by john | Apr 26, 2016 | Business of publishing, Writing
Let’s be clear. I’ve never met Ros Barber, as far as I know and can recall. Since she’s an academic and poet living in England, I’m probably pretty safe saying we’ve never met, but there are these great things called airplanes that take people across the great big waters and there is a chance we’ve met and I just don’t remember it. But i really don’t think so. So I don’t know the lady. She’s probably a perfectly fine human being. I doubt she kicks puppies or takes away walkers from old people or tosses children’s ice cream cones on the ground or does anything generally despicable.
What she has done, as have many writers for The Guardian in the past, is written a clickbaity article decrying self-publishing as a viable career path for writers and generally insinuated that self-published writers are less talented, less skilled, and generally less writerly than other writers.
And people that are generally intelligent are taking her word as gospel, and that’s a shame. Because, like I said, these people are generally intelligent, but may have blinders on about some realities of the writing world today. So I decided to take a close look at Ms. Barber’s article and apply the filter of my own experiences to it. I don’t know if I’ll go point by point, because frankly, I may get bored and may have to go actually, you know, write at some point today, since that’s how I make my living and feed my family. I don’t have the backup of writing pissy articles for a website or teaching at a university to cover my living expenses, I have to do it through my fiction writing, unlike Ms. Barber.
Before I begin, I want to say this – self-publishing isn’t for everyone. For a lot of people it’s not the right choice for a variety of reasons. But to deride it as a viable career choice is frankly bullshit, and to make every self-published author out to be an unskilled writer with a lifestyle more akin to carnival barker than storyteller is unfair, uninformed, and makes you sound like an elitist assclown.
- “You Have to Forget Writing for a Living” – right out of the gate, Ms. Barber talks bout how much time is spent promoting a self-published book, or series of books. She jumps right into the deep end, talking about how self-pub writers spend 90% of their time on promotion, and only 10% of their time writing. Let’s look at my typical work day to provide an example of how much time in a day I spend on book promotion.
Wake Up – 7-8AM – I’m generally in front of my computer answering emails and eating breakfast by eight each morning. I spend the hours from 8-10 usually goofing off on Facebook, answering emails, putting out fires either with books in production, projects coming up from Falstaff Books, or just watching cat videos.
Write – 10-11AM – I usually shoot for about an hour of actual writing each morning. That gets me 1,000 words on the page in the morning, and that’s pretty decent.
More email/Facebook – 11AM-Noon – also frequently means editing something for Falstaff, doing a cover design, working on a book layout, working on a calendar of releases, confirming travel details, whatever.
Lunch – Noon-1PM – Suzy and I try to have lunch together, and I try to stop staring at the computer screen for an hour.
1PM – 2PM – Answer emails, finish up pre-lunch business
2PM – 3PM – Write – the goal is to get another 1,000 words in after lunch.
3PM – 5PM – Edit, work on covers, check in with my partners at Falstaff about their ongoing and upcoming projects, help Suzy lift a few heavy things out in the yard, maybe do a little prep work for a convention if there’s one coming up that weekend. Make sure I have inventory ready for upcoming conventions, and start looking at/booking conventions for 2017. We’ll call that 30 minutes of convention work “promotion.”
5PM – 6PM – Read for revisions and sometimes in the evenings I try to get another 1,000 words in.
I honestly spend perhaps half an hour each day on real promotion of my work, plus an hour on weekends setting up social media posts for the week. That equates to roughly 3.5 hours out of the let’s call it 50 hours each week that I work. That’s about 7% of my time spent promoting.
I try to write for two hours each day, and some days I get an extra hour, so we’ll guess that I write for about 12 out of the 50 hours I work. That’s 24% of my time spent writing.
What happens to the other 69% of my time? Well, 3-4 hours each day are spent working on one of three businesses I run – a publishing company, a lighting sales rep company, and a Magic card sales company. And I watch a lot of cat videos on the internet. So just like at your job, not everything I do in a day results in words on a page. Sometimes I write long blog posts.
2. “Self-Publishing can make you act like a fool” – So can being hired to write for The Guardian. Yes, lots of people behave like jackasses on social media. Let me introduce to a gentleman named Rob Gronkowski. Moving on.
3. “Gatekeepers are saving you from your own ego” – I had a lot of snarky responses about saving me from the ego of PhDs with accents, but deleted them because that’s not where I want to go. Let’s just say that agents and acquisitions editors are not the arbiters of taste or quality writing. They are looking to buy books that sell, not necessarily books that are brilliantly written. So the gatekeepers that will save you from your own ego? We call those readers. And if they don’t like a book, they won’t buy it. Or worse, they will, and they’ll leave savage reviews everywhere to save other readers from their pain. So yes, gatekeepers will save you from yourself, but not the gatekeepers you think.
