Pulp Speed exemplar Dean Wesley Smith isn’t exactly bullish on oldpub’s long-term prospects.
Most writers who break into traditional publishing are done in two books. Maybe three if they are lucky. And when I say most, I would give a conservative guess of 95%, more than likely closer to 99%. A lot of writers are chewed up and spit out to get that one writer who sticks past three books. But even then, a ten or twenty book writer is often tossed aside if anything goes south along the way.
But that is impossible to tell an early-stage writer with the dream in their eyes of being a writer.
I can vouch for the futility of talking certain “aspiring authors” out of seeking approval from oldpub. I’ve also observed that there’s a high degree of overlap between oldpub Stockholm syndrome sufferers and people who flood the #amwriting hashtag with despondent tweets about how writing is nerve-racking emotional labor.
There is no long view in traditional publishing anymore. None.
When I first broke in back in 1987, there was a long view. You sold novels, they came out, you grew readers until you became a lead title of a line in a month, then if you could write bigger books, you “broke out” of the genre into bestseller numbers and you could live off your writing.
I lived off my writing back in those days from 1987 by being prolific, a slightly different path. I did not care about writing under my own name, and I wrote upwards of 18 novels in one year for seven different publishers under many pen names. I did that for over a decade, year in and year out. And I edited for New York and other companies as well.
But it is not possible to do that now. There were twenty or more major publishers when I broke in, now there are four. And a few mid-sized one that play as publishers.
There is also no loyalty now. When I came in, the editors and publishers were loyal to their authors. Now an author is nothing more than a number on a spread sheet and if the number doesn’t match what someone thinks it should be, that author is gone. That’s why they can fill the shelves these days with so many two-and-out authors.
Maintain no illusions. Oldpub is a meat grinder that sucks in hopeful authors and churns out pink slime. Best to avoid it.
With indie, you own all your own copyright for the life of the copyright and unlike traditional publishing thinking, books don’t spoil. You can keep the books out to readers for a long, long time, changing covers, redoing blurbs, marketing them.
In the same time as it will take an traditional writer to be pushed aside, try to write something new, and be dropped by their agent and realize they will never be published traditionally again (usually about 7 really brutal, dream-shattering years), an indie writer who just writes at a decent speed can be making decent money. Some might even be making a living.
And with indie, the money can just keep on coming in if you are smart.
But you are in control. That is a good thing for most of us, a bad thing for a few.
Who is newpub bad for?
- Writers who shy away from the business side of the business and “Just want to write.”
- Writers who think that marketing their work is somehow beneath them.
- Writers who value getting a pat on the head from self-appointed gatekeepers over earning a living.
