting serious.” I guess I have to talk about that for a few paragraphs and then move on. “Getting Serious” is a term used in writing when a professional writer looks back at years and says, “It was at that point that I got serious.” That means that they made the time to write, set goals, and switched from a writer who always wanted to write but could never find the time to a writer who made the time, set targets, and followed Heinlein’s Rules in one fashion or another on the path to making the dream come true.

My big turning point, as I have talked about before, was January 1st, 1982, where I went from writing two stories a year and sometimes mailing them to writing and finishing and mailing one short story a week. I got serious. Granted, I had published a couple stories and a whole lot of poetry in the 1970’s, but that date was the day I “Got Serious.”

I can’t help you much on the decision to get serious, and all these “goal” blogs are aimed at are writers who are going to make the “Get Serious” jump, or writers who already have made the jump and are just looking for tricks to keep going into the new year.

Let me put it this way. You look back from December 31st, 2010 and you finished only a few short stories and didn’t mail much of anything and couldn’t get that novel done, you’re not serious about attaining any writing dream. But you set some goals now toward making your dream down the road, and come close to those goals, you are serious and have made the jump.

And for those of you who read this post last year, look back at how you did. Was 2009 your get serious year, or do you still need to make the jump.

So now to marketing goals.

I’ve gotten a bunch of questions from people about marketing. It seems the dream that almost everyone has is to get published, to sell books or stories, and that means you have to mail them. But yet writer after writer will finish a book, then just not mail it, or mail it to three agents and give up.

Trust me, you won’t attain any dream by doing that. So combined with the page production goals (the most important part) is Heinlein’s Rule #4 and #5. You have to mail your work to someone who will buy it and publish it. (Agents do not write checks or publish anything, as a point I wanted to make and then drop.)

How to mail a book to someone who will buy it? Well, to be honest, it’s tough. Kris and I spend an entire week teaching writers how to market their work and we have two of those marketing workshops left before we wind down this round of teaching. One in March, one in October, and if you can make one of those, write me for information. Basic information is under workshops here on this site. (Don’t expect us to do another one. May not happen. Sorry.)

So, it’s not going to be possible to tackle a weeks’ worth of work here, to teach anyone how to write a good query letter here, or a good cover letter, or a good proposal. All that takes that evil word: Practice. And some hands-on training, which is why Kris and I do those marketing workshops.

For a short story per week challenge, the marketing is easy. Mail the story to an editor and keep it in the mail until it sells. But for novels, this part tends to freeze up writers.

Let me back up first for a moment and talk about why writers freeze up at this marketing point.

Book as Event.

Writers can produce a short story in a few hours, a few days, maybe a week. It isn’t an event getting it done and it’s easy to just fire into the mail to an editor. Not much of a big deal for most writers. And short stories appear in a magazine and then are gone, replaced quickly by the next issue of the magazine. No event, no one treats them like events, including the writer.

But books seem to take on a life of their own. To a writer, the myths built up around writing a novel are hundreds of years old, have deep roots in all of us, and in many ways affect how we approach the writing of a book.

English professors, bless their hearts, dig into the “meaning” of a book, how “important” the book was by the author, how layers of this or that were put into the book. Oh, my, any young writer after that will think “I can’t write a novel, I don’t know how to do any of that.” But what the professor never says is that’s not how the writer wrote it, and chances are didn’t see 90% of what the professors are pointing out and would be surprised that it was even in the book. (Not kidding.)

All this builds up to “book as event” on the writing side, which freezes anyone. It is the biggest elephant of them all to try to eat.

I had a couple people stunned that I could type in a title and then just fire on a novel, with no idea at all where I was going. If you feel the same way, you may have this “event” issue even deeper than you realize. I did an entire long post in the Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing on Book as Event. Go back and find it and read it.

A novel is just a story. Sure, it’s longer, sure it has more characters, sure in Western Literature, it has a certain structure, just like humans all have bones that give us a certain structure. But we all know the structure, we all have read thousands of books, watched thousands of movies. We all know story structure deep down inside.

We are story tellers, not “book as event” writers.

How else does this “Book as Event” kill writers? You finish a book, it’s taken three months, six months, most of a year, whatever. That’s a vast amount of time spent so, of course, it’s MORE IMPORTANT because you spent more time on it. Uhhh, no, it’s just longer. Nothing more.

But because you think it’s IMPORTANT, you have to rewrite it, of course, right? Ignoring Heinlein’s Rules because he’s dead and what did he know anyway. My novel is IMPORTANT and I had better make it good before I mail it.

