Breaking in, Breaking out, Dropping out

It is one of the most regular questions asked of any professional writer: How do I break into the field?

It is also one of the most difficult questions to answer and one that at any time you ask it as a newby, you can be sure of getting an answer that’s AT LEAST ten years out of date.  Sometimes twenty.

The advice I got, which arguably allowed me to break into the field, was unarguably at least ten years out of date, and it might have been twenty.  And while it, in its simplicity – write, submit, query, attend cons, get an agent, let the agent find you an editor, write more.  Keep writing.  Keep attending cons – worked (with modifications.  I found my first editor.  At a writers’ workshop.) to break in, it did not work to break out, nor did its auxiliary advice “write a d*mn good book.”

By the time I came in that pathway to success was broken.  I’m not going to beat this dead horse.  I explained how it worked for me here.  (And here I’m not going on my own writing and I’m not saying “my books are the best thing since sliced bread” though I’ll note my bestseller friends are all baffled at my books not having broken out, yet, on quality alone.  I’m going on what I’ve seen from other writers I KNOW are writing books so d*mn good that they’re the best behaved little demons ever.  And yet they are stuck where I am.  Or they can’t break in at all.  Or they’re somewhat below me in midlist hell.  Everyone who reads them agrees they’re amazing, but… very few people ever read them.)

I don’t know when I noticed the advice was not working and that there were troubling indications that it couldn’t work.  I think it was about five years AFTER I broke in.  This was because I’m slow, and also because when things don’t work as advertised, I tend to think I’m doing something wrong.  So, when I noted that agents did not in fact fight for a better advance FOR ME and often talked my expectations down, I assumed it was because my books weren’t that good.  When my books didn’t show up on ANY bookshelves and I was blamed because they hadn’t sold, I assumed it wasn’t because they weren’t that good.  Etc.

It took an attempt on the part of an agent to talk me into a contract clause that was criminally insane, and which – if I’d taken it as was – could have prevented me from writing ANYTHING for five to ten years and possibly for life depending on the whim of the house, all for the princely sum of 30k for me to realize perhaps not all was right in the field and that things didn’t work as advertised.

I still kept trying to make them work as advertised, and I still thought I MUST be doing something wrong to get the peculiar treatment I was.  This was a peculiarly insane place to be.  One of my fans, who is hanging out in a nannowrimo mailing list with me compared the process I went through for the last ten years to taking my children to the temple before I found out if they got to live or be sacrificed to Moloch.  Wish it were just that.  It was also, after they decided the kid would live – i.e. be published – seeing them decide to cut off the kid’s legs (bad cover; no marketing plan; not even bothering to get it in bookstores) and then blame me because it couldn’t walk.
But I kept trying, because hang it all, I’d been given advice by experts and it MUST be good advice.

And then at cons I started meeting a new breed of “young, talented and making it very fast” writer.  This started about five years ago.  They had self-published and then sold to a traditional publisher.  (Now, remember, five years ago.  No ebooks yet.)  Once they came into the traditional house, they got the treatment I wanted but never got – promotion, interest, advertising money.

I was intrigued, but while I saw it as a new pathway in, I didn’t see it as one I could take.  No, not even if I were able to start again.  Part of this is because every one of these authors was a self-marketing powerhouse.  The ones I know personally would publish the book then spend EVERY waking moment marketing the living daylights out of it.

I couldn’t do that.  First of all because my books have no natural “Platform” (take, for instance my friend Larry Correia.  He’s a gun expert/instructor/weapons dealer who writes about people killing monsters with guns.  Natural platform.  No, that’s not all he writes about or what makes his books interesting.  BUT it does give him a venue/in to promote stuff.) I don’t write about things I’m an expert in, though I research (of course) for the books I’m writing.  But saying “I read everything I could find about World War I for three years obsessively” doesn’t make me a credentialed expert.  If I wrote a book about a translator (I still would like to do a space opera about translators to the stars) I could see having a “platform” but it’s not really a “sexy” or controversial one, and I don’t see it getting me into talk shows.  Not even local ones.

However, I noted it was a way in.  And when people asked me about how to break in, I pointed it out to them, usually with the caveat “I wouldn’t self publish, because there’s a stigma, but…”  If the person had a natural platform, say like my friend Amanda, who has law-enforcement experience, I could see telling her (I might have, in fact) “send it in, sell it.  Tell them you’re willing to give talks on law enforcement to mystery writers all over the country, and to hopeful mystery writers, and help promote your book.”

And then things changed, again.  In fact, they’re in the middle of a tumbling change, and right now it’s very hard to answer that question.  If I had to this would be my VERY qualified (as in “I’m putting qualifications on this”, not as in, “I’m qualified” answer.)

