TL;DR – Congrats on being a writer in an era when writers have options about how they want to become ‘published’. Now go write.
Okay, let’s talk publishing. I’m a librarian, a text technologist, and a published author: this is something I know a lot about.
[FYI, this is mostly a post about publishing fiction books — non-fiction and/or getting your work into magazines and/or online publications are different beasts entirely.]
There is a lot of talk going lately on Medium and tumblr about publishing, and great ideas are taking shape. My contribution is perhaps a bit pedantic, but hopefully helpful to those looking at taking the jump past “blog posts” into the rarefied atmosphere of “published works.” If you don’t have much or any experience getting published, this post is for you. If you know a lot about this topic, you will find this post pedantic and boring, sorry.
So, to start, I’m going to put us all on the same page: What do we mean by the concept of “publishing” in regards to books? Historically, publishing is a very old practice that has seen a lot of change and yet the basic premise has not been altered since the 15th century: someone writes a book, a publisher (that is, a person or company) buys the book or the rights to print the book, prints the book, distributes the book, eventually goes bankrupt and/or gets purchased by a larger publisher.
Perhaps I should say: the basic premise has not been altered until the 21st century. Here in 2016, publishing a book is both more of the same and also something completely different. The dust on these changes has not even begun to settle. Has “publishing” as a concept fundamentally changed? What is the difference between “posting” and “publishing”? Who is a publisher? Who isn’t? Are the rules different, the same…do rules even exist, anymore? If so, who sets those rules?
Most importantly: what does that mean for writers?
It means there are platforms like Medium and wordpress and facebook to share writing on, as well as options to self publish or go with a small “indie” publisher (more on that later) in addition to the still-thriving “legacy” publishing industry.
Still and all: what does that mean for writers?
A lot. A hell of a lot, and it’s worth knowing.
Some personal background that, I hope, explains my perspective: I’ve been a student of publishing since I was a teen in the 1980s (also of writing, but that’s a different topic completely) and when I got my master’s degree in information studies a few years ago, I did a concentration in text technologies (the study of “text” through history).
I am also a bona-fide professional writer. I’ve worked as a reporter and journalist in the past, have freelanced in copywriting (did not like that much), and yes, I am a certified “published author” of many novels — although under a pseudonym, for professional (read: day!job) reasons.
I have always known that I was going to be a published author. Whether it was Mother’s brainwashing* or destiny, I can’t say at this venerable age, but there it is, presented as fact. Never had a doubt shadowed my mind about that fate (or doom?).
“When” and “how” and “with what???!?!” were separate from that. Those questions haunted me in daily conjunction with my certainty of the end result, which is why I started studying the publishing industry when merely a teenager. Those questions also played heavily into why I gave up on writing for nearly a decade, starting in the 1990s. Or I should say, I gave up on writing as a profession. As writers must do, I wrote on regardless, but mostly via blogs and journals and (poorly written) unfinished stories.
To clarify: I gave up on writing as a profession for a whole decade because of publishing, not because of writing.
I was reminded of this by Oliver Shiny‘s recent exhortation about writing, publishing, and helping others. It’s a great rant, and pretty reflective of the rebirth I went through as well.
In fact, it inspired this post, because as much as I know about publishing, I realize that a lot of writers don’t. For one thing, they are busy writing, and for another, the changes wrought to the publishing industry over the last 20 years have been tumultuous and often traumatic for everyone involved, but are not easily understood without knowing something about the process as it stood before the World Wide Web and Internet took over.
The place I felt Oliver was speaking from, and what most writers these days come to at some point, is that we live in an age of options. Options are not things writers had in the past. Prior to (about 2000 and definitely) 2007, when the release of Amazon’s first Kindle lit up the digital horizon, writers had one legitimate (that is an important word here, I will come back to it) road to follow to publication, and that was whatever hellish road their publishers decided for them.
Over the last couple of centuries, publishing coalesced into a very standardized process, one that was completely in place by the 1930s. I outlined the basics, but here is how it played out for writers during the 20th Century: lots of rejections, insane dedication, more rejections, ruthless agents and editors who sometimes improved the writing and sometimes did not, and then paltry royalties that rarely paid off the advance.
There were exceptions, of course, the break-away bestsellers that usually ended up paying the publisher’s debts for everything else they put out that year. Every working writer knows the story of Steven King writing Carrie at 4 am in the morning before heading off to teach school and eventually getting a six figure deal for it (also, please: read his book On Writing, that’s all you need to do, really).
