a. Ebooks (New February 9th!)
f. Things to Do to Get Published
What do you think about ebooks? Do you think it’s better for a starting writer to go the self-publishing route or to go with a publisher? What do publishers offer that makes them worthwhile, especially in the digital world? — paraphrased from an email by Ryan D.
(February 2012)
Wow, big topic, and I’m putting a date on my answer because the field is changing so rapidly that my answer will probably be out of date in a year.
I love ebooks. I see this time of upheaval as a good time for creators and consumers both. There is going to be weirdness. Think of it like this: when motor cars first came out, NYC had a law that if you operated one, you needed to have someone carrying a red flag walk in front of you to warn pedestrians. (Apocryphal? Maybe, but horses + cars = weirdness. Doubtless those who loved horses hated the motor carriages, and those who loved motor carriages wished the horses would get out of the way.)
Ebooks, however, are the new gold rush. Among the miners who went to California and the Yukon were doubtless a lot of good miners, but there were also a huge number of people who thought that just by showing up they would get rich.
Those people didn’t get rich.
In my opinion, ebook publishing can be a great venue for you… IF. If you write fast, if you write the right kind of story, if you can master the various e-tailers’ formatting schemes, if you are comfortable contracting good cover art, and if you’re willing to relentlessly promote.
1) Write fast: depending on the genre, short might be fine, but a huge number of your sales are going to be repeat customers. If they’re not giving you much each time, you want them to have a lot of products so that you can make a living.
2) Write the right kind of story: Any kind of commercial fiction. Do you write the kind of stuff people like to read, or the kind of stuff people like to be seen reading? Pretentious lit that can’t get the official stamp from New York? Probably not going to do well on Kindle. Fun vamp comedies with lots of sex? Well…
3) The ebook formats don’t always play nice together. It’s changing, but you need to edit and do layout well enough that your book looks professional. If you’re a bad speller, hire someone. It’s easy, even if you’re a good speller like I am, to know what you mean and read right past your errors. Reading one typo in a book is forgivable. Five, six? Infuriating.
4) Your cover art makes a HUGE difference. Especially if you’re one of the horde of self-published folks. Find good artists and design people. Find something that gives you a template so that each of your books looks like one of your books. People will forget your name, but remember the cover. It happens. Make it easy for them to find the next one.
5) Promote. You’re going to have to go to others for pointers on this. It’s different for self-published writers.
If you self-publish digitally through Amazon (and charge at least $3), you get 70% of the profit. So, sell 10,000 copies and you get $21,000. If you publish through New York, you get 25%–of their profit. So Amazon takes its 30%, and you get 25% of the 2.10 (actually almost surely less), $5,250. $21k sounds better than $5k, right?
Of course it does, but on the other hand, would you rather have 70% of $100 or 25% of a $1,000? Assuming you can sell as many e-books on your own, yes, OF COURSE you should self-publish.
I don’t assume that.
What does a publisher do for me?
Let’s be honest, there’s still a stigma against self-published writers. Why? Because they deserve it. Because most of them are crap. (That’s okay, most of everything is crap.) Most stories published by the Big Six aren’t much better, but at least you know that they’ve gone through two rounds of gatekeepers (agents, and then editors). So even though the average may only be lifted ten percent, by moving the entire bell curve up ten points, you’ve made the likelihood of finding a great story much, much more likely.
Put it this way: where are the Robert Jordans or George R. R. Martins who are self-published? The truth is, once even self-published writers find big success, many of them jump over to New York publishers–for the credibility if nothing else. (See Amanda Hocking and Michael Sullivan).
What else do publishers do? Editing, copy editing, layout, maps, cover design, cover art, distribution, other markets (like paperbacks, hard covers, omnibuses, trade paperback, book club, large print editions, etc), promotion, organizing book tours, and buying you nice meals when you visit New York. They make it many times easier to sell foreign rights. They make it many times easier to sell (or will sell themselves) audio rights. Now, any particular publisher may not do all of those things uniformly well, but it is their job to squeeze every possible cent out of your one story. They are very good at this. (Of course, because THEY do the work to make the pie bigger, you have to accept a smaller slice of the pie.)
