Disappointment is the Lot of Writers

One might say it's their own fault. They're chasing an (almost) impossible dream; a dream of earning a living while staying home in their pajamas and working at something they love. However, if they had their wits about them, and did even a little research, they would know that it's easier to get to heaven, notwithstanding the odds that many are called, but few are chosen, than getting published and/or making money as a writer. One in a thousand aspiring writers get offered a book deal, and then, only three or four years later, half of them are back on the street, with nine out of ten of them out of the business within a decade. And even with a contract, few of authors ever make a living from their writing. Things may be a little grimmer in indie publishing. Most of the traditionally published authors received some sort of an advance - money for their work - and occasionally, royalties. Indie publishers, on the other hand, need to finance their own books, which, if they are chumps, and sadly, many of them are, this can costs hundreds to thousands of dollars. Dollars they'll never likely to see again.

One could also say that it's the fault of their attitude as well, though I suppose one can't blame them for having it, since that attitude is very pervasive. That attitude being that the distinction between good, professional work, and bad, amateur work, is signaled by the price the product commands. In the case of authors, a professional author not only expects to be paid for their work, but actually expects to sell some books at the price they set. Amateurs, on the other hand are not good enough to charge for their work, so they should not expect to sell it. Thus, those who do not charge for their work, do so because it's not good enough to command anything more. I, of course, do not accept this definition, I have my own definition of being an amateur, so I can live the life of an amateur without misgivings. It has saved me from a lot of disappointment, and more than that, between sales and a lack of concern about sales, I've had fun writing all my life.

In addition, professionalism not withstanding, almost every writer I know believes that they are, in fact, due compensation for all the work, the creativity, and the artistic merit they've put into crafting their stories, as well as for the entertainment their work provides for readers. The flaw in this attitude is that, unless they have a publishing deal with a publisher, no one asked them to write their stories, and thus, no one owes them anything for doing it. If they're chumps enough to believe they can make money writing fiction, they have only themselves to blame if they don't. 

Of course, they can ask for money, and yes, it is fair to ask for some sort of compensation for the entertainment value their book provides. However, it will be total sales, not the price the writer values his work at, which determines the actual value of their effort as a commercial product in the marketplace.

This, the dollars, turns out to be one of the great sources of disappointment for artist of any sort with commercial ambitions. Indie publishing is a rotten business, one with astounding failure rates. Still, hope springs eternal. I've seen a chart that shows from 2020 to 2024 about 100,000 ebooks per month were uploaded to Amazon, but since then, the number has risen to over 300,000 ebooks per month, likely as a result of AI produced books. The readership, however, while avid, is not growing, so clearly, the overwhelming majority of ebooks will simply go unread, or if lucky, barely read, unless one already has a following of some sort. Thus, if an author choses to measure the value of their work in dollars - being a professional and all that - well, they're likely left with the mental gymnastics of convincing themselves that sales, or rather the lack of sales, is not, after all, the only yardstick of worth. There are other factors that can explain the lack of agreement between the professional nature of the product and its lack of sales.

And indeed, there are many, so it may be easy to reconcile commercial failure with artistic merit. Why, if no one ever comes across their book, how can its artistic worth be measured? But nevertheless, there is no denying that as a product it is, at least, a commercial failure, since money is the yardstick they automatically have adopted, as professionals, to measure success by. And so most books turn out to be... disappointments at some level.

For the life of my, I don't know why so many writers who are, with aforethought, producing a product to sell while looking (or not) at their oh, so very likely fate, stubbornly persist in choosing all but certain commercial failure and disappointment when they need not, if they would simply think outside the box.

Now, I should add here, that writing fiction is both an art and a commercial product. As a work of art, I can understand their attitude. As an artist, I felt that my best work was my most impressionist pieces, though even among people who like art enough to visit art galleries, in life and online, maybe only one or two in a hundred appreciated what I was doing. One of the reasons I stopped selling my art was that my more mundane, i.e. realistic, pieces sold better than my best work. It was discouraging that my so-so work was the stuff that was getting out into the world, but, alas, most people like realism. At least I didn't have to part ways with my best pieces. So I too, in a way, understand a writer standing by their work as art, even if it isn't a commercial success. But a book is so much more a commercial work than a painting is - it needs to be published and sold to be appreciated. Paintings can be sold as well, of course, but they just need to be viewed to be appreciated. 

Given all this, the questions I have for self publishing authors is this; does the fact that you ask for money, make you a professional writer? Does it take just one sale to validate this judgement?  Or do you need more? And if so, how many more sales are needed? How distinct is the line between professional and amateur?

