One of the common refrains heard from people who skirt the field of writing is that of someone who suspects that if he or she writes a book and no one reads it, is that person actually a writer. And there are numerous schools that try to answer this, much like a zen master talking about whether trees falling in the forest actually happen if no one hears them.
Lawyer and writer, Susan Wolfe, writing for Writer Unboxed, asks that same question and comes up with the inevitable answer of yes, you are a writer, which isn’t really that much of a surprise. But what does comes as a surprise to me is that her article goes on about how whether or not her second book sold was enough of a hit to allow her to want to write her third. That hit me kind of hard because it’s been a very long time since I wrote my third book, so it’s almost like I don’t ever remember having that conversation with myself.
You see, my biggest problem back in the day was whether or not to write my second novel. I had finished Innocent Until Proven Guilty early in my military career. And it was such a lot of fun to write. Then, I started imagining my second novel and decided to go with science fiction instead of mystery/suspense. And that got me to start wondering: Was the first time a fluke? Am I really a writer? Who am I trying to fool?
So, I sat down and started to write the second novel. And let me tell you: It was freaking hard. I kept second guessing myself, convinced that the first time was that one book everyone has inside of him (or her), and a second one meant you were really trying to be a writer. And about halfway through that novel, I can’t even begin to tell you how many self-doubts started flying around me. Yet, like all stories, this one had an ending, and I managed to muddle through it. That book became Leader of the Losers. Without a doubt, that was the hardest book I ever wrote. My third one, and those after, were never as hard as that second book. I’ve written 14 of them now. I’m writing my 15th.
But getting back to the original question of whether or not someone considers himself/herself a writer based on a particular book’s success seems almost irrelevant to me. I’m a writer because I love to write. I was writing stories for several decades before I wrote my first novel for actual publication. I had written hundreds of short stories that had been published during that time as well, which I suspect is a bit of a problem these days as not a lot of writers get their start that way any more. Instead, they’re expected to write their great opus out the gate, which is why so many self-published books read like someone’s very first thing they’ve ever written. Because it is.
To Susan Wolfe, I would say relish the act of writing more than the business of writing. If you’re doing this to “sell books” rather than to tell stories, I suspect you’re probably never going to find true happiness. You might find financial success, but that’s such a sad way to find one’s place in art. I’ve had moments where a turn of a phrase I came up with has lightened my entire day. I’ve had others where I’ve been seriously pissed off at a character of mine for doing something that I hadn’t expected. Writing finds those paths that logic can’t travel because each sentence is part of a journey, and a writer should constantly be trying to find new roads.
There’s a term that e-published authors have been using to describe the old way of doing business in the writing world: Legacy Publishing, meaning that it’s the old way of doing publishing. As one of those who got his start in the legacy publishing industry, where my first two novels were published as physical entities, I’ve slowly been trying to build a writing career by embracing the non-legacy model, i.e., publishing my work as e-books myself. In the process of doing that, something strange has started to happen that I never really anticipated. Let me explain.
When I started publishing some of my completed novels as e-books, I wasn’t really expecting to make a huge profit, or even to sell a whole lot of books. I hoped to sell a few and at least get a few readers interested in my work. Honestly, that’s what every writer tends to want to do. I’m really not that different. Not knowing the first thing about connecting to an audience that I don’t have, I’ve tried all sorts of different marketing, including Facebook ads, google ads, viral marketing, standing on the corner and yelling out loud, and all sorts of other antics that are capable of bringing on all sorts of restraining orders. As a result, a few people have started to read my books, and let’s just say that while I haven’t been extremely successful, it’s proving to be an interesting experiment.
However, a new development has occurred, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I mentioned that some of my earlier work was published by Legacy Publishers. So far, they have done absolutely nothing to sell my work other than orginally publish it. I’m an unknown to them, so why would they be interested in pursuing any marketing on my behalf? So far, there’s been no reason. However, because I’ve been doing a LOT of marketing myself recently, some of my work has actually started to sell. Most of it as e-books, but some of that marketing has actually caused potential readers to go to bookstores and buy physical copies of my novels. Great. This is leading to something, however, and what it’s leading to is the realization by the original Legacy Publishers that I’m capable of actually selling books. It never dawned on me that they’d ever be paying attention to the fact that my marketing would start to pay off. And it has. Which has led them to start paying a bit more attention to me, and that attention has proved to be quite eye-opening.