Yup, and there you go, down that rat hole. Writers don’t know their own work, wouldn’t know if something was working if it slapped them. Give the book to a trusted first reader, only fix what they suggest that you agree with, then mail it and start the next one. Let the editors decide if it is worth their time or not. Trust your work.

This business is a numbers game, remember? I said Editors above. Note the “s” on the end of that word?

So what happens on the other end, on the editor’s end. Well, to them, these books are events as well, as they should be on their side of the contract. Books take a vast amount of time, energy, numbers of people, and money to take from manuscript and get to the shelves. The publisher risks upwards of a hundred thousand bucks on your small paperback original, so of course they look at the book as event. They have to.

And you, the young writer, goes out and listens to editors talk about books, as you should. And this book as event feeling comes back with you into your office. And the thinking goes like this: “If they are going to spend so much time and energy on my book, my baby, my masterpiece, then maybe I had better spend more time on it also, rewrite it a couple of times because I wrote it fast.”

And thus “book as event” death right at that moment to a real creative person. Creation comes from deep within each of us. Our voice, that thing editors say they look for, can only come out when you are pounding away in a creative state. Voice, in rewriting, gets toned down because you, the writer, can’t see your own voice. “Polishing” takes off the rough edges and makes your book dull and just like every other “polished” novel out there.

So when setting marketing goals, the first thing you have to do, and the hardest, is trust your skill, trust your writing, and just write it and mail it. Let the editors decide if what you have done is an event or not, worth their time.

In other words, you have to somehow, in some way, take “Book as Event” thinking out of your mind. You tell stories. Short ones, long ones, doesn’t matter. It’s just a story.

So to nuts and bolts on setting marketing goals, as much as I can in this place.

Short story: Finish and mail to one editor, keep it in the mail when it comes back. Write the next story and repeat.

Novel: Finish and mail to five or ten editors. Keep it in the mail when one rejects it. Write the next novel and repeat.

Warning again: The process of writing a book has nothing to do with the final product of a book. So never tell them you cranked it off in six weeks and didn’t rewrite it, just like you should never tell a short story editor it took you one evening to write the story they are using for their cover. Novel editors are going to be spending a year with your book, working and fighting to get it into print. Let them believe you spent the same amount of time on the other side of the process, even though every good editor out there knows better.

Back to a reminder from a previous post when it comes to setting marketing goals. Marketing is not writing. Research is not writing. Researching editors is not writing.

Keep your production goals outside of your marketing goals. You must have duel goals.

But let me say this clearly right now. If your goal is to write a novel this next year, your goal should also be to market the novel this next year. Two goals.

And get used to rejection. There is nothing you can do to keep it from happening. It means nothing. Keep your rejection slips and letters for tax proof you are making a consistent effort at making money. Count your rejections. Rejoice at the personal ones because a busy editor took time with your manuscript to give you a personal one. When you get a form letter back, just shrug and say, “Guess it didn’t work for them. Their loss.” And then mail the thing back out again.

Short story only one editor at a time.

Novels, keep the novel on a number of editor’s desks at once.

Your marketing goal will be tied to your dream and your production goal. Securely tied. You can’t make the dream of selling and publishing without marketing.

And somehow, go learn how to write a good query letter, a good proposal. Make that a goal too. GOAL #3 for those of you counting. <g>

For years I watched really good writers get books rejected and couldn’t figure out why. Then we started the novel workshops and had the authors attending, all selling short fiction writers, send in proposals with their novels and query letters.

Kris and I were stunned. The novels were great but all the query letters and proposals sucked. The novels were damned good, but no editor was ever going to see the book, no agent look at the book, because the author was hiding their good work behind a crappy presentation.

That would be like going into a job interview half dressed and smelling like dead fish. No one would hire you. Bad proposals, bad query letters are exactly the same issue. They are your job interview, your books job interview to become an event in some publishing house.

Make it a goal to learn how to write good ones. But learning that is not writing, so keep it away from your writing time.

You are a story teller. Learn how to write stories by sitting down regularly. That’s goal #1.

Learn how to present your stories in a good way. That’s goal #2.

Submit your stories to people who will buy them. That’s goal #3.

Now, go back and look at your schedule and figure out where, each week, you can learn one more detail on the second two goals. Just one detail on goal #2 and #3 per week along with the production of new pages. Yes, the other two goals take time, but you can work the time in. Yes, it takes time to write a query letter, but once a good one is done for a book, you pretty much got it for that book. Research of editors takes time, but there might be five minutes here, or a quick stop in a book store to research a book line.

All three goals need to move forward at the same time. And honestly, all three are fun. Writing is the most fun, but sending out your work and getting paid for it has its rewards as well.

Cheers, Dean

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