There are a few things you must understand about publishing right now and which are non-debatable:

1 – No one knows anything
2 – Publishers and Agents are in trouble, mostly because they’re avoiding making necessary changes.
3 – The old model of “it’s not so much what you write but what you are that will determine your success” is still very much in place.
4 – most publishers are not most writers’ friends.

Given this, this is the best advice I can give:
1- In most cases, don’t get an agent.  They don’t have the power they used to in the field, and they’re getting desperate and a little insane.

1.a. – I have a good friend who is an agent, and I MIGHT still sign with him if I were a newby.  I can’t imagine him doing anything business-insane.  OTOH I don’t believe he has that much pull.  No agent does.  Even the “powerhouses”.

1. b. – If you’re writing non fiction this might be different.  I don’t know that it is (and feel free to chime in any of you who do) but I’ve had the impression it might be.  If your agent is THE field expert on eighteenth century furniture and represents every author who writes about it, and you’re writing about it, it might be a good thing to have him represent you.  It will give publishers an assurance you are the real article and know what you’re talking about.

2 – If you think you have a property and/or you’re the type of person who thinks he/she can do well in traditional publishing, send queries out to publishing houses.  Yes, the old “no unsolicited submissions” is still in place, but I understand it’s honored more in the breach.  At any rate, if you go to a writers conference or a small sf con in, say, NYC, and pitch to the editor who then says to send it in, your submission is no longer unsolicited.

2.a. If you sell read that contract like a hawk.  You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff being done.

2.b. Make them cross your palm with silver.  When I broke in I heard the lowest advance for which they promote was 25k.  G-d knows what it is now.  (This is not always true, though, if you’ve become friends with an editor, even a minor one, you might get promotion for your 4k book.)

2.c. Be prepared to promote, and be aware this only REALLY works if you have a “platform” that’s at least tangentially related to your book.  Also, if you don’t have kids or a real life.  Even my “blog tour” for DST ate most of a year and was responsible for how late the second book in that is in coming out.  Not complaining.  Without it, there might NOT be a second book.  OTOH it still ate a whole year.

2. d.  Did I SAY read that contract like a hawk?  Yeah, hire an IP attorney, too.  Because one of the things that could well happen is your house going under – see where everything is in flux – and you don’t want your book caught in that.

3 – You don’t meet or aren’t willing to follow the rules in 2 – to be honest, I was never really able to, both by personality and because when I broke in I had very small children, so a lot of cons, and a lot of publicity were out of the question – consider self publishing.  I say this with all the trepidation of a traditionally published author who still is afraid people will rush into publication with books they’ll be sorry they put out.

3.a – Don’t promote unless you want to.  Unknowns are making more in ebooks than I ever made in my career.

3.b. – Write.  More.  Furiously.  (This does seem to be something that DOES work in ebooks.)

3.c. – when you have ten books written, take the first one free for a month or so.

3.d. – There are no guarantees, but it’s at least as good a chance as in trad publishing and maybe better for the type of writer who “just wants to write.”

3. e – Before you go out half-cocked, research how to do this, so both your formatting and your covers look as good as possible.  This might involve just looking at what’s out there, or taking a workshop, or whatever.

4 – Go with a reputable, small, Indie publisher.

4.a. – This is only apposite if you are either too nervous to go it on your own and/or you are writing in a niche – like erotica say – that some small publisher has made their own.  If they have fans, it will rub off on you.
4.b. – Before you do it, research the market and what are reasonable terms.
4. c – Before you do it, research the house.
4. d – get an IP attorney to look over the contract.  Even if the house is reputable, they might have some snags in there that even they aren’t aware of.  And if they go under, you want to be protected.

Now, where I stand, I’m doing both.  I am still writing for the traditional market and will do so for one house as long as they want me (debts you can’t pay are debts you can’t pay) and for the others if I think it suits my marketing plan, though some of these might be loss leaders.  However, I’m also indie-publishing.  This has removed some of the venom of publishing.  It gives me a portion of it over which I have control.  There’s even a chance I can live from that portion (don’t know yet.  Early days.)  More importantly, if I don’t sell something I wrote, I don’t have to bury it in a drawer, I can still put it directly to the public and hope it finds readers.

For me, this is the best place I’ve been in ten years as a published author.  I can feel myself “decompressing” and look back at the last ten years in a sort of wonder, as though it had been a fever dream, or I’d been crazy.  Stress eating is waaaaaaaaaay down, as is stress-obsession-with news.  (And I didn’t even know that was a symptom of stress.)

Once I get some of my backlog – about 200 short stories/novellas, etc – out, I expect to be able to take weekends off.  Which is predicated on my finding out WHAT one does on such weekends. (Well, it’s been years.  And years.)  I’m looking rather forward to it.

However, my path might not be your path.  If you take nothing else away from this post, DO take that there isn’t only one path.  And that if you’re not breaking in or breaking out the way everyone tells you you should, perhaps the field has changed.  And perhaps you need to, also.