You see, when I was originally published by them, the whole e-book universe was not even on the radar. So they never bothered to negotiate those rights. Those rights are mine still. Well, they’re now realizing that, and they’re also realizing that because I am self-publishing the rest of my work, it’s pretty obvious that my work they originally published will net them absolutely no profit whatsoever when it comes to the e-book market. So, rather than just contact me and be honest about it, their contact has been the kind you expect from a Shakespearean villain. The kind that goes: “Did you know that people are selling their books as e-books, and they’re making millions? We’re willing to publish your book as an e-book if you’re willing to sign that right over to us.” They also forget to mention (and sometimes they do) that they would like to set up the generous terms that are similar to the ones that happened under the old contract, where they get about 90 percent and I get 10. In other words, rather than have me publish it myself where I get 70 percent and Amazon gets 30, they’d rather they take 90 percent of the 70 percent, leaving me with (doing the math….for every $1.00 a book makes, I get $0.07). So, for a book that normally sells for (if they put it up at the maximum they’re trying to get) $12.99, I’d get 90 cents. Now, if I sold that book for $4.99 by publishing it myself (or even at $2.99), I’d make $3.49 (or $2.09 at the $2.99 rate). In other words, even if my book sold at a massive discount (my pricing), I’d still make 2 to 3 times more than what a publishing company would give me for it. And keeping in mind that the publishing company has NEVER marketed one of my books EVER, I get absolutely no benefit from them being the ones publishing it. None.
So, you might see why many writers are turning away from the normal legacy publishers. It’s not profitable, and unless you’re already a marketable name that they’re willing to throw money behind, you get absolutely nothing out of the deal. Instead, you sign over all of the profit to an entity that doesn’t do anything to deserve it.
It would be different if they actually went out of their way to do something to benefit my name. But they don’t. Or they never have. Now, if I was to find a publisher that was willing to do something to help me sell books, then we’d be talking a completely different story. But the way this model works, they don’t want me until I can already do the job that they won’t do themselves. Once I have the name recognition and the ability to sell my own work, my need for them goes away completely. So, somebody please tell me how quid pro quo thing works here if one side is continuously leeching off the other.
"I read all of Duane Gundrum's books because he's so dreamy...."
In case you aren’t aware of it, there is a war taking place. I’m not talking about Libya, Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m talking about the war that is currently waging over the publication of books. What war? You say. Well, let me explain.
For years, in order to get published, you sent out your work to a publisher (or an agent in hopes of getting a publisher), and if you were very lucky, you might get a bit of an advance. Sometimes, those advances were for decent money. Around the 1970s and on, they started getting really small. Kind of dismal, actually. Unless you were already a famous author, like Stephen King. So, you would get about $5,000-$10,000, and then the publisher would take 18 months or so to create your book. Then it would get released. If it started to sell, great. You would receive about $1.67 for a $20 book for each sale, the publisher keeping pretty much everything else. After all, they were the publisher. That $1.67 would continue to knock down the amount of the advance you received until you actually started to make what are called royalties, which would be additional money the book made after you paid off the advance. Most books tended to not even make back the advance, so you were generally lucky enough if you made somewhat of a decent advance.
Well, recently, the publishing industry has kind of been turned on its side. E-books are becoming the new “in” thing, and strangely enough, publishers are still maintaining their dominance in the industry, because they are still the power brokers they used to be. In other words, in order to gain any attention whatsoever, you really needed the publisher to get the attention out that you had published a book. So, not surprisingly, publishers have been publishing e-books, too, and still taking that outrageous amount off the top, leaving writers with very little profit, even though the costs for publishers have diminished to almost nothing.
Something new has started to happen, which is turning the whole industry on its side now. Writers are going directly to the readers and selling their books without the publishers. And needless to say, this is causing a bit of a stir in the whole industry. Publishers need the writers to survive, and so they are doing everything possible to diminish the positive experience for writers, so that publishers still remain the power brokers that they have always been. Unfortunately for them, that model isn’t going to last that much longer.