So is it worth it? That’s up to you. Do realize that thinking because there’s one Amanda Hocking, that YOU will be the next one is like thinking because there’s one JK Rowling that I will be the next one. If you want to be a writer, you’re already basing your business “plan” on falling in the .01%. It’s already wildly optimistic. But don’t “plan” on falling into the .0000001%. What’s a few zeroes between friends? Well… c’mon.
Ebooks are going to be an increasingly large piece of the pie, but they’re only going to be a piece. If you enjoy promoting and contracting and fiddling with software and putting together a book that is all yours, where every decision is in your hands–self-publish. But if you love just the writing? Well, guess what, you’re still going to have to do a lot of the business side these days, but by having team members who are doing a lot of the other stuff for you, you will have to do less.
b. Work while writing: Do I need to get a real job while I’m trying to be a writer?
Ugh, I hate to be the cold voice of reality. But probably. Almost certainly, as a matter of fact. One agent I know says you need to have five or six books published before you quit your day job. Published. Now, if your books do well, you might make it less than that. But probably it’s going to take you what, a year, two years to write the first book? Eleven years, like Pat Rothfuss? In that year, or two, or eleven, you need to eat. So do what you have to. Count the cost. If you’re investing your youth in this, be aware that your friends may all be owning houses and driving SUVs while you’re still struggling to get published. Be aware that if you’re washing windows for 30 hours a week rather than working 80 hours a week as a scrub at a law firm because you want the time to write, you are making a trade for something that’s unlikely. Most people don’t get published. Honestly, I’m not trying to throw despair your way. If you could do another job, but your soul would die, then write. Be aware you’ll probably be poor forever, but if that doesn’t dissuade you, more power to you. It’s a beautiful life, fighting with the blank page every day. Welcome to the revolution, comrade.
c. Books on Writing: Are there any great books on writing you’d recommend?
There are about a million books out there full of advice. The ones I found that were helpful to me were Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card, Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass (my favorite writing book) and then in third On Writing by Stephen King (which is half autobiography and half writing book). Those are where I started.
d. Books on Publishing: What are some helpful books about the publishing business?
i. This is going to be a little counter-intuitive. My advice is not to worry about the publishing side of things until you’re finished writing your book. The publishing side of things is incredibly hard to learn from the outside–and most of us are on the outside. You can read tons of webpages full of total crap about the publishing industry–and it will get you twisted in knots. The people who are actually IN publishing and know what they’re talking about are generally too busy with, ya know, publishing: reading, editing, networking, selling, and soothing the artistes who work for them to be posting accurate information on the web. Not that good information isn’t out there, but it’s hard to sift that good from the bad if you’re just an author in Des Moines and two different, seemingly reputable websites say diametrically opposed things.
ii. SO, my advice is for you to do the one thing that no one else can do: write that great book that is inside you. The whole industry chugs along on books, and you make them. You are the fuel. So make that book as high of an octane as you can, because no one else can do that for you. Don’t understand foreign rights? Someone will explain it to you. Don’t understand conventions? Someone will explain them to you. Don’t know what you’re supposed to do on book tour? Someone will explain it to you. 1. Write a great book 2. Get a great agent 3. Ask questions. If you write books that connect with people, and have an honest, intelligent agent (if she’s experienced, that’s a big plus), no one is going to look down on you because you don’t understand P&L’s. I promise. (Well, if they have to explain it to you twelve times… but hey, if you’re bright enough to write an amazing book, you’re probably bright enough to understand a P&L… by the eleventh time anyway)
e. Agents: How should I get an agent?
i. The best way I know to find an agent is to find authors whose books are similar to yours and look in the acknowledgements. Authors will almost always acknowledge their agents. Then go to those agents’ sites on the web and follow the instructions they have exactly. In your query letter, say something like, “I’ve loved the work of your client, writer X, and think you’ll find MY BOOK TITLE to have similar A, B, and C.” This sounds cookie-cutter, but really, it works best if you can honestly say how your book IS like those books. Also, get ready for rejection. If you mail some rockstar agents, they may never respond to you. The ones who DO may take months. Welcome to the business. Take your rejections as evidence that you’re in the game. If you weren’t playing, you couldn’t strike out. And let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to be in the stands drinking beer and critiquing the guy who’s swinging for the fences and whiffing than it is to stare down a 100 mph fastball.
