Want to be a Successful Author? Burn Any Rule Book You Find

In a crowded marketplace, more of the same is not going to stand out.

This post began life as a comment on @cheah's recent contribution: How to Make More Singaporean Writers. If you're an aspiring writer, his no-nonsense, tough-love blog is a great place to look for inspiration and good advice.

Short version: plant your ass in a chair and pump out the words, bucko!

Even though @cheah writes from a Singaporean perspective, his thoughts on fiction writing as a business are universal. The publishing scene has changed so much, with print on demand and Kindle publishing, that doing things the way they used to be done is suicide.

I really wonder how the traditional publishing world is going to hang on for the next decade. Authors like Sean Platt, David Wright, and Johnny Truant of the Self Publishing Podcast churn out engaging entertaining books each year, while supporting themselves and a growing company of dozens of employees. And they do it without dealing with the likes of Penguin and Random house.

So just what service are traditional publishers offering?

Let's consider what happens when you start shopping around a manuscript the old fashioned way. You send it off to agents and wait months for a response. If it's good (and frankly most early manuscripts from beginning writers just aren't) it might find a taker after a couple years of rejections. Then the agent begins the process over again with the publishers.

Three or four years after you typed THE END, you might be offered an advance for a few thousand dollars. Months after that your book will be printed and distributed to stores, where it will sit among thousands of other titles for a couple of weeks.

Now you'd better be ready to put on your extroverted self-promoting hat on and pitch the hell out of it over every channel that's available to you, because these publishing houses don't fire up their promotion machinery for any except their star authors. If your book sells enough copies to earn out that advance, you'll get royalties of 10% or so, which you'll have to wait more months to receive.

And if it doesn't sell enough to earn out your advance, you'll have an even harder time placing your next book.

In fairness, those publishers put a some effort into making your book shine. If you sign that contract, you've got professional editors at your disposal, and typesetters and designers, and cover artists - although you'll have absolutely no say over what the cover of your book looks like. But is that worth giving them 90% of the value of your book?

It's not really more work to self-publish.

If you self-publish, you'll have to do all that work yourself.

Yeah, you'd better hire an editor, and maybe a graphic designer. That cover art? It's all on you, too.

But amazingly, all these services aren't really that expensive any more. Services like Fiverr and 99designs have artists compete to design your cover and let you choose the one you like best. As for editors and designers, paying one yourself is going to be a lot cheaper, in terms of time-cost, than waiting for the publishing house to do it.

Is your self-published book likely to fail? Statistically speaking - almost certainly!

But the odds aren't much better for traditionally published books.

You can fail faster if you do it yourself. You can fail for a fraction of the time, money, and aggravation. Then you can fail again and again until you get it right. And if you decide the writing life isn't for you (no shame in that), at least you haven't sunk half a decade into a bitter process.

Now, if you're good - you tell an engaging story, you write exciting prose, and you polish and edit until you've got a package that makes people feel like they're buying something from a professional - you probably will find some success. And with self-publishing, even a little success means something. For most ebooks sold on Amazon, the authors receive 70% of the money, direct-deposited just 60 days after the sales.

Outside opportunities.

You can also share your work on Steemit before you publish, earning some Steem upvotes and building publicity at the same time.

Traditional publishers won't touch a book that's been shared anywhere else before they get their hands on it. Unless, of course, it's already a success! 50 Shades of Grey comes to mind, and Diary of an Oxygen Thief, and Amanda Hocking's young adult fantasy. Isn't it odd what all these breakout bestsellers have in common? They were all self-published books that exploded due to the efforts of their authors - and then got gobbled up by major publishers.

It's really a mystery why traditional book publishing even exists as a business today. I love books as much as the next worm, but I have a hard time walking into a chain and paying nearly $20 for a paperback. Then I've got to store the thing, and lug it around with me every time I move.

The book shed at my local dump provides a rotating stock of reading material that could keep me turning pages for the rest of my life, and I've already got enough on my shelves at home to last for decades.

These are luxury products that nobody has to buy. And increasingly, nobody does.

The Book Mystique

We have such an emotional investment in the idea of books. They're perceived as the pinnacle of culture.

People use reading as virtue signalling. (Hey, I'm guilty of this. I read 60 books last year! Aren't I smart?) So kids go off to school and enroll in creative writing programs, and graduate with a bucket of debt. When they get tired of working at Starbucks (There's no shame in being a Barista, but you don't need a college degree to do it.) they take on more debt to spend a few more years in an MFA program.

As many as 4000 students graduate with a creative writing MFA every year. Now, how many new novels do you think Barnes and Noble can fit into their "New Fiction" display?

Here's an interesting quote from a New York Times article, Why Writers Love to Hate the M.F.A.:

The monthly magazine Poetry receives 100,000 submissions a year and publishes 300 poems. “The number of writers has increased, but the number of readers has not,” says Joseph Harrison, senior American editor for Waywiser Press.

As a result, the role of the MFA graduate stops being to write and becomes to teach, which fills the universities with more and more professors and administrators desperate to keep this weird, creative Ponzi snowball rolling.

Those that can, write. Those that can't, teach. And those that can't teach... go into publishing.

Am I in a position to give advice to aspiring writers? Hell no. With three unpublished novels sitting in a drawer and reams of scribble-saturated notebooks, I've discovered that I have a lot more fun writing on Steemit. And reading on Steemit is why I haven't finished a single book yet this year - and we're four weeks in, already! But I think it has taught me something worth sharing.

Meaningful writing needs readers.

And there are a lot more writers than readers these days. (I was only half-kidding about this yesterday morning.)

I'm certainly not crapping on anyone's dream of "being a writer" someday.

If you have this dream, you've obviously got something to say. There's that song inside of you that won't stop even when you cram earbuds in and stare at your phone. Watching TV won't kill it. Drink won't kill it. Going to work at the nine-to-five might injure it for a while, but then it crawls back and knocks at the inside of your skull in the wee hours of the morning.

So fuck it. Go write something.

But don't go looking to anyone else to tell you what you should write, and how you should share it. Not publishers, not consultants or industry "experts," and for the love of God, not universities.

These people make their living making sure everyone keeps doing what's been done before. If you take their advice, you're condemning yourself to obscurity. And worse: boring prose.

You still need editors, though. Hire yourself some good ones, and listen to them.

What do you think? Are you an author? What has your experience been with traditional versus self-publishing? Do you think the traditional publishing houses might still have something to offer? Let me know in the comments!