Things to Consider
A lot has been on my mind today, particularly since I had a fairly illuminating conversation on writing and the publishing industry with a professor of mine, who has published two successful nonfiction books with one of the top publishers in his field.
First of all, check out Lightspeed Magazine associate editor Christie Yant’s blog, Inkhaven, if you haven’t already done so. She’s been writing a series of posts she calls “Lessons from the Slush Pile,” which I’ve added under the Writers’ Resources links section. She offers advice on writing an effective cover letter, as well as a meditation on the differences between Pretty Good, Really Good, and Great stories in the slush pile. Another post documents some pretty staggering statistics about how many stories are submitted to Lightspeed in one month, how many of those are passed on from slush to editor John Joseph Adams, and how many of those stories are finally accepted for publication. The truth is…disheartening. Downright terrifying.
There’s a lot of debate raging in the publishing industry right now, among all involved parties. Writers in particular seem most conflicted about the perks or ills of e-publication. Other writers have insisted that any publication credit below 3 cents/word is not worth mentioning on a cover letter.
During my aforementioned conversation, I was advised by my professor not to settle. Small-press sales are a good thing, of course; some of them are actually pretty high-quality publications. The little guy that pays you a cent per word is still showing an interest in your work, and proving that your stories are a potential commodity — something worth reading.
But if your goal is to achieve publication in a prestigious magazine — my target markets are places like Apex, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed, to name a few — a cover letter with a slew of semi-pro or token-pay “publication credits” can actually create a bias against you. As Ms. Yant advises, less is more with a cover letter. Editors want to love your story, and the cover letter should have nothing but a positive effect. If you are a graduate of Clarion or Odyssey, that’s something to put on a cover letter. If you’ve sold to F&SF or Asimov’s, that’s something to definitely put on a cover letter. College creative writing classes and indie press publications aren’t really credits, as far as the top markets in the business are concerned; they can actually hurt your credibility.
My professor used a good metaphor: If you attend a good graduate school, and then get placed in a really good job right after graduation, you’ll have success with getting other great jobs in the future. If you attend a school with a poor reputation, which then places you in an unfavorable job upon graduation, you’ve already begun at the bottom.
This may be true in the publishing industry, for obvious reasons. If your name is unfamiliar, and suddenly your work appears alongside seasoned pros in a place like Apex or Analog, people are going to take notice. You mean this Joe Blow sold to Lightspeed, and Cat Rambo got rejected? Who does this guy think he is? And then, suddenly you’ve got real credibility. You can be trusted to produce quality work — which you should be doing in the first place.
Myths abound in this business. There are extremes at both ends of the spectrum. Complete amateurs read the advice of someone like Dean Wesley Smith, an established pro, and come out of the gates with their first couple of finished stories thinking that his advice will work for them right away. It works for Dean; why shouldn’t it work for me?
Well, unfortunately, there is such a thing as craft. As practice, which Dean talks about far more than anything else. Because he knows that before you can succeed as a writer, you have to at least be a good writer. Seems obvious, and perhaps it’s an intuitive truth; but a lot of the advice propagating across the Net makes the assumption that everyone seeking advice on craft and the writing business are already competent storytellers. I wish this were true, that everyone in the world who ever wanted to be a writer put in the time, effort, and focus necessary to hone their skills — but I sincerely doubt it.
As Yant also points out in her Lessons from the Slush Pile series, writers are in a big damn hurry to get published. Who isn’t? I was, and am. It’s a natural instinct to rush, and write more, and bombard the industry with your writerly genius. Perhaps there’s an element of truth in the notion — but this all comes after craft, after practice.
The knee-jerk reaction for a lot of new writers, eager for publication but too impatient to wait until he or she has started receiving (consistently, one might argue) personalized rejections from one or more prestigious, professional-level markets, is to start e-publishing every single story they’ve written, and then wait to see if suddenly a career materializes through the miracles of cyberspace. This might even happen…to a rare few. But even then, it’s miraculous, and far less likely than selling to a pro-level, SFWA-qualifying market.
Have I started to sound like a snobbish, elitist asshole yet?
Maybe.
My point isn’t that everyone should extend their arms skyward and try to touch the stars. I’d be willing to bet that your arms wouldn’t quite reach, and even if they did, you’d get a nasty burn.