The publishing industry is a lot like the music industry, and its current dynamic is going through a revolution much like the music industry has recently gone through as well. While there are still seriously powerful music leaders in the industry still calling shots, a lot of artists have gone directly to the Internet with their work, and are bypassing the profit model previously established by the RIAA and other such top-down industry leaders. This has caused all sorts of problems for the industry, but it has done wonders to present new opportunities for artists who may never have received an ounce of attention before.
Move this into the publishing world, and you see the same sort of thing happening there. The publishing industry is still in control right now, mainly because the model hasn’t completely developed yet. Online booksellers, like Amazon, Apple, and somewhat Barnes & Noble, are producing their own e-readers that allow writers to push their content to eager subscribers. However, the battle currently waging is who is going to control the process flow from this point forward.
The publishing industry is counting on its enormous clout to push their agenda forward. They have already pushed back against Amazon (which has forced the others to comply) where they forced the increase in the cost of books being sold on the Kindle. You used to be able to get brand new books for $9.99, but now you’re lucky if you can get one for $12.99. The game changer in the first battle was Ken Follett’s new book Fall of Giants, which publishers forced Amazon to sell at $19.99. The backlash against the book has been interesting as Kindle users included all sorts of bad reviews for the book based on the price alone, taking what would have probably been a five or four star reviewed book down to an average of about 3 stars. What’s interesting is that his reviews on this book tend to resemble an upside down bell curve, with 301 5-stars and 327 1-star reviews, with a tiny amount filling in for 2, 3, and 4-star reviews. In other words, the critics either really liked it or really hated it, and there’s no doubt that the really hated reviews come specifically from people who are pissed off at the price.
If this was the end of the fight, you’d think that the publishers pretty much won, but like most great stories, a new sliver has been added to the mix, with writers being that added variable. Writers, realizing that they need to somehow be able to take advantage of this new technology, have started to show up sans publishers (being their own publishers), and they’re starting to include their own novels at much lower cost than the publishers are forcing down the e-market’s throat. Rather than stick it out at $9.99 (or push it up to the publisher’s price of $12.99), writers are now starting to introduce their books at the $2.99-$4.99 range, providing a more comfortable area for readers to purchase on impulse alone. Some of the more prominent writers, instead of using their fame to push for $12.99, like the gas station economic model the publishers are following (one raises the price, the rest follow), are listing their books at $0.99. According to some of the better known writers doing this, they’ve pointed out that because of the amount of people willing to buy a book at that low price, their profit has actually been better than if they tried to sell their books at higher prices. The economic implications are staggering, the more you think about it.
The biggest problems facing the writers right now is how to actually get anyone to pay attention to them in the first place. The one thing publishers have going for them was that their clout actually got books into bookstores, and without that clout, an unknown writer is essentially that, an unknown writer. If no one knows you exist, the chances of selling a book are dismal, at best. So, right now, the battle has halted, as both publishers and writers realize they’re at an interesting crossroad where both can benefit, but neither seems willing to budge. Publishers aren’t interested in giving up their high percentages they receive for “publishing” books while writers are no longer interested in giving up the entire store just to get their work out there. Which means that once writers figure out how to jumpstart the system in their favor, the whole publishing industry is going to go the way of the recording industry.
But what can a writer do to become marketable without already being a famous writer who was selling books already? That’s an important question and one that I’m spending a lot of time studying.
I’ve been spending a great deal of time lately exploring the whole e-reader market. My reasons for doing so are probably obvious, as I’ve pretty much given up on ever getting sustainable establishment from the main publishing markets, as everyone seems to be a writer these days and trying to get an agent to even read a manuscript is like trying to get Charlie Sheen to act responsibly.
Anyway, so some months ago, I put up one of my previously published books onto Amazon for the Kindle, and it has had a few sales, but mostly, it’s a lot like standing on a corner and trying to get people to read printout copies of a manuscript. People just don’t seem interested. And I don’t think it’s that their not interested in me or my writing; they’re just not interested in purchasing books from someone they’ve never heard of. It’s the same dilemma writers have always had, except there’s a lot more of us these days, and practically the only way to establish a career as a writer is to be famous for doing something else. So, if you can cook and have a cooking show, you might make it as a writer. If you’re a reality show star and have gratuitous sex with people who live in your reality show house, you might have a career as a writer. If you were a famous baseball star who took performance enhancing steroids, football star who beat up your girlfriend, musician girlfriend who got beat up your musician boyfriend, washed up movie star who seems to get arrested for practically everything written on police blotters, or some older guy who lived through abuse by your evil stepmom, well, you might have a career as a writer. But if you’re actually a writer who writes novels, and that’s all you really have to share with the rest of the world, your chances of making it as a writer are about as good as you making it as a millionaire by winning the lottery. Okay, maybe a little less.
