Adventures in Publishing
There was a time when one typed up a manuscript and spent a stupid amount of postage to get it copyrighted, because everything had to be done on paper then. Then you would spend a stupid amount of money on postage again, each time you sent it to a new prospective publisher. Agents weren’t something a writer had, you just sent your query directly to the publisher, and hope that they asked to see more of it. Very frequently that request might hinge on how many short stories you had sold to major trade magazines.
Then you would send your book to the publisher, and hope for the best. Months might go by, during which time you were unable to send the book to anyone else. If you got a deal, you might get a nice advance that would allow you to keep the lights and phone connected and pay for food while you wrote the next one.
None of that is true anymore.
Now the periodicals are gone, and I mean gone gone. There are a few online still, but nothing on paper. It’s not like the old days of Analog, Galaxy, and Worlds of If, when everything was on paper, and people had bookshelves full of them in their homes, as I did. How I loved them! A friend of mine from high school gave me about a hundred or so of them, and I dearly loved each edition, and read them all cover to cover.
But now, there is no bellweather like periodicals to tell a publisher that you’re worth a nod. Well, there sort of is, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Instead, there are agents, who do the slush pile reading that the publishers used to do. All new writers yearn for representation, because getting an agent is now pretty much the only way into being traditionally published, and the number of available writers compared to the number of agents is badly skewed against us. Getting an agent is roughly like winning the lottery, and it really doesn’t depend on how good you are as a writer.
What does matter is what’s trending right now in the fiction publishing marketplace, and there’s no way to write to the current trend unless you are (a) an insanely fast writer, and (b) can write well enough at that speed to be worth reading. Most people aren’t. Seanan Macquire, Kevin J. Anderson and John Scalzi all are. Alas, I am not John Scalzi, nor do I have his reputation, and in fact few have heard of me as an author or otherwise.
So what’s a newly minted writer to do?
If you decide to forego traditional publishing and just raw dog it, you suddenly find yourself responsible for:
- Designing your own cover, or finding someone who can. There’s no excuse for a bad one. There are people on Fiverr who can help you, at least do that much.
- Designing your own layout, or finding someone who can. There’s a learning curve, but it’s also an art, and the more attention you pay to this the nicer the experience will be for people who bought your book.
- Getting your book professionally edited. You are not getting your book press ready without at least a line editor, preferably a t least a copy editor as well, and sometimes a developmental editor. This typically costs thousands of dollars, so its little wonder that self published books frequently do without some or all of these levels of editing.
- Hitting social media like a spastic bongo player, on all channels, every single day. Every. Single. Day.
- Finding opportunities to promote your book to get review readers, on Goodreads, and StoryOrigin, and Bookfunnel, all of which costs money you probably haven’t got.
- Wading through hundreds of instant messages a week, trying to sort the genuinely interested from the ones trying to sell you author’s services (pro-tip, the radio is 8:1 against).
- Expanding your book’s universe by writing additional stories set in that world, so you can give them away as freebies to help hook people on the idea of buying your book.
And now, here’s the terrible secret
Except for the cover design, interior design and editing, you would have been responsible for everything else if you had been traditionally published anyway.
Only a very rare few are lucky enough to be able to self publish and have all the necessary skills to backfill all of these publishing tasks, plus all the marketing. I’m apparently one of them, and I am white-knuckling this whole process. I am so new that I have no clear idea what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes a video will go viral. Other times, TikTok will decide it simply does not like you.
I wish I could tell you some secret sauce that would make all this pain go away so that your book will sell thousands of copies a year. I can’t. Not only don’t I know how it works, apparently the path is a little different for every single author. The one common thread in every case study I’ve made is that the author had mad technical skills when it comes to making marketing content, and a sort of a bonzai, take no prisoners attitude.
Personally, I am going after this stuff with a warhammer. I just absolutely refuse to admit to myself that I could fail at this, and every day I push myself to see if I can find some new thing I ought to have known should have been working to fix months ago, but didn’t know anything about. It’s a good thing I’m retired, because this is turning out to be a full time job.
And yet, hope survives
And yet I am hopeful. Getting the word out has been ridiculously hard. I have no idea how other authors do it. Other fantasy authors have 60,000 reviews per title on Amazon, and I am not kidding about this at all. I have five, on Goodreads as I write this. But the five I do have are very good quality. What I lack in numbers, I have in sincerity. People who have actually read the book are genuinely happy to have read it, and say so.
There are glimmers of sunshine.
A significant Hollywood production company has requested a copy of the book. They make animated features. I can’t say which one, because I’d look pretty silly in public if it didn’t happen (and it probably won’t, the odds are not in my favor on this).
One Hugo and Nebula award nominated author loves my book, and has said so in public in his review of it. A Hugo grandmaster is reading it now. I’m hoping to get more of these sorts of endorsements.
Keep Moving Forward
And now, there’s nothing left but to keep moving forward.
I have new giveaways in the offing, and you’ll read about them here before I post about them anywhere else.
Thanks for sticking with me.
Gene Turnbow