What I am suggesting is that every writer ought to evaluate one’s own personal set of goals, develop a logical, realistic plan of action that will make those goals relatively achievable, and then work toward that goal with patience, careful attention to the craft of storytelling, and an eagerness to learn all that one can about fiction writing and the publishing business. It’s all changing fast — you’d be a fool to argue otherwise — but there are traditions in the publishing industry for a reason. Professional editors have a very important job, whether it’s polishing a story into a potential gem or wading through the slush pile in search of a great story by an undiscovered new talent. With practice and patience, the talent will come — it’s a matter of little more than time and persistence. But I suspect that those who sell themselves short, who crank out story after story with the sole purpose of making a fast (and likely small) check, are the ones who will either not last, or will not gain a large, faithful readership.
Good stories, unfortunately, don’t just happen. At least not without years of honing one’s craft, reading, and self-examination. So think about where you want to be — not tomorrow, but in five years. And then do what it takes to get there. It’s really that simple.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ungrateful for my three semi-pro, small press sales to the Library of Horror/SF Press. I’m very grateful. They taught me a lot: that my writing is worth something, in terms of both being read and earning me money; and also that selling to the small press is…pretty easy. It took me about a year of writing consistently to sell three stories. But I’m not talking necessarily about speed, but rather about focus, about art. I think of Joe Hill’s Horns, which despite its modest length probably took a long time to plot, develop characters for, write, and then revise.
Taking the time to reflect on the lessons of each work, on what worked and what didn’t work, teaches the writer far more than simply cranking out a new story week after week. If you’re throwing each one of them up on the Kindle store, moreover, you’re not even giving it the chance to impress the editors at the pro markets — and you’re therefore not really taking yourself too seriously as a professional writer who feels her stories are worth being bought and read. That doesn’t mean stories can’t gradually make their way through the reputable markets, and find a home in the small press. Stories are meant to be read.
Don’t become jaded; don’t give up; don’t shortchange your work.
Well said. I’m happy for those who have this as an option and wish them success, but I’m not there yet.
My writing is improving, but I’m not there yet. I’d rather wait until I have more evidence that my fiction is professionally readable than self publish something that’ll force me to change my name.
Alex,
Quite a read, and interesting coming from the perspective of someone still fighting to climb the ladder rather than someone near the top looking down. There are some great points here. I suspect there are a few that are off base.
I’ve been following a friend’s study of ebook sales (an established pro without a big name but a name nonetheless) and it seems (in his studies) that the key to ebook sales is other ebook sales. The times your book/story/whatever sells, the more it will show up on “people who bought this item also bought…” lists. This puts your story in the eye-line of people likely to buy it and the cycle continues. It is a bit of a “turtles all the way down” strategy, though. To inspire those first sales to reach numbers that perpetuate the rest of the cycle, you need to grab an audience. Sales to big mags can do that, as can appearing on a television show or buying up billboard space in every city in North America. Somehow you need to get it started, but there is evidence to suggest the reaction will self-sustain for a while even through self publishing.
I’m awfully tempted myself to Kindle a collection of my own stuff. I could do it and I have a tiny bit of street cred (WotF and my eventual Escape Pod appearance) to propel things a little. It might prove more profitable to sell the stories in ones and twos rather than in a big omnibus since price seems a driving factor of Kindle sales. 20,000 words for a buck? People take a chance. They like it and they drop more dollars.
But I still feel like it’s too soon. I don’t want to start the roller coaster too soon lest I get stuck in the loop. I might not get stuck, but I don’t want to risk it. I may wait too long and find too much coaster traffic to ever make it to the loop, let alone through it. Market saturation may not be too far ahead.
Selling to a mag is a guaranteed amount of money…but hard to achieve. Going it alone on Kindle is a lot easier to get money…but no guaranteed amount. Two different gambles. Which is the better lottery ticket, PowerBall or MegaMillions? As a traditional kind of guy, I’m wandering traditional kinds of routes, finally getting a few select editors to recognize my name and pay my rejection letters some special attention. It’s a slow process, but I’m making progress. If I wasn’t, I’d likely take the other road. Either way, I suspect success in the future will require both roads to some extent. The all-or-nothing approach is the riskiest of all.
Okay, my two cents turned into a buck-twenty. I may expand these comments in a post of my own. You’ve inspired me. But for now I’ll just shut up.
Scott
Interesting thoughts, Alex. I’m in the “don’t sell yourself short” camp for sure. I don’t submit to token markets anymore, though I do submit to a few semi-pro markets (Like Shimmer, for example). I don’t see any reason not to aim for the top. I think for short fiction especially, even in this new world of e-books, that all efforts should be made to exhaust the pro-paying market options before you put it up. The world of the magazines is very competitive, but it isn’t impossible to break into and if you don’t send your work out, you’ll never know if you could have sold that story. Short story rights generally only get tied up for a few months to maybe a year, so it’s even more worth waiting for a story to travel the submission rounds.