So, what is a writer to do, if he’s not interested in starting a gunfight with the local police department in hopes that he might live long enough to write about it while in prison, well, the answer seems to be “write an e-book and get famous that way.”
The funny part of that solution is that making it as an e-book star is just as ludicrous as making it as a professonal blogger. Unless you have a gimmick, or you get seriously lucky, your chances aren’t that good. Even if you’re a great writer, it appears that everyone seems to be a great writer these days, so you really have to have something else working in your favor.
So, in actually trying to get established as an e-reader writer, I started with Kindle, and like I said, so far I’ve sold a few books and seem to be as popular as Pee Wee Herman at a stripper’s convention. Okay, I’m wrong on that one. He’d probably be a bit more popular than I am right now.
But what I have been doing is reading everything I can find on how others have actually made it. And what I’ve discovered is that everyone talks about how e-readers and e-books are the solution to the current glut in writers out there, and how it is the solution to getting past the impossible gatekeepers of publishing (even going around the publishing industry itself), but what no one really seems to do is point out exactly how that success is supposed to happen. I’m constantly reminded of the Southpark episode with the underwear gnomes, when the kids ask the underwear gnomes why they’re stealing underwear, and they point out their master plan, which reads a lot like:
1. Steal all of the underwear
2. ????
3. Profit
Yep, that seems to be the consensus of everyone who talks about success as a writer in the e-book market. Somehow, you are supposed to go the same way:
1. Write a novel and e-publish it.
2. ????
3. Profit!
Yeah, I don’t see any logic behind it either. What seems to be missing is how do you actually market yourself as an e-book writer? How do you get traffic to your blog so that people pay attention to you? Whenever I read a book on marketing your blog, it says to first create interesting content and then moves onto capitalizing on that traffic that will then come. Now, I’ve talked to a lot of people who do read my blog, and they tend to agree that I create interesting content, but at the same time, the masses aren’t showing up to read it. A few people do, and a shitload of spam also seems to be paying attention, but that’s about it. Somehow, I’m missing a step here, and I can’t seem to figure out what it is.
It is that same step I believe I’m missing that somehow makes it possible for e-books to actually be attractive to people and sell the mass load that everyone seems to think will happen “naturally”. Well, I’m still working on that one, and I haven’t come up with a solution yet.
So, if real people actually seem to be following this blog, PLEASE COMMENT ON THE BLOG at my actual blog, and I’d love to hear from you. But right now, I get nothing but spam comments (do keep in mind my blog gets imported to Facebook and Open Salon, so if you’re commenting that you actually read it, I’m not talking about those places; I’m talking about my actual blog…the one linked here). It’s really frustrating. I mean, REALLY frustrating.
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.
I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately. Not sure why, but it just keeps coming up in my mind. I wonder what it would take to finally get the job I really want, rather than the job I actually have.
I don’t mean I don’t like my current job. It’s okay. It’s just not really all that exciting. Nor is it really that hard. It’s not even all that interesting. I’m a glorified editor who sometimes creates stuff that’s not really very creative. It requires working for the health care industry for a hospital system, and most of the stuff I do is really designed around rudimentary stuff like registration, insurance and other boring stuff that would cause most people to scream if they had to deal with on a day to day basis. Every now and then I get to contribute on some education for a surgical procedure, but it’s not like anything I contribute really helps the procedure in any way. I just make sure that people can understand it, and that no one in the chain of command (or higher up outside of the chain of command) thinks it was designed by Neanderthals.
But no, I think I’ve figured out the job I’d rather have. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it. It’s not because the job isn’t something I can’t do. I’m highly qualified for it, and if I was able to find an opening, I’d probably be one of their top choices. But I don’t live anywhere near the place where this type of job is accessible, and in order to move to such a place, I’d probably have to be jobless for some time before I actually found something, and that’s never a good situation to be in.