(crossposted at According to Hoyt)


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8 responses to “Breaking in, Breaking out, Dropping out”

  1. Sgt. Mom Avatar
    Sgt. Mom

    I came to the very same conclusions – as did a lot of the other members (indy writers all) over the same period. I already had a platform for my printed and e-book writings, so what the heck! Do an end-run around the literary-industrial powers that be, get the books out there, and build up the fan base. The traditional publishing world is crumbling, and writers and insiders are admitting it, in louder and louder voices.

    I am not at all sure that I’d entertain an offer from a traditional NY publisher, anyway. I’d rather carry on, directly hiring the experts that I need for cover design, editing, formatting … maybe at some point a professional publicist? … these people would work directly for me, not a corporate entity whose larger interests very likely run counter to my own.

    But I’d purely love to land a publishing contract with a firm who would do a German translation of the Trilogy, though. I would so clean up from all those Karl May fans in Germany!

  2. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    Sgt. Mom,

    I no longer CAN translate into German, and probably — frankly — not FROM German. (I probably can still translate into from French and Portuguese, and could translate INTO if I gave it a year’s study.) Here’s the thing, it has occurred to me that anyone like me out there, with multilingual training, who didn’t sell their soul to fiction writing twenty years ago could be cleaning up about then. IF I can’t make it indie, I’m seriously considering spending a couple of years training up my languages again (I was at one time as fluent in French, Portuguese and German as I’m in English) and just starting offering a deal to successful indie publishers — only, of course, I’d much rather succeed in indie publishing and am going to give it a good d*mn try first.

    I’m wondering where one would even ask — short of sending a bleg to instapundit — if there are people willing to do this, for say 50% of the net in that language? I’d willingly give it to someone who translates my musketeers mysteries into Portuguese, even though it’s (in ebooks) a relatively marginal market. My eighty year old father would LIKE to read the book I dedicated to him, and he doesn’t speak English.

  3. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    Of course, it would help if that comment weren’t full of typos, but I beg you to believe I AM fluent in English — I just have had no caffeine today, yet. I meant I can translate from French or Portuguese but not INTO without a year training. And that I thought someone with my training who kept up the skill could be cleaning up right about NOW.

  4. Sgt. Mom Avatar

    Heck, yeah – I’d give up a significant percentage of royalties from sales of a German edition – to either the publishing firm OR a freelance translator, just to get it out there, and I absolutely guarantee the Trilogy in translation would be a gold-mine. I’ve had emails from English-speaking German fans wanting a German version for their friends and kin … and at the Christmas fair yesterday, I even sold a copy to a German grad student who said, heck, yeah – she had the skills to do so! (I can’t afford to pay her though – and it would be a lot of work, though 1050 pages in the all-in-one-edition! – a lot to ask someone to take on spec. I put out a bleg on Linkedin a while ago, about a German publisher – no response. May as well try an Insta-bleg as any other.

  5. […]  Any Questions? There will be a quiz next week . . . and there are a couple of discussion threads about this, here and here. […]

  6. Sarah Avatar
    Sarah

    I don’t see why they wouldn’t work on spec. And now that both Amazon and Smashwords, and soon Kobo will be in Germany, I don’t see why you need a German PUBLISHER except for the paper book, which you’re more likely to get if you are already selling madly in ebooks there.

  7. Sgt. Mom Avatar

    Since Amazon is almost universal, I could set up a German edition through LSI anyway. Seriously, I thought it over, during dinner, and I would do a 50/50 split on the profits from a German language e-book/print version, with anyone willing to work on spec. They’d also have to do any translating as regards publicity, I’m afraid.Nothing ventured, nothing gained!

    It’s been a good few years – ever since since the Brief fell off the Insty/PJ Media event horizon – that any of them paid attention to an email bleg from me. You want to have a go at a bleg on my behalf? I’d be grateful – although if there were several applicants, I’d have to have a test of skills, or even an elimination event, judged by some of my bilingual falns, in the event of anyone deciding they wanted to take a chance on it.

  8. Mark L Avatar
    Mark L

    Non-fiction is different from fiction in one important way — I can sell a book on a proposal and be pretty sure that if it is accepted, I have a deal.

    Also there seem to be more venues today for short (10K-25K word) non-fiction works than there are for short fiction.

    I have never had an agent. Sold all my stuff to small press or university press, which you can get to without an agent. (Although my way of schmoozing up to publishers is unique. I do a weekly book review for my local paper. Make a *lot* of contacts with publishers that way.)

    Can’t say I have made enough to live on writing, but have not needed to. Kept the day job as an engineer (and now as a senior tech writer). But I have made enough to put two sons through college.

    I suspect if I did need to write full time I could clear $30-40K or so annually, so plan to keep full-time author as a retirement career.