Kameron Hurley
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2015
- Messages
- 101
Brian Turner suggested I stop by here with advice for aspiring writers, if I got a chance. And luckily I've had the opportunity to chew on some stuff recently that I think folks might find helpful as they wade through the wild and weird world of trying to make a living as an author.
I prepped for a talk at the Dayton Metro Library earlier this week, and joked with my spouse that the first question was going to be about self-publishing. Without fail, every talk or panel – whether it’s craft or business - has a self-publishing question, and they are generally the first question. This is a not a terrible thing; I’m a hybrid author myself, and have work published traditionally and through digital-only channels. But every time I talk about how writing and publishing are difficult, or how sometimes you have to spend ten or twenty years honing your craft, and even then, there’s no guarantee of success, someone pipes up with this idea that self-publishing is the solution to all of my woes.
Self-publishing will make you rich! Self-publishing means you have total control over your career! Self-publishing cures cancer! Self-publishing will bring world peace!
This is about the time I let them know, gently, that I do actually self-publish some of my work, and I make about enough every month on it to pay a utility bill.
The reality is that self-publishing isn’t much different than what I’m doing now: typing words onto a page, putting them up on an electronic forum, and watching the page views. Yes, in an ideal world, we get paid for typing, and that’s fabulous when it happens – when we’ve got a good story, when the pricing strategy is right, when we spend enough time on promotion, or when the magical Amazon algorithm decides, for a few months at least, that it likes us. I know self-published authors who count free downloads as sales, and count themselves huge successes using this metric. If I counted every page view as a sale, I’d put “millions of copies sold!” on the front of every writing collection.
Being an aspiring writer in the digital age can be very confusing, because you’re told everything is supposed to be so much easier now. There are all sorts of electronic forums for your work. There are easier ways to connect with readers and colleagues. It’s often touted as being so easy – for traditionally published authors whose first novel is a mega-hit, or self-published authors blessed by the algorithm – that if you aren’t selling loads of copies right out the gate or you get offered a $5,000 advance instead of $500,000 you feel like you’ve done something terribly wrong. You feel like you’re a failure.
After all, that’s all we see in the news, right? The successes. The outliers.
The truth is that these get-rich-quick publishing stories are not the norm. Not even close. Even worse, many of these get rich quick stories fail to give you the full history behind an author’s monetary success. I know one author lauded as an overnight self-publishing sensation who had actually written a book a year for twenty years, and spent an incredible amount of time on marketing, which was also their day job specialty. They didn’t just magically get up one morning, write a book, post it online, and make a million dollars. Most of those stories are myths.
I will give you this, though: your chances of making a million dollars writing novels is still greater than winning the lottery. So, that’s something.
One of the things I want to reassure writers coming up through the slog here in the digital age is that it’s OK for this to be difficult. It’s OK to spend twenty years honing your craft, piling up rejection slips. It’s OK to feel like you suck, and that everyone is better than you and you’ll never make it. It’s OK because all of these things are actually frightfully normal. They’re all just part of the process. Most of us get dispirited at some point in our careers. Even when you publish novels, the game isn’t over; you are always working on the next book, and the next, because one sale does not guarantee future sales.
So if you’re sitting out there right now, upset because your self-published book only sold 30 copies, or because you’ve got yet another rejection from a major magazine, I want to remind you that it’s OK. It’s part of the game. No one expects you to be an overnight success. The overnight success is a myth. The real story is hard work, and perseverance, and never giving up – even knowing that most writers will quit, that most stories are not read, that most “career writers” require a second income in order to make ends meet.
It doesn’t make you more or less of a writer, this long climb. It’s simply part of the process; it’s the long winding road, the journey to where you want to be, the dragons and dungeons and giant spiders on your own epic quest to being the writer you want to be.
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