What it means to write alone today
Money and Art
In ‘The Well-Known Author and the Crank’ I looked at the writer who can’t get his tales published for money, and at how his means of self-publishing have changed in the past few years. So now a writer can put out his tales, at no cost to himself, where millions can find and read them.
This crank, or ‘Zack’ as I name him, never wrote for fame or fortune. He wrote because he had to, for his own ears. On the far end of the scape the commercial writer, the well-known author, or ‘Andrew’ as I name him, wrote on the whole for fame and fortune, or else he found a style and type of tale that he liked as much as his editors and readers did.
Now, few of us run to either far end of this scale. Most of us have some Andrew in us and some Zack in us as well. We want to tell the tales that please us, and we’d sure like to earn our bread at the same time, and we want praise and fame as well.
In one way, these are the talesmen who get hurt the most by the mills of today’s publishing industry. Their tales don’t sell enough to free them from having to work other jobs. Some of their tales and some don’t, and they find it pains them when a tale doesn’t sell. Some of them find early success and they can’t build it up, as today’s publishing corporations demand. Or they find their tales get caught in the thresher of diminishing returns, where a second book is only printed in the same number that the first book sold; the second book sells a percentage of its print run, and the third book is printed in the same number that the second book sold — a smaller number than the first — and so on down toward zero. Other talesmen write without selling for years and don’t know what else to do but try another tale, read books on how to sell, go to conferences and workshops, and beat their heads against a brick wall.
Those who fall closer to Andrew’s end of the scale can only go on in this way, and work and try and hope that some day they’ll break into the tenth of the scale of well-known authors who support themselves on tales alone. Or they settle into being known in a small part of the field, they take jobs teaching writing, and carry on with lesser hopes. Or they run out of patience and give up telling tales, maybe not all at once and maybe never in so many words. But the time they give to their writing shrinks from year to year, and the interval between ‘The End’ grows longer and longer until they find they’ve been working on one tale for 30 years, and they’ll go on tinkering with it and adding to it now and then, with false hope, and without admitting that it has turned into a hobby.
These writers can’t give their works away. If they did, then they’d fear it means their works are worthless. And it would take value from the works that they had sold and yet hoped to sell. And they’d fear that publishers would give up on them if they turned to self-publishing, which the industry as a whole scorns as ‘vanity press’ and unreadable trash, and proof of the lack of talent in a writer.
The Free World and the Paid Have Different Problems
But the writers who run more to Zack’s end of the scale find that being read (or just being able to be read) tempts them more than the fear of not selling. They will turn more and more to the free and open trade of talesmen.
These writers then face 2 problems:
- They are unknown
- Their work is unknown
(These are not problems for the true Zack, who doesn’t care if he’s known or not, or if his work goes unread.)
The pack of free tales put forth on the internet is already huge, and it grows each day. So-called ‘pirated’ texts, samizdat editions of commercial books offered for free against the many copyright laws, are also out there in great numbers.
The first problem this talesmen faces is getting his name to stand out enough so that people will want to read his tales at all. This is a question of marketing and I won’t go into any more on it here.
The second problem is that his work, the tales themselves, do not stand out. This is a problem of talesmanship.
The way to stand out in commercial fiction is to write like other writers who have sold. But the way to stand out in free fiction is to write unlike all the writers who have sold.
The first problems a would-be Andrew faces are all bound up with the gate-keepers of the world of professional publishing. Agents, editors, book sellers, reviewers, all choose to take or reject authors as business decisions. To them each ‘Yes I’ll pitch your tale,’ means ‘I think your tale will make money.’ The way they make up their minds about this is, they put a tale side by side with the tales that have sold in the past. A tale that is more like a big seller seems more likely to sell well on its own. But a tale that is far from the big sellers is a risk and nought but a risk. Rich companies with fat profit margins and loads of cash to burn can afford to take risks. Lean companies with thin margins and down-sized staff have to hope to put out a big seller with every title they offer. They have to build up the odds that each title they put out has the greatest likelihood of being a big seller. This applies to agents, editors, and book sellers. And there are few rich, fat companies with money to burn in the book business today. So if a writer wants his work to sell, he has to make it run as close as he can to what has sold in the past, and then tell the tale so well it will be bought.
This notion turns upside down in the free world. In the free world, the tales that echo the commercial hits only offer readers more of the same but with lower quality or some flaw, for if the quality were higher, it would have sold commercially; and right now the commercial publishing world is where all of us but the true Zacks would go as our first choice.
Here is where the ‘talesman’s voice’ comes to the fore. You have to seek out the part of your soul that runs away from the pack. You have to feed that part and let it grow until it takes over your tales. This is what will make your tales stand out like no others. This is what will make your name stand for something that no other writer’s name can match.
(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, February 24, 2008)
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