4. “Good writers become good because they undertake an apprenticeship. Serving your apprenticeship is important. – In some ways I actually agree with this, although not at all with the feudalist in which it is phrased. You do need to learn to write before you self-publish a novel. And you can best learn to write by writing a lot of terrible shit that is unworthy of publication. And some of us do that by blogging for half a decade and writing 400+ semi-journalistic poker articles before we branch out into fiction. Some people just write a good book the first time. You don’t get to decide who’s good enough, or educated enough, or talented enough – the readers do. This is the core educational elitism that i take issue with. Just because you’re an award-winning poet with a PhD doesn’t mean you’re qualified to judge anything about my self-published work. I’m an award-winning poet with the word “Publisher” behind my name on my business cards, and I still don’t get to tell you anything more about the works of Christoper Marlowe than you get to tell me about computerized theatrical lighting control systems (unless you’re also an expert on those, which it doesn’t mention in your bio).
5. You can forget Hay Festival and the Booker – so can every genre fiction writer in the world. Stephen King and George R.R. Martin give not a single fuck about those prizes. And frankly, Pat Conroy did pretty well writing literary fiction without ever winning any of those awards. So write what you want, and fuck awards.
6. You risk looking like an amateur – only to elitist assclowns. Readers who see me at a table with Faith Hunter, Gail Martin, David Coe, A.J. Hartley or any of my other traditionally published friends can’t tell the difference between my self-published paperbacks and their traditionally published paperbacks. The only people who give a shit are writers, and mostly wannabe writers.
7. “70% of Nothing is Nothing” – True. You might not make any money as a self-published author. You might lay out a grand to get your book edited, get a decent cover, get it proofed and converted, and then maybe make less than a thousand dollars off the book. You might also get a $5,000 per book advance from a traditional publisher, give 15% of that to your agent, get your book published and on the shelves in local bookstores, then not sell worth a fuck and get dropped from your contract before book 3 in the series comes out. Then you’ve got $4,250 per book, a series you can’t finish, and years of your life you can’t get back when you could have been writing something else.
Or you could bust your ass and make a living. I do. I don’t make a glamorous living. I’m not living in a mansion, but I make my mortgage payments. I don’t drive a Mercedes, but my truck will be paid off this year. I don’t eat caviar, but I don’t miss any meals, either. So if you want it, it’s out there. But you have to want it. And you have to be willing to work harder than anyone else, because that’s what small business owners do. And if you don’t look at your writing career as being a small business owner, then you’re not ready to have a writing career, no matter how you plan to publish.
Writing is hard. Writing novels is hard. Selling books is hard, and anybody that tells you they’ve got a silver bullet for you is a fucking liar, and keep your hand on your wallet while you talk to them. But don’t shit on anybody else’s dream just because you can’t make a living at this. Don’t spout your barely-researched half-“truths” because you wanted to write poetry and literary fiction, but you were too scared to take the leap, so you got a job teaching “to fall back on.”
If you want to be a writer, be a fucking writer. if you want to encourage people to choose a career path you love, go for it. But don’t look in from the outside with no experience and tell the world that one path is the wrong path just because you’re afraid of looking stupid and trying it. If you don’t have to guts to jump, don’t stand at the bottom of the high dive platform and tell everyone on the ladder they’re stupid. Buy a ticket, sit in the stands, and applaud the bravery of others. Or suck it up and jump in the pool.
Rant over.
John G. Hartness is a teller of tales, a righter of wrong, defender of ladies’ virtues, and some people call him Maurice, for he speaks of the pompatus of love. He is also the author of the EPIC-Award-winning series The Black Knight Chronicles from Bell Bridge Books, the Bubba the Monster Hunter series of short stories and novellas, the Quincy Harker, Demon Hunter novella series, and the creator and co-editor of the Big Bad anthology series, among other projects.
In 2016, John teamed up with a pair of other publishing industry ne’er-do-wells and founded Falstaff Books, a small press dedicated to publishing the best of genre fictions “misfit toys.”
In his copious free time John enjoys long walks on the beach, rescuing kittens from trees and playing Magic: the Gathering.
For samples of John’s ridiculous sense of humor, check out these free ebooks – http://bit.ly/1U8eASF
by john | May 21, 2015 | Business of publishing, Writing
So last week I might have pissed a few people off and maybe opened a few eyes when I listed Five Reasons You Won’t Make it as a Writer. In reality, there are a lot more, including just sheer bad luck, but those five are a good place to start. So this week I figured I’d keep the ball rolling and be a dick about self-publishing on the interwebs. And it’s one word, regardless of what my goddamn autocorrect says.
