I meet a lot of people who want to be writers.
I also meet a lot of people who’ve written a few things and
would like to see them published.
And, I meet writers who’ve actually published a few things,
but feel lost on how to get anyone to read their work or, more importantly, how
to make money from their books.
For the next few articles I’ll be blogging about these
things, moving from the general to the specific.
First, the big, usually unspoken question that haunts many,
many authors: Am I a real writer?
I’ve never met a writer at any stage of their career that
wasn’t haunted by self-doubt. If you’ve never written a novel, you wonder how
you can possibly call yourself a writer when you haven’t produced a finished
manuscript. You can’t finish the novel unless you write it, but how can you
write it if you aren’t a real writer?
Or, you’ve written your novel. Maybe even a few novels. No
one outside your circle of friends has read them. You polish and polish, but
never feel like the book you’ve written is good enough to get sent out to a
publisher. A real writer would already have their manuscript in the mail,
right? (And, yes, I know that “in the mail” is something of an archaic phrase.
When I started in this business you still sent paper manuscripts via postage.)
So, maybe you’ve actually hit the “send” button and
submitted your manuscript to publishers, only to get silence and form letters
in return. Sure, you’ve strung together 80,000 words in a more or less coherent
fashion. But does that really make you a writer? If you’re not good enough to
interest an editor maybe you’re not good enough, period. You’ve seen horrible, unoriginal,
poorly written books make it into bookstores. What are you lacking? Why are
these hacks selling books and getting reviews on Amazon while you’re watching the
pages of your calendar fly away, movie style, as each unpublished year brings
you and your work closer to oblivion.
Then, success! You’ve published a book! And nobody reads it.
You have three friends who review it on Amazon, your sales ranking is a seven
digit number, and now, finally, you have the evidence to prove what you’ve
always secretly suspected: You’re no good at this. If you were any good at all,
word of mouth and positive reviews would have driven you to at least moderate
success. The silence that greets your book is the final nail in the coffin of
your dream of being a writer. You suck at this. Time to give up.
But, wait! You’ve actually had a few people buy your book.
You’ve got reviews from total strangers on Amazon. Some were glowing, some were
harsh. You’re a real writer! But, wow, you’re not selling nearly enough books
to be a real, real writer. You can’t break the top 10,000 on Amazon. Your name
has never been on a New York Times bestseller list. For that matter, you’ve
never been reviewed in any publication you actually read. No daytime TV shows
have invited you on. NPR hasn’t booked you for Fresh Air. Oprah’s people aren't speaking to your people, if you have people. When you tell people you’re a
writer you confront again and again the
reality that they’ve never heard of you or your book.
Then: Success! You actually do creep onto a bestseller list.
You’ve been interviewed by newspapers! You’ve talked about your book on the
radio! Your book is popular! For maybe two months. Then it’s forgotten, swept
aside by the deluge of new books demanding space and attention. To keep feeling
like a writer, you need a new book, but what if your last book was your best
book? What if lightning is never going to strike again? Good thing you didn’t
quit your day job. Sure, you’re a writer, but you just don’t have what it takes
to make a career out of it. Maybe you think your work is good, but you don’t
have the type of personality that you need to promote yourself aggressively.
You don’t have time to keep up with all the social media platforms. And you
wrote your first book because you believed in it. Now you think you can maybe
make a little money writing a sequel, but is it right to do it just for the
money? Doesn’t that make you a hack instead of a real writer?
I promise you that the most successful writer you’ve ever
heard of was haunted by these same self-doubts. Success only raises the bar. I’ve
met plenty of authors who had one giant bestseller twenty years ago. They’ve put
out a dozen other books since then, but it’s still that one book that everyone
talks about. All their hard work and
experience have never duplicated that first beloved hit, even though, by their own
judgment, some of their later books were better written. Maybe it wasn’t talent
or hard work or superior quality that made that early book break out. Maybe it
was just luck, the right book at the right time, and the same level of success
might never come again.
Self-doubt is an author’s most valuable asset. If you ever
vanquished it, you would have no need to ever learn anything new. You would
have no reason to work harder to improve your writing, and no reason to work on
any of the other skills you need to be a professional writer, the marketing,
the accounting, the networking, and the never-ending struggle to keep abreast
of a publishing world in constant turmoil.
The key is that this self-doubt needs to be matched with an
almost equal measure of self-confidence, even arrogance. You have to believe
that your words and your stories are important. You have to be able to read
your own books and think, wow, I love this author! I can’t wait to read more by
them! You have to be eager to encounter the potential reader who’s never heard
of you and who couldn’t care less about your book and explain why your book is
worth their time and energy.
Now some hard truth. The odds of making a really good living
as a fiction writer are kind of low. All art is difficult to make a living at,
in some ways because we undervalue art, but also because it’s not truly a rare
commodity. The month you’re ready to release your book to the world, 10,000
other writers are going to take their shot as well. It’s hard to rise above the
noise of so many voices crying for attention at once. On the plus side, the sheer
number of books in this world can be taken as a reassurance. People write books
all the time. You can too. This ain’t rocket surgery. It’s daydreaming, typing,
and a tiny measure of organizational skills. I promise you can write all the books
you’d like.
But if you are doing it to make money, sorry. Your odds of
making a living that can provide you not just food, clothing, and shelter, but
also healthcare and retirement funds are fairly low. But not everyone who can
play guitar is going to wind up a Nashville superstar. They can still play
songs they enjoy playing. And the fact that there are a million other people
with guitars who can play just as well or better is no reason to put the guitar
in the closet. The same is true with writing. I’ve written some books that have
sold well. I’ve written others that might has well have been printed in
invisible ink given how few people read them. In the end, though, the true
measure of a novelist is this: Are you writing books you enjoy reading? If you
are, you’re a writer. You are your most important audience.
And if you still hold out hope of making some money, I’ll
let you in on the secret. That can be done as well, but it’s not guaranteed and
it’s not easy. Still, the good news about those 10,000 other writers who
released their first book the same day you did is that 9,900 aren’t going to
write a second book. An even smaller number is going to write their tenth book.
With patience, persistence, hard work and, yes, a bit of luck, you can beat the
odds and make a reasonable income from writing.
In future posts, I’ll provide more specifics, and a path to
slog toward success. Until then, go write something!
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