I've been able to avoid disappointment as an amateur writer due to a mindset different than most writers. To begin with, I look upon ebooks differently than most. Because they are so ephemeral, merely insubstantial electronic files, I don't consider them really books at all. They're merely a medium that delivers a story. And because they can be endlessly duplicated at no cost, they have no economic value. Only the story they deliver has any value. And since I've been borrowing and reading books from a library all my life, I've never directly connected reading a story to buying a book. So it seems natural for me to offer my stories via a worthless medium for free. It costs me nothing to do so, and well, in my mind, reading a story is one of life's free entertainments.   

And then there is the fact that I like being an amateur writer. Because I enjoy the entire process of writing and publishing my work, I feel no need for anyone to pay me for doing it, so I ask no one to do so. I'm just having fun. By choosing to share, rather than sell my work, wherever possible, my work is much more easily accessible. And as a result, it has been read and enjoyed by a thousand readers, instead of only dozens which would've likely been the case if I had chosen to consider myself a "professional" and put a price on my work. I chose to measure artistic value without a dollar sign, and instead, use readership as my yardstick of success. I've never been disappointed by the results. And, as a bonus, I've enjoyed the freedom to write what I please, how I please. And, every once and a while, readers thank me for sharing my books for free, readers like Attie and Ruth.

"I am 81 years and in an oldage home. enjoyed his light hesrted whit. I live on the other side of earth. I am an Afrikaans speaking person. So there can be some small errors in my writing. Thank you and Bless you. Attie."

"loved all your books...deprecating heroes and wayward ladies! very grateful for free audiobooks as I am s pensioner Ruth gr South Africa.."

Sharing has its own rewards. So if disappointment is the lot of writers, it need not be. As I said, the best things in life are free.

Developmental Editors and Indie-Publishing

I'm going to say it up front. Publishing is a business. A very risky business. So if you're not certain that the revenue from the book you're publishing is likely to pay for a developmental editor, you should not hire one. A developmental editor's value, at least in indie-publishing, is minuscule. Developmental editors are the ones who go through stories and "suggest" what needs to be fixed to make it a "better" story.  Which may be helpful, but considering that they'll likely charge anywhere from $1,000 to more than $3,000 for their work, unless you already have a large established readership, you'll likely never see any return on that investment. This makes spending this sort of money on developmental and/or line editing without a booming self-publishing business, a very poor business decision. In my opinion. As I said, publishing is a very risky business, and investments in it need a thoughtful consideration of facts, not dreams. Any money spent, should be spent very prudently at the scale of expected sales.

Writing, unlike publishing, is an art. Stories are a work of art, created by their author(s). This work of art can be, and almost always is, turned into a product in the hope that it will sell. The job of the editors is use their expertise to re-shape a work of art into the most commercially appealing product possible. In traditional publishing a team of editors work on the cream of the manuscript crop, i.e. manuscripts culled from the thousands submitted to agents, vetted by the agents, and then selected by acquiring editors. Still, they only manage to produce one profitable product out of every three books they work on. And how much of that success might well be attributed to the book's promotional budget is an open question. This is not to say that editors are completely incompetent, it is simply very hard, even for professionals, to know what readers will like. Your own-edited, self-published book is as likely to succeed commercially as a professionally edited self-published book, i.e. statically very unlikely.

A "well edited" book is like a tree that falls in a forest. No one will ever know it is well edited, unless they somehow discover and read it. For this to happen,  thousands of impressions are needed just to get a potential reader to click on the cover, read the blurb, and perhaps, read a sample before buying it. Only if, or when, they get to the sample pages will editing ever have a chance to play a role in making a sale. Thus, money spent on getting the book seen is a far more effective way of making sales than thousands of dollars spent on editors.

Given how late in the sales process any effects of editing might have on influencing sales, there is no compelling case that it is needed at all. Your work, your vision, is just as likely to succeed as an editor's. You just never know what will click with whom.

These days, in traditional publishing, authors usually get only one chance to prove to their publisher that they're potentially a bestselling author. This is not the case in indie-publishing.

The beauty of indie-publishing is that, unlike traditional publishing, you have as many chances as you care to take in chasing commercial success. There's a very simple reason for this; on average, only several dozen to a hundred readers will ever buy and read most indie-published books, be they good or bad. A hundred readers out of a million potential readers gives you a lot of headroom to make mistakes and many chances to get better over time, without coming close to exhausting your potential readership. And the best way to get better is to write, publish, write and publish, again, and again, learning from your mistakes and any feedback you might get along the way. And then, when you reach the point where you can look back and find yourself embarrassed by your first book, you can unpublish it. In the meanwhile, you've been building a back catalog for readers to explore and buy, when the day arrives when your newest book sells more than a hundred copies. When you've made it.

Thus, it's indie-publishing's very long odds of commercial success that allows an author the freedom to write their story the way they want to write it, without compromises to conform to some "professional" editor's opinion. I strongly believe you shouldn't give up that artistic freedom. Who's to say that being different is any less effective than being a copy of last year's successful books? Fashion moves on.