Now before any of the Disciples of the Church of Konrath’s Beard get all up in arms and storm my house with pitchforks (and seriously kids, I’m a redneck – do not bring a pitchfork to a gunfight. It will fuck up your whole day), let me remind you that I started off self-publishing and continue to self-publish to this day. So I don’t have anything against self-publishing. I plan to continue self-pubbing as a part of my career path until it is no longer viable, which I hope is never. I enjoy a lot of the parts of self-publishing, including the vaunted “control” that self-published authors talk about all the time.
SIDE NOTE – I am not an “indie” author. I am a motherfucking self-published writer. I don’t wear horn-rimmed glasses and skinny jeans. I’m only ironic accidentally, and I don’t ride a fixed-speed bike. I’m not fucking trendy enough to be “indie.” I’m the biggest goddamn sellout you’ve ever met. Anybody in the world wants to write me a check with the appropriate number of zeroes, and I’ll stop self-publishing tomorrow. I have a wife, two cats, a stupid dog and my own fat ass to feed, so my hipster artistic integrity rode off into the sunset before we even started worrying about the Y2K issue. I don’t call myself an author, because I’m a working writer. I throw poop at the page every day and pray some of it sticks. I don’t sit around drinking wine with my pinky extended and discussing Shakespeare. When I discuss Shakespeare, it’s over beer or vodka. I’m self-published and I own that shit. If you want to crow about the control, don’t be fucking ashamed of the label. Own it, with the shitty history of AuthorHouse and every other goddamn thing that comes with it. /RANT
So what am I bitching about now? I’m bitching about the fact that you are making me look bad. I can do that perfectly well on my very fucking own, I don’t need any help from you. So here are some things to fucking stop doing, so you’ll fucking stop making me and the rest of the self-published world look bad.
1) Get your shit edited – I know, I know. It’s expensive. It takes a long time. It’s fucking hard. Wah-wah-wah, my rectum bleeds just fucking listening to you. You can’t write well enough to edit yourself. No one can. I don’t edit myself, Neil Gaiman doesn’t edit himself, Pat Rothfuss doesn’t edit himself, Brandon Sanderson doesn’t edit himself. And you’re not as good as they are. I’m nowhere near as good as they are. I fuck up dialogue tags all the goddamn time. So I pay somebody to fix that shit for me. And she also asks me awesome questions about things that don’t make sense. Because sometimes what’s in my head doesn’t all make it onto the page. And with apologies to a dear friend of mine – YOU MAY NOT HAVE YOUR SHIT EDITED BY A SIBLING, SPOUSE, PARENT OR ANYONE YOU SHARE DNA WITH OR ROUTINELY SWAP FLUIDS WITH. I don’t give a fuck how tough you say your wife is on you, she’s not going to be as tough as somebody who YOU’RE NOT FUCKING. Because she knows you, your husband knows you, there is a set of shortcuts in their understanding of everything you say and do that a stranger LIKE YOUR FUCKING READER doesn’t have. Something that may be crystal clear to the man you’ve banged for the last fifteen years may not make any fucking sense to a reader picking your book up for the first time. Because they don’t know that a fibbertygibbet is your made-up word for a Colt 1911 .45 semi-automatic handgun. And that’s going to matter to a reader. So get your shit edited. It can be a friend. But it cannot be someone who you’ve ever fucked or who you are related to. And we’re not going to discuss the states in which those may be the same people. This isn’t that blog.
2) Learn to lay out your fucking pages – I fucked this up when I published the first edition of The Chosen, and it was Allan Gilbreath who called me on it. I printed the book like it was a blog, with a blank line between paragraphs instead of running them together and indenting shit. You know, the way fucking books look. So I had a book that looked like a printed blog. And my page numbers were jacked up. And my headers and footers were bad. About the only thing I did right with the print edition of that book was I picked a decent font. You can’t go too far wrong with Times New Roman, although there’s apparently a backlash now against Times. So used Garamond. But pick a nice serif font, something that looks classic and clean. A perfect example of this was a book from a couple of guys I met last week. They have a nice looking product, awesome cover, but their typesetting looks like a blog. It doesn’t look like a book that Pyr or Baen or Tor or Roc published. And that’s the point – if you think you’re good enough to compete with the big boys, you’d better present as well as the big boys. And if you don’t think you can run with those big dogs, keep your ass on the porch. If you want to see an example of a self-published book that looks as good as or better than most NY-pubbed books today, go get Matthew Saunders’ new book Daughters of Shadow and Blood Book I: Yasamin. Order the paperback, and you’ll see what an amazing job Matthew did with the layout, the back cover, the front cover, the spine, the whole fucking thing. That’s my current gold standard for what a self-published book should look like. My shit’s not as good as this, but I have a little bit of a following, and they all know I’m a drunk, so I get a little bit of a pass.