My own agent is Donald Maass. He understands Story, and is blunt and honest. He’s written the best books on writing that I know: check out The Career Novelist, Writing the Breakout Novel, and The Fire in Fiction. He has The Career Novelist as a free pdf download on his website. Free. It’s worth more than that, honest.
ii. Also, I’m probably not the best resource for this, given that I tried 33 times to get an agent and was only successful once. However, the first thing you need to do is write a really great book. No really, a really, really great book. (You can dispute whether The Way of Shadows is such a book, but my agent thought so. So there.) Then the best thing to do, in my humble opinion, is to look for books that are similar to your own book, look in the acknowledgements, and figure out who that person’s agent is because they probably thanked them there. And if they didn’t thank their agent, you probably don’t want her to be your agent anyway. 
You might as well cross out all the absolute top-tier agents while you’re doing this step, because they’ll be too busy to take on people who’ve never published anything and haven’t proved that they can make them money. When I solicited agents, half of them never wrote back to me, not even a form rejection. Then look on their website, follow all their directions, exactly how they said it, and write them a great query letter. Mention that you loved that author X (the guy who they also represent) and tell them how your work is similar, or why you think they’d be interested. Read some books from Amazon about this whole querying process, it is a little more in-depth than that. Secondly, and at the same time, go to some writing conventions. They cost money, but you’re going to learn a lot of stuff in the time you spend there. And you may even meet these people in person. Next, you’re going to have to wait. It always takes a couple of months to hear back from any of these people. My agent gets 300 queries a week. And quite honestly, reading your query is the lowest on their list of priorities each week. Not because they hate you, but because they have people who are making them money who want them to do things all the time. Once you get an agent, if you’ve gotten a good agent, they will handle selling it to the right people. Quite honestly, you will not have much choice. If a publisher says yes to you, that’s a yes. Be excited. Be aware that the whole process after you’ve finished your book can easily take from 1 to 2 years. If you’re a writer, you have to be in this for the long haul. Took me 2 years to get my eventual New York Times Bestseller sold. And another year for it to get published. So in this industry, sometimes good things come to those who wait.
f. Things to Do to Get Published: What are some things I should do to get published?
At some point, go to a writing conference. Look for one with lots of classes on things you need to work on. Generally, I avoid talks at conferences given by writers. (Sorry, other writer folks, this is solely my own and limited experience, but I’m trying to be honest here.) No matter how good the writer is, those talks have sucked–because, my guess is, writers make so many of their decisions intuitively and those talks can become love-fests. Cool if you love the writer, not that cool if you’re trying to learn. Agents, editors, book doctors–these people think analytically. They can tell you why things work or don’t. It’s going to cost money to go to a conference. My first was local and still cost me $450 (a huge, nearly prohibitive sum to me at the time), but I learned more in three days than I learned in the previous year of just reading books on writing. Plus, I met my now-agent, the aforementioned Donald Maass.
I went to that conference thinking my book was finished, and that I was going to pitch it. Well, I did pitch it–not very well. But from a talk by Don, I realized that I wasn’t finished with the book, either. Agents at these things tend to be very open to taking lots of mss. They figure if you’re professional enough to have paid money to come to a conference, your book will be a cut above the usual dreck. Well, it was 9 months after the conference that I sent my query to Don, but being able to say, “I talked with you at Conference X, and you asked me to send you the first five pages of my novel Y…” at least bumps you up in the pile.