I’m not even talking about a really, highly technical job like law or medicine either. I’m talking about something I do all of the time. As I’m a writer, I realize the job that’s perfect for me. I should be a copy editor, or an editor for a large book company.
I know these jobs are out there, and I know a lot of strong writers got their start in the field by making connections with these types of jobs. I just don’t live anywhere near where such a job might be possible.
This often gets me thinking that I’m living in the wrong place. I even moved back to the wrong place when I came back from South Korea. The San Francisco Bay Area just wasn’t the place for me, even though you’d think those jobs would be available there. I really think I should be living in New York City. I just don’t know how to make that kind of move, as I’m now kind of stuck in West Michigan right now. There’s not a lot of upward mobility when you hit your 40s. You’re kind of stuck with whatever job you can get, and often you have to stick it out, even if it’s not the best match for you.
If there was some way to obtain a job like this from afar (BEFORE moving), that might be the greatest thing ever, but I’ve never been all that successful with trying to hook up a job long distance (even though I did get the current one that way). I just really think that working for a big publishing company as an editor is the one thing I could probably do well. I sure don’t see myself getting a job with the government or anything all that exciting these days.
I was in the bookstore the other day looking over the selections of books when I came across a really interesting book of which I had heard nothing so far. But it looked intriguing. It was called Moby-Duck, and as you can see from the picture with this article, it is about a man who goes on a quest to discover what happened to 28,800 bath toys that were lost at sea.
So, why am I talking about this book? Well, think about the story involved in this book. The author, Donovan Hohn, actually put forth a lot of work to find out what happened to these rubber duckies and bath toys after the disappeared. In essence, he went on an epic quest, like the infamous Moby Dick to find what happened to these items. In other words, he went through a hell of a lot of work to get the story that he later transposed to paper so that the rest of us could experience his adventure.
My point is that so few people who write memoirs these days actually go through this amount of work in their adventures before sitting down and writing their “memoirs”. Instead, they suffer one bad relationship, have a bad drinking problem, or do something singularly simple and then try to convince the rest of us that it was actually an epic journey to get from one place to the other. I guess you could say I’m getting a little sick of these kinds of stories that really have no great master journey to them, no odyssey, yet are treated as if they are the epic adventures of a lifetime.
We need more writers out there who are willing to go through a little bit of work to actually come back with the story they need to tell. Instead, we get lazy writers that try to profit off of their innane adventures. And we keep buying this crap because none of us are willing to demand more from the writings that we read.
I felt this way some time ago when I was writing one of my earlier science fiction novels, Thompson’s Bounty, which was about a Coast Guard cutter that gets sent back into the 17th century. When I first started writing the novel, I actually tried to just crank it out without really knowing much about my subject, other than having watched a few old movies about pirates. Then it dawned on me that I wasn’t ready to write the novel. So I contacted the Coast Guard and requested some in person information, which led to going out with a cutter crew for several days over several weekends. It also led to a bunch of long conversations and tours on a Coast Guard base where very knowledgeable people gave me first hand information about the subject I was writing. In the end, I wound up with a book that told the story I wanted to tell instead of one that was peripheral and out of context.
Recently, I’ve been working on a novel that I originally wrote decades ago that takes place in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Originally, I kind of winged it through the story, but after doing my thesis work on the August Coup in the Soviet Union, I finally had the premise, place and event that really made up the background of the novel I wrote years before. So, I’ve been sitting down and tackling that book from the start, realizing that I now know a lot more information than I first did when I wrote that book back then.
That’s sort of the thing I’m talking about with the kind of reading I’m coming across these days. So much of it can be so much better than it is if authors would take the time to actually do the research that would make their books that much better. I remember a great scene from Billy Crystal’s Throw Mama From the Train when a woman in his creative writing class is describing a submarine story she wrote, and he comments that maybe she should actually know the name of the device she’s describing if she wants to be taken seriously in a story that involves submarines. I take his advice a bit further and say that maybe some time should be given to exploring the lifestyles and events that lead people to the moments that occur in novels so that the reader believes the author is the right person to be writing the story.
We seem to have a lot lazier writers these days with a lot of the stories and memoirs I read, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle for that. We can demand more substance, research and work. We just generally don’t. And we’re the ones who suffer as a result.