As the century wore on, that model became the actual business plan for most publishers, especially the big ones: throw everything out the door, hope for a mega-hit to pay for it all. Paper was cheap and so were writers, so it wasn’t a bad plan, from a business perspective. Publishers who had higher ideals or less business sense eventually disappeared, or more often, sold out while they could to a bigger house (this is where “imprints” come from, and yes, you should click that link).
The only ones who did not follow that plan were the romance publishers, who played by their own rules and still do. Serving as publishing’s “houses of ill repute” they could do exactly what they fucking wanted to do, and did. I’ll get back to this point later.
But the plan started falling apart when paper became more expensive in the later part of the century. There were other things too: globalization, economic down turns, and writers who wanted more money. Mind you, publishing didn’t fail due to these pressures, it just buckled down and did the same thing only harder.
They could not print as much and keep high profits, so they invested less in developing a writer’s potential. That meant if your first book wasn’t a huge seller, your second book was lucky to get published at all. They also started short changing the editing process by cutting back on the number of editors they had on staff (note this started happening in the 1990s, long before ebooks were a “threat”, so people who blame the firings/downsizings of editors from legacy publishers on Amazon/self-publishing/dystopia are wrong). They created draconian contracts that could and did literally enslave writers and their works to the publisher (horror stories, I can tell you a few). The “mid-list”, older or less-popular books that nonetheless reliably turned a small profit, disappeared. Everything was sacrificed for the goal of publishing as much as possible as cheaply as possible and banking on a few hits to pay the bills.
Knowing this as a writer in the 1990s, I knew had exactly two choices to make:
- write what would sell, pray for a miracle, maybe make some money
- give up
I know what you are thinking: why not write what you love and then pray for a miracle? Well, the fact that my big fantasy epic was based on an asexual who travels around in a wheelchair, and that my romance stories were generally polyamorous, meant that more than miracles would be needed. More like, an alternate universe. No publisher with a brain would bet on those stories, and I knew it, and I understood it. I did not blame them at all.
Why? Because write this down and staple it to your head: PUBLISHING IS ABOUT MAKING MONEY.
Writing is not. Writing is about passion and love for the work and a (sometimes desperate) need to share our stories. Publishing don’t give a crapola about any of that, I don’t care what you’ve read, or what the owners of publishing houses say. It’s about the money, honey.
Previously, that left writers at the mercy of publishers. Some publishing houses were run by editors and writers who cared about their stable of authors; they usually failed, or got bought out (see above). Publishing is a business and again I state: it is a business in the business of making money.
Online platforms have not changed that. When you “publish” on facebook or Medium or WordPress.com or where-ever, you are still dealing with “publishers” who need to pay to keep the lights on and the servers running. Bandwidth costs, okay?
Facebook turns users into products, selling our data; LiveJournal and WordPress.com use a ‘paid memberships or free-with-ads’ model; Medium, well, no one knows…yet.
Even one of the most altruistic “publishers” of the new era, Archive of Our Own, relies on donations to stay up and running. Ain’t nuthin’ for free.
Likewise, self publishing is also about money. Amazon and Smashwords and all those others, they have simply updated the old model (publish a lot at a loss, hope for a hit to pay the bills) by literally publishing anything and everything any writer wants to publish (freedom!!!) and hoping that enough books sell enough that costs are covered. They do this by simply dropping the pretense of being a “publishing company” in the traditional sense, even though that is technically what they are, by kind-of merging the role of publisher with the role of retailer. Nowadays, authors do not need a publisher to edit, print, market, and distribute (all very expensive activities) to a point-of-sale location such as a bookstore. The “print, distribute, and point-of-sale location” are all wrapped up in one entity, such as Amazon or Smashwords (there are others).
Which leaves the heavy lifting of writing, editing, and marketing to…yes, the writers.
Don’t be fooled, though, by claims that legacy publishing companies “take care” of their writers via high-quality editing and extensive marketing, which is why they claim to be so much better and more important than lowly Amazon or Smashwords. Yes, some authors get that kind of attention and focus (read: money invested), but the vast majority don’t. So even with a signed contract in hand from a powerful, well-known legacy publisher, many authors are finding that hiring their own editor and doing a lot of their own marketing is necessary.
In short: if you want to “just write and leave the rest for other people to deal with” then you either need to be rich enough to arrange for that yourself, or accept the fact that success will not come to you that way.
(Yes, there are exceptions. How much are you going to bet on being one of them?)
I have one former friend who wrote in a small mystery niche, and had a couple of fairly popular (for the niche) books published by a legacy publisher. She basically dropped out of writing professionally because she did not want to have to market herself, which was what she was left with by her publisher since her books were not heavy-hitting best sellers. From a business standpoint, that makes complete sense: she was not making the company enough money for them to invest in her brand. Short sighted? Yes. Unfair? Also yes. Standard operating procedure for any publishing house? You betcha. Since going into self-publishing or hooking up with a small indie publisher would have meant more of everything she did not want to do (mostly marketing, but generally the business end of publishing), she simply said “no” and stopped trying to get published. I don’t know if she stopped writing.