Of course, sometimes lightning strikes and a guy like Jim Butcher gets his ms rejected at some agency, and then meets and hits it off with an agent, who THEN decides to rep him. Don’t bet on this or worry about it, though. Mostly, conferences are good for learning and for meeting some folks. Put on your extrovert hat and do your best. Don’t worry, there are lots of other introverts at these things.
Again, the biggest thing to worry about is the thing that you actually have control over: the book. If it’s awesome, and I mean AWESOME, then eventually you will make it through the gatekeepers. Now, even if it’s AWESOME, it will take more time than it should. That’s the business. I got rejected at six or seven places, despite having a great agent… and all those rejections took up two years of my life. Painful, and brutally difficult. Just have a good idea of what you really want, and if you’re prepared to pay the price for it. It’s hard, it seems random, and there will be published writers who are published despite that your book is clearly better than theirs. Try not to get paranoid, and hold on, by fingernails if necessary. The thickened skin will be helpful when critics start talking crap about your books.
g. Writer’s Conferences: What writer’s conferences should I go to?
This is one answer I can’t answer very well. Things labeled Writers’ Conferences are often good. There are a lot of these. You’re looking for things with seminars or talks by prominent agents or editors about the business of writing–both the writing, and the business. Both the Willamette Writers Convention (Portland, Oregon) and the Surrey International Writers Conference (Surrey, British Columbia) were very helpful to me. If you’ve done you’re homework, you’ll start to see names pop up. If you see one of the agents that reps an author you think is very similar to you is going to a con near you, GO. I met one agent who looked like a great match for me on paper–and in person, I was like, no no no no no. That personal connection is really important–even though when you’re poor and desperate, you feel like you’d take any agent with a pulse. Don’t do that.
h. Classes/College Degree: What classes should take, or what college degree should I get, to be a writer?
i. My degree didn’t really help. My education was very important. I’d absolutely tell you to study what you love and you can certainly include in there some things that you think would be helpful for future books, but nobody asked me for my GPA or what I got a degree in when I was trying to get published. However, it’s up to you to find the passion and the guts and the dedication to actually write that great book that is worth people buying. No one can do it for you. So pour your heart into it.
ii. As the guy said in Good Will Hunting, all you need is a library card. Though a huge amount of discipline and curiosity helps. All writers are autodidacts. Read everything you can get your hands on, and read the best. And you will learn sub-consciously what works and what doesn’t. Then drag that stuff out into the light:
This book worked. Why? What was good about it? You loved the characters? What made you love them? This book sucked you in from the very first paragraph? Go look at that paragraph and ask yourself what it did and how.
Nobody cares what your credentials are when you try to get published. They care if you can tell a great story. So if you have the right personality to read a lot of books and teach yourself, there’s no reason for a university directly. However, it is also extremely difficult to get published and to make a living writing books. So an education is a helpful thing for getting a real job while you are trying to write. (And you may have the good fortune to meet amazing friends and brilliant people, in addition to wracking up a ton of debt.) There are trade-offs to be made either way, and you have to figure out what is going to work best for you.
i. MFA Programs: What MFA programs should I consider to be a writer?
I think there are a couple MFA programs that study genre writing. But–and you’re talking to a guy here who didn’t go to an MFA program, so I’m a biased, barely informed source–the main good I see from an MFA program is that it gives you a community of writers to be part of, and you get assigned to write a lot of different types of writing. And you get a lot of writing assignments, so it forces you to write lots. The pressure of deadlines IS useful to many, if not most of us. However, an MFA does cost money, and it costs time, and a lot of MFA programs are snotty about genre fiction. So for someone who wants to write genre and wants make a living writing, rather than making a living teaching writing, an MFA can be a huge waste of time and money. Every program is different, so I don’t want to make a blanket statement, but go in with your eyes wide open. A couple of programs might actually help you land a job teaching writing, many won’t. So depending on how the professors at a particular program react to the idea of writing genre (and find out BEFORE you go), and depending on your own feelings, you may be better served by giving your library card a lot of use, and just writing on your own. If you’re looking for genre-focused MFA-type programs, look into Clarion or Clarion West. Good luck on your journey.