Advocates of using editors often try to make authors feel that they are betraying readers and their fellow indie-authors if they don't get a "professional" editor to polish up their story. Never mind that anyone can set up shop as a "professional freelance editor." There are no bar exams for editors needed to pass in order to put out a professional editor shingle on the internet. Who knows what your "professional editor" knows about editing.

Advocates of professional editors will also point to popular authors who, they say, grew too big for editors and their books suffered for it. Authors like Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson are examples of whom they say produced bloated work as a result. What they don't mention is that while some readers might find this to be the case, there are likely as many or more readers who think those "bloated"  stories are wonderful just as they are. You can never please every reader, and shouldn't try. 

So don't be afraid. It's okay, indeed, desirable, to create your story, your way, no matter how quirky it might be. Remember the abysmal success rate of agents and editors in the traditional space. You really can't do worse by doing it your way. 

Now, by all means produce the best book you can. Get all the feedback on your story that you can from spouses, family, friends, critique partners, and beta readers if you have any doubts about your story. Produce as clean a copy as you can, using the built in spelling and grammar checks, as well as free, or paid (for a month) grammar checkers like Grammarly. But, whatever you do, keep your book uniquely yours. That's its greatest value. Don't let its uniqueness be eroded by someone's idea of making it more marketable. The numbers tell the story; editors have no magic to make a book better and there's no proof they make it more salable. Plus, when it comes to indie-publishing, it's a very different market, with different readers and reader priorities than traditionally published books. Thus,  hiring traditional publishing editors, and mimicking traditional publishing standards is almost certainly a recipe for missing the mark in indie-publishing.

I believe that authors should keep the "self" and "indie" in self-publishing and indie-publishing.

The inspiration for this post came from watching a small publisher/author's YouTube video several weeks ago. In his list of "lies authors tell themselves that will destroy their careers," he listed not hiring a professional developmental editor as one of them. It seems that we're too close to our work to see it's trash. Then last week, he posted another video, where he made the case even stronger - despite the fact that he doesn't feel the need for a developmental himself. (Is he telling himself a lie like the rest of us?) In any event, his advice seems to be a do as I say, not as I do. He then went on to say that cost of editing should be no excuse. Save up for years, if need be. No mention of the steep odds facing success in indie-publishing. And in this video he freely admitted that he was acting as a gatekeeper to keep the riffraff, the "bad" books out of the market - something a holy mission for him. He also admitted that he sees himself and his small press a traditional publisher, so his mission seems to be keeping indie writers out of publishing, or to bankrupt them as quickly as possible, should they take his advice and hire expensive editors. All of which struck me as pretty self-serving. I don't think it is in the best interest of aspiring indie authors to follow his advice, since he never addresses the sad truth of indie-publishing; that tens of thousand books are released every month and only a tiny fraction of them will sell a hundred copies or more. Most will lose most of the money the authors spend on publishing their books.

The Man behind the Curtain

How often, dear reader, do you pay attention to the "man behind the curtain," when reading a story? A story, like the Wizard of Oz, requires a man or woman behind a curtain to create the illusion. Often, but not always, the author behind the curtain wants to remain hidden behind the curtain, keeping the reader's attention on the story they are weaving. The best succeed in getting readers' hearts beating fast with excitement, skin crawling with creepy things, and shedding tears at the death of fictional characters. In short, making things real in the moment with words alone. If that isn't wizardry, I don't know what wizardry is. 

Of course the success of  this depends on how skillfully the author is and how engaged the reader is in the story's premise, but it is still a rather amazing accomplishment, when done. But the magic doesn't work on every reader, not completely, anyway.

I must admit I've never shed a tear while reading a book, or never got so wrapped up in a story that my heart raced or ever took a "scary" scene seriously. (Though I'm not a horror story reader, so that I don't tempt fate in this regard.) This is not to say that I don't get emotionally involved in a good story - though it takes a good story - but at some level, I think I'm always aware that I'm reading a story, not living it. I'm always aware of the author working behind the curtain, perhaps because I am one myself, and have been one most of my life. I don't think this distracts from my enjoyment of a well written story, it may even enhance it, but I am never entirely immersed in the premise of the story. So how does this being a writer reading a writer work?