Which brings me back to my own story about “quitting” writing in the late 1990s. I kept writing of course but I shrugged off the idea of getting published any time soon.
Sure, I wrote, and I toyed with some plots and characters, but I’m not a “category” writer who can follow the required beats and word lengths and character restrictions (all power to those who can, and make good money doing it). In short, I stopped taking the idea of getting published seriously, and that affected my writing. Like I said, I have always known that I would, eventually, be a published author, but I stopped trying to cater to that destiny and (foolishly, it turned out) stopped putting time or energy into my writing.
If I had it to do over again, I would tell myself: Write the stories anyway. Write them, finish them, edit them, and WAIT.
Because things started changing, and since I was already fairly versed in how traditional publishing worked, I saw a window open into my dimly lit world of self-imposed publishing exile.
Unfortunately, I’m not an early adapter. That award goes to the likes of Jack Konrath who jumped on the self-publishing train early and with every book he could pry the copyright away from his previous publisher. No, I’m super cautious. I regret it now, of course, but I did NOT jump on the self-publishing train in 2008 when I first considered it. Maybe if I had all those stories written and finished, I might have… *sigh*
But the window was opening, for those willing to take the risk(s), to jump ship out of the legacy publishing cycle and take back some control of their writing careers. Because this is what the significant change amounts to, for writers: we have choices.
Previously we either bowed to the legacy publishing system or went with the much-maligned “vanity press” — and there was a real danger there, because anyone who published their own works was signing their death warrant as an author. No REAL publisher or agent would touch you, if you published your own work first. You would be blacklisted.
One of the authors I know, still struggling in the sf/fantasy scene but with a few minor successes under her belt, less than ten years ago gave me a stern lecture about how I should not even consider self publishing! I would doom my career! It would be catastrophic! …and, for the time, she was right.
Of course, less than five years later, she started publishing her own novellas through Amazon. That’s not because she was wrong and “saw the light,” it’s because she’s a smart businesswoman who realized that the times have changed.
So, what does all of that change mean for writers?
In a word: options.
You can self-publish. You can publish with a small, mostly-online press. You can start your own publishing “house.” You can “publish” serially on sites like Wattpad and AO3 or your own website. You can create a Patreon site and ask people to support your as you write in exchange for perks like early access to your stories. You can continue to submit work to traditional publishers and/or agents in hopes of getting a contract. You can do all of that simultaneously.
It is up to you.
Resources
There is a huge number of magazines and blogs on the topic of “getting published” and “the publishing industry” (Publishers Weekly, Digital Book World, Publishing Perspectives, Writers and Poets Magazine, even Writer’s Digest). However, if you are really interested in learning more about the options writers have, the good and the bad of traditional/legacy publishing, information about self-publishing, and simply insight from authors and publishers about the current market, I suggest these sites:
Author Earnings: Less of a blog and more an ongoing study and analysis of books sales by indie author Hugh Howey and his anonymous “Data Guy”, scraping the numbers live from various sources. Very important work being done, and whether you agree or disagree with their conclusions, it’s the most transparent insight currently into the publishing industry we’ve got. Because big publishers? Do NOT share their data.
The Passive Voice: labeled “A Lawyer’s Thoughts on Authors, Self-Publishing and Traditional Publishing” it is a also a good clearinghouse for articles about publishing and writing by publishers and writers. Has a very pro-indie slant, but tends towards a balanced opinion on issues.
The Shatzkin Files: The publishing son of a publishing legend, Mike Shatzkin has written some amazingly in-depth and insightful posts about the changes being wrought in publishing over the last 15 years. It’s def. worth reading his older posts.
Writer Unboxed: An online magazine with posts by a variety of well respected writers/reporters, discussing publishing from a writer’s perspective.
Chuck Wendig’s blog: not specifically about publishing/writing, but he does a lot of good posts on the topics. Also, he’s damn funny. Again, strong bias towards indie/self publishing, but he’s also got some legacy publisher contracts, so his perspective is very holistic.
*[Mother’s take on “published author” as a concept went different ways from mine when I was an adolescent. My deep and abiding love of SF and fantasy and pop culture was at odds with her very high-literary inclinations. She tried to bridge that gap by assigning me Doris Lessing to read. In retrospect, I feel bad for telling her that Lessing’s writing was confusing and boring, but I was, what, 13? Bad call, Mother, bad call.]