On the other hand, I don’t think ignoring e-publishing is necessarily good either. If you don’t have the writing chops, you won’t sell. Which might suck, but at least it won’t really hurt you (no one will even notice because your work will sink like a stone and disappear among all the other poor work out there). If you don’t suck, you’ll sell. Maybe not a ton instantly (wouldn’t that be nice?) but copies will move and a little money will start to flow in. I’ve sold over 35 copies of a single short story in the last few months that otherwise would have sat on my hard drive and earned me nothing (it had already been rejected, sometimes nicely, by magazines for years before that). Not money to write home about, but I’ve done nothing to get it out there either (I don’t promote my few literary stories).
My feeling is that a mix of things is good. And writing is king. If you don’t write, you won’t have product to sell nor will you improve. Practice, practice, practice. Self-publishing takes skills as well, like writing a good blurb, getting copy editing done, making good covers, etc. All things that I think that the writers who will do the best in the future will need to learn or find people to do for them. Kris Rusch has a great blog series going on the new world of publishing as well, and her latest post talk about beginning writers. I agree with what she’s said so far.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s “either/or” with all this. I’m learning the ropes of epublishing now, while still sending out lots of work to professional magazines. I’m submitting novels to editors as well as getting some ready to put up online.
In the end though, all that matters is continuing to learn and practice and improve. If you don’t have the chops, you won’t make it in writing at all, whether you self-publish or go the traditional way. And I’m really glad you point that out, Alex
Practice is king. And yeah, a career is not a sprint, but a marathon. No need to be in a hurry 
I agree with a lot of your points. I feel certain that I will e-pub sooner or later, leaning towards later right now. There’s just too much going on in my life to figure out how it would all work, plus I would prefer to get my stuff into some pro markets first.
So why is EVERYBODY talking about e-pubbing right now? I guess I didn’t get the memo…
Eileen- everyone is talking about e-pubbing because things in the publishing world are changing at crazy speeds.
Alex… I did the look of the new blog!!
Wow, that wasn’t coherent was it? (ahem) I dig the new look of the blog. (ahem)
A few thoughts…
Editors all have different tastes, and what works for one editor won’t work for another. I think as aspirants we get into this mindset where we think if a story or book can just be made ‘good enough’ that somehow it will sell to anyone and everyone. And this hasn’t been my experience at all. If you look at many selling writers, especially those doing a lot of short fiction, you’ll notice they tend to sell to the same venues over and over again. This is because those writers have figured out how to write to an editor’s particular taste — either deliberately, or simply through the coincidence of a writer’s particular style also matching an editor’s; which is what I think has happened for me with Analog.
Given this reality, it’s a good idea to keep casting a wide net — write a lot, submit to lots of different places — until you finally get an editor to bite. Once an editor has bought you once, especially if they’ve taken your work alongside or even over that of well-established professionals, it’s a sign that they’re willing to invest in you as a project. You’re new and unknown, but they see you as having the potential to produce the kind of work they need for their particular venue. This is the foundation of an editor-writer relationship, and this is how most well-established professionals navigate. Editors buy from writers they’re familiar with and trust, and writers write for editors they know will appreciate and purchase their work. It’s been that way since the beginning.
But for the unsold aspirant, it’s a rather hostile environment. Few chances to score a hit. Too many closed doors. At times it will seem a hopeless project. Hence the lure of self-publishing, which these days gets confused with e-publishing, which is sort of a different animal. Almost always, the self-published have jumped before they are ready. And their prose shows it. E-publishing can be a lot like that too, but e-publishing is also working great for many writers who have already cut their teeth and can produce quality manuscripts — they’re just tired of dickering with New York’s dysfunctional slush funnel.
This year, if I hit my goals, I’ll be using all channels: one novel to electronic distribution, two or three novels circulating the slush funnel of New York, perhaps one or two short fiction “packs” up on Amazon via Kindle, and two dozen short works hitting the slush at the digests, and a selection of electronic short fiction markets, like Lightspeed. Which of these channels will “pop” using Kevin J. Anderson’s analogy, is hard to say.
But one thing is certain: once you break in, you realize the work has only just begun! You have unexpected (and very nice) things happen to you, too. But once you rise to the entry-level pro quality point, and people begin to expect that from you, suddenly you’re on a different level and it’s a learning curve all over again.
I agree with not selling yourself short. Very sage advice. Or else you and your writing will be ploughing the same furrow over and over again while the villagers are laughing.