On a basic level I would imagine most readers recognize certain story patterns as being artifacts of the style or fashion in fiction when it was written, but forget about them when reading the story. Take for example the opening scene in a lot of contemporary SF & fantasy books. These stories often immediately open with - without context - an action scene with lots of drama and violence. Sometimes its a prologue, and sometimes it's a scene out of story order which has to be walked back once the story really starts. But you see it all the time in contemporary fiction because it is thought to "hook" the reader - in the case of traditional published book, this reader is the prospective agent or editor - into reading the rest of the story. I, however, see starting a story by jumping immediately into some sort tense action as an artifact contemporary commercial storytelling. I see the writer behind the curtain writing it that way because they have been told that is what they need to do to hook an agent, an editor, or a reader. The same can be said, at least for me, for stories that jump around between multiple points of view - another popular motif these days. While many readers find this technique interesting, I can't help but see it as an artificial construction of the author to tell a story in a contemporary way. The popularity of these techniques gives them a level of invisibility to readers. But as someone who has, over the last decade, read various "how to" write advice pieces, (which I read far too late ever to take to heart) I've often encounter these prescribed patterns. Thus when I see them, they immediately bring the author out from behind the curtain for me. It's an "Ah-ha!" moment; they're doing this because it's what so-called experts, agents, or editors have advised them to do. I see the man behind the curtain pulling levers. This awareness of techniques - of authors manipulating the levers - often takes me at least a bit out of the story.

I'll use an actual example of this from the book, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Many readers of this book often cite it as one of their favorite books of all time. In it, one of the main characters dies. If you've seen the TV mini-series you know who. Many readers say that they are so sad that they shed tears over this incident, even if they had seen the series of TV. In my case, however, it just made me angry. Angry enough for me to stop reading the story at that point. So why did I react this way? Because it felt like a cheap trick by McMurtry designed to manipulate my emotions. I saw him as deliberately pulling levers to create an emotional response, which, I will readily admit is something authors regularly do, and readers expect. It may well be justified, and obviously works within this book for most readers. But you see, I'd made the mistake of reading the prequel novels,  Dead Man's Walk and Comanche Moon prior to reading Lonesome Dove, so that I did not see this death, and all the others in this story in isolation. I was painfully aware that in the prequel books (written after Lonesome Dove) McMurtry introduces a great many named characters, has them do stupid things, and then kills them off. It seems like nine out of ten named characters never make it out of one of these books alive. So I was well aware of his technique of introducing characters only to kill them off when I was reading Lonesome Dove. I could seem him at it once again in this story, killing off many minor characters along the way, just as he had in the prequels. And so it goes... But when he pulled this stunt on my favorite character in the books, it was a bridge too far. He had finally flogged that mule to death. It was clearly McMurtry who had killed him, not the native Americans in the story who did the deed within the story. McMurtry was no longer behind the curtain, and, like Dorothy and her friends, I was no longer impressed. The magic of storytelling was gone.

While this is the most dramatic example an author visible behind the curtain, I can cite other examples. Charles Finch in his The Last Passenger, inserted random explanations of this and that into his Victorian era mystery story, perhaps to recreate the timeframe, but which struck me as merely trying to impress the reader with his Wikipedia-sourced tidbits of Victorian life. In the fantasy book The Lefthanded Booksellers of London, it seemed that the author was using Ready Player One's formula of inserting all sorts of trivia from the culture of the time period into the story, I suppose to world-build, but struck me as just that; random trivia. Every time I encounter a handsome 6'3" square jawed hero I cringe. And all too often when sampling SF stories I see Star Trek or Firefly, or Star Wars lurking behind the story from which the author drew their inspirations from. In short, I am often struck by the things the authors do in writing their stories - especially in modern stories - that take me out of the story, or at least keeps me a arm's length of it.

And yet, seeing the author at work is not always bad. There are stories I read just to watch that little man behind the curtain do his or her stuff. Indeed many of my favorite authors and stories fall into this category. These are the books that I enjoy how they are written - how they pull the levers. I enjoy observing just how these authors put words together to tell their story as much or more than the story they are telling. These are writers I can read over and over again for their wordsmanship rather than the story, i.e. authors like my often mentioned favorites; P G Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Patrick O'Brian, and Jasper Fforde to name a few. When reading these stories, I can both admire the authors' skillful manipulation of these "levers" and still enjoy the stories they produce without any disconnect. Though even at this level, it is not always the case of me enjoying their magic. Gene Wolfe springs to mind. He is often held up to be one of the great American literary writers, whose style and depth of writing is admired, though less widely known because he wrote in genre fiction - SF & fantasy. In the one book of his I tried to read, I found his obvious manipulation of the levers of writing too self-pretentious, deliberately obscure, and too literary for my simple tastes.

So, to sum things up, it seems that I can't help but look on stories with the eyes of either a writer, or a critic. To some degree or another, I peek look behind the curtain. The question I have is the one I posed at the beginning of this piece; how do you read stories? Are you also aware of the author behind the curtain as you read the story? Or can you completely lose yourself in the story? Can the story be everything in the moment for you? Drop a line in the comments below to enlighten me. I am very curious about this.