This is one of those questions that has been going through my head lately. I’m one of those enigmas of writers who has written a lot of stuff, yet never really managed to break into a writing career. At one point, I had a good start, and then I just stopped, giving up writing, before realizing what a mistake I made. And then I realized I wanted it back more than anything. But I did it at the strangest time, when the Internet was just coming around, and suddenly the old way of doing things was no longer the way things were done. Now, I’m an overwritten writer who has pretty much nothing of a writing career, realizing that I’m probably never going to have one.
So, like most struggling writers, I tried to do the whole e-book thing, and I’m averaging about $25 every three months of sales. Not exactly the illustrious career to get one away from one’s normal day job. And when one has all desires to be a full-time writer, that gets extremely frustrating.
So I find myself wondering if there’s really a future for an unpublished writer who doesn’t just get lucky or happen to be in the right writing school at the right time. Again, being lucky.
I put my book of poetry on Amazon, and it’s done absolutely no sales. I’m not a salesperson, so I really don’t have the ability to figure out what one has to do to interest anyone in buying one’s writing. So the only other option is to just release all of my writing for free, which then still leaves me with the realization that that probably doesn’t make a difference either. People are less willing to read your stuff for free than they are if they actually went to buy it. Sadly, that’s kind of true. They find it has less value if you tried to give it away, so even if it was Hemingway trying to get bullfighters to read his latest book, it wouldn’t make a difference because the stigma is already there because of the whole free thing.
Which leaves me with the wonder if I should just give it all up. My career is going nowhere, and I honestly don’t anticipate it going anywhere in the near future. The only reason I haven’t given it up already is because I really don’t have anything else in the wings to replace it. My job isn’t going to make me happy. Watching TV isn’t going to give me any satisfaction in life. I don’t date and probably couldn’t recognize a woman if I ever saw one (as it’s been so long). Which leaves me with something I’ve been talking about for some time now. Nothing. Writing was pretty much it. And without it, I’m not sure I really have a reason for sticking around anymore. I mean, what’s the point?
I’ve been wondering this question for a bit of time now with the emergence of the Internet as the place where everything seems to be centered in writing these days. In the old days, to be a writer, you first finished your education (generally), then you started publishing in literary magazines, then to commercial, high paying magazines, and then you started to work your way into getting that novel published. Granted, some people took an easier path, but mostly this was the formula for success.
The Internet has kind of changed all of that. Now, anyone can claim to be a writer and try to make his or her way without any previous work. This has developed a whole sense of a lot of junk that has been thrown into the mix, making it almost impossible for a writer to get recognized and even worse, that much harder for a reader to figure out what is worth reading. Bookstores start to gravitate away from the old formula, and the next thing you know (or we currently know) bookstores only publish commercial fiction that is churned out by publishers who are only willing to invest in already established names or, even worse, celebrities who are now writing books. Like Nancy Grace’s new book. Or Glenn Beck’s. Or the autobiographies of unimportant important people which were really written by other people. This leads to events like Tyra Banks announcing she’s writing her new book Modelland, which really excited only about four people, all of them employed by Tyra Banks.
Which brings it back to me. It’s my blog, so why not?
At one point, I was actually making a name for myself in the literary magazine marketplace. Editors started to know me. Sometimes they even commented on my published work when they saw me in another magazine. It used to be a really close-knit community, and I was breaking into it.
And then I stopped writing for about a decade and a half due to a really strange relationship I had with a woman. It took me that long to realize I needed to get back to writing, and here I am. But no one remembers me any more, so it’s like I’m starting over again.
Recently, one of those editors contacted me and published one of my later pieces of work in his literary magazine, a science fiction one. A success. Yay. But it leaves me wondering if this old model of publishing is still viable today. Don’t get me wrong. I’ll include it on my vita like I normally would, but I wonder if the publication of this story in this ‘zine is really going to contribute to my eventual success. Oh don’t get me wrong. I’d still have it published there cause I like the editor and support his continued attempts to build an audience for what he does best. But I’m still wondering if there’s a career out there for me because there are so many writers these days, and basically you’re competing with anyone who has access to a computer today.
It makes me wonder if the age of being a writer is somewhat over, unless you already made it famous before or you’re some kind of marketing genius capable of making a name for yourself in the sea of endless writers.