3) Get a better cover – For fuck’s sake why am I even still talking about this in 2015? Covers are easy, they’re cheap, and they look good. The covers I got for the Quincy Harker series look awesome, and I paid under $100 for the pair of them. Spend the time to get a good cover done professionally. Here’s the first cover I did for The Chosen.
Now in defense of the artist, this is exactly what I asked her to create for me. It references a specific item in the story, Lucypher’s keychain with an apple on it. It also says not a goddamn thing about the book and doesn’t look anything like a fantasy novel.
This is the revised cover. This has a lot more interesting elements, more engaging typestyle, and a lot of neat things going on there. There’s a fire, an apple, an angel – a lot of fantastical elements that draw a reader in.
One of these covers sells a hell of a lot better than the other. I’ll let you decide which one. No I fucking won’t, that’s the whole point! The second cover is obviously better, but some of you are still putting out half-assed covers. It drives me nuts and drags me down by association.
4) Get better back cover matter – If I read another self-pubbed back cover that tells me everything about the character and their backstory then tells me how much I’ll love the book, I’m going to fucking vomit. Have none of you ever gone to a bookstore and read the back cover material on a book? What the fuck? Do you think this shit just materializes from the word fairies? That they just sprinkle this shit all over the shelves and descriptions appear? Go read back cover copy! Rip off the best ones! Every fucking body else is doing it, why should you be the special goddamn snowflake that has to write some Pulitzer-winning bullshit for the back of their book?
Do you write horror? Read the back cover of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door. Do you write fantasy? Read the back of some awesome fantasy books. Do you write romance? I got nothing for you. Duh! Read the back of romance novels. But don’t give me this bloated, hyper-descriptive shitball of a back cover with eighteen paragraphs in 8-point Helvetica telling me the entire prologue that you wanted to write but didn’t because some other dickhead on some other blog said that prologues are out this season, like skinny jeans and floral prints.
5) WRITE BETTER – Seriously, goddammit, work on your fucking craft. If I read another opening page that’s a dream sequence I swear to Jebus I’m gonna wipe my ass with it. Don’t tell me every fucking thing about your character’s morning ritual. I don’t give a shit how many squares of TP she uses to wipe after she pisses. I don’t care about how she scratches Mr. Pibbles, her Maine Coon Cat behind the ears as she passes him on the way from taking a piss to putting on clean undies. I care about the fucking zombies coming up the fucking stairs. Get to the point. Tell me the story, no bloat.
And show me the action. Show me the relationships. Do not tell me that your main character loves his sister, even though he picks on her all the time. Build the fucking characters. Show me through their actions, expressions and dialogue that they love each other. You spent so much fucking time describing the wallpaper in the shitter, but you won’t take three paragraphs to develop the character? That tells me you haven’t learned what’s important to the story yet.
Avoiding passive voice is a given. Adverbs weaken your writing is a cliche because it’s true. Avoid filter words is a maxim because it’s something everybody needs to remember. Show me, don’t tell me runs off the lips of every editor because it’s the truth. Polish your craft. Work on getting better every single day. I spent four years and over four thousand articles writing about internet poker before I moved to fiction.
Between five years of blogging almost daily and four years of poker writing, I worked my way through a million shitty words before I ever started work on The Chosen. And I’ve still got a lot shit I work on in my writing. But I’m working on it. Everything I write this year is better than anything I wrote last year, because I’m writing all the time. I’m reading all the time. I’m working on my craft. If you’re not willing to do the same thing, get the fuck out of my profession.
I fuck off a lot. I make wisecracks, joke around a lot, but there is one thing I am deadly serious about – my craft. Do not come in here thinking you’re the next fucking Hemingway and you don’t need to work to get better. Because I’ve got over forty titles out, I’ve sold over 50,000 books since I started this journey five years ago, and I still have a loooong way to go. I’m nowhere near the best I can be, but I write the best I can each day. And I make sure that every single product I put out with my name on is the absolute best I can make it. Because that’s all you get in this world – your name. Your reputation is what you make it, and so is your career. You might judge success differently than I do, and that’s fine. But there are benchmarks for quality, and if you can’t hit those benchmarks for quality – don’t hit “publish.”
But if you’re willing to work hard, and you’re honestly ready to bust your ass and get things done, then jump on. Let’s ride.
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