There’s a great article on Nathan Bransford’s site about e-book publishing. For clarification, I received this article following a link from an article by Elijah Rising’s blog (I give credit where credit is due). But what I wanted to talk about is something this article brought up as an issue for me, and it’s one that I think more writers are probably thinking about themselves, and an issue that really needs some kind of attention as we move forward.
The issue is simple. How does a writer who is unknown, independent, and did I mention unknown?, get any attention in the first place so that an e-book isn’t just seen as yet another announcement in the ether that disappears like a Twitter post on, oh, say my Twitter feed with its awesome 38 followers (that tend to be ready to drop me at a moment’s notice if I post a topic that displeases them in any way…I’m just saying)? As one of those writers myself, who has been trying to build an audience for himself for about as long as he’s been writing, I am constantly left wondering if somehow I missed the boat, and that a writing career just isn’t possible.
How does the independent writer create an audience, or at least set up marketing so that it’s productive and leads to sales (and, obviously, readers)? It seems like there’s a variable missing in the game, and that so many of us are trying to figure out what it is while so many others are easily making it through life without any effort, like a teenage girl who makes a Youtube video about a horrible song that ends up getting endless play because of how horrible it is (and then a record deal). I mean, what planet are we living on when this sort of thing happens in such Bizarro style?
It’s almost as if you need to be famous already in order to make it as a writer, and that basically writing isn’t the thing people are looking for in the things they read. I know it sounds ridiculous, but what am I missing here? When Snooki can write (if you call it that) a novel and it becomes somewhat of a bestseller, and a dedicated writer can’t sell more than two copies of a novel in a month, I’m left wondering what’s wrong. It would be one thing if I knew my writing sucked, but it doesn’t, and fortunately I’m way past the self-incriminating stage of my writing career. But it is so easy to be sniped at by other people when someone with very little writing talent gains a writing career when someone else can spend his or her entire life trying to do the same thing, and the only difference is I didn’t first get famous by having sex in a hot tub with social misfits first.
But I’m not making this post to complain about that. Such things are always going to happen, and we know it. What I’m trying to do is work out, in my writing, or my head, what it takes for the average, yet decent, writer to make it as a writer in today’s atmospheric dynamic. Part of me still clings onto the belief that a traditional publishing company is the way to go, but when that doesn’t seem to be working out, you have to keep trying something or you give up. And I’m not ready to give up.
Yet.