I’m not talking about would-be writers who haunt workshops, conventions, and online forums; usually while talking about the writing they are doing, or about to do, or have set aside for a little while so they could commune with their Inner Genius some more.
Today’s hint-o-madness concerns the people who actually, day in and day out, sit down and pull text out of their brains. Then they hone these words and try to sell them, or flog them off to an editor or marketer who will use them to sell other things. Whether vocation or hobby, the act of writing is distinctly masochistic. Just think about it for a moment: whether someone writes fiction or nonfiction, they go through the same hurdles.
Researching enough for CYA without getting sucked into the research. (CNN axed its entire investigative journalism corps. The ‘news’ media has outsourced most of the little fact-checking it still does. Many, many writers work in this freelance field, and they have to balance Truth with Time every day.)
Once written, those words must find a home, and enough eyeballs to validate existence – i.e. Readers! This means queries and networking, book proposals and blog platforms. The romantic image of the solitary writer banging away on a keyboard, connected to the world only by an agent and/or publisher – is fiction itself. It rarely happened Back In The Day. Writers in 2013 generally have to be a lot more connected through social media and online professional communities. (Even hermits like me.)
I saw a literary agent’s answer to a potential non-fiction author client recently. The agent quoted Jack Canfield: “A book is like an iceberg: Writing is 10%; marketing is 90%.” The agent then went on to tell the author: “Write the best books you can. Only books that fulfill their promise succeed. Produce as much as you can without diminishing quality. Test-market your books, online and off, in as many ways as you can to prove they work, including a blog, videos, podcasts, a website, talks, teaching, articles, self-publishing, and media interviews. Build your platform–your continuing visibility with potential buyers, online and off, on the subject of your books or the kind of books you’re writing. Crowdsource your success by building win-win relationships with engaged communities of people who want to help you, because they know, like, and trust you: writers, fans, mentors, techies, bloggers and other media people, reviewers, booksellers, and key people in your field. Readers want to be part of your community.”
Useful and realistic goals, but I’m left wondering how much of that 90% marketing was going to be done by the agent – or by the author. And how was that agent’s 15% commission going to be earned, if the author had done most of the heavy promotional work?
Some naysayers use this problem to illustrate how literary agents are not necessary for some writers. I know too many self-published and vanity-published authors who have since learned that marketing efforts can take up far more of their time than actually writing. And most of the successful authors I talked to, or read about, say that writing more books is the single best marketing plan they have. Having an agent can still often be worth that 15%; at least they can market one book while the author is writing the next.
So, here we have twitchy creative types having to learn how to be salespeople and marketers, while remaining creative. How is it that we do not manifest crazy, at a greater proportion than the general populace?
A forum thread on AbsoluteWrite.com asked recently ‘what is normal for writers?’ Hilarity ensued, with just enough rueful admissions to soothe the original poster. A comment from Benluby on AW adequately sums up most writers’ association with normality: “Sorry. We’re writers. We’re usually the walking epitome of split personality syndrome, with dozens of characters running about throwing our shit out the window and peeing in the cooler. If normal shows up, they typically duct tape him to the brain stem and tell him if he utters a word they’ll castrate him with a pencil.”
Want more? Take a side trip to the Making Light blog and the entry: ‘Varieties of insanity known to affect authors’ :
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004307.html
Elizabeth Bear is a Big Name in science fiction and fantasy. She’s won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, multiple Hugo Awards, and she’s taught the craft of writing sf&f at the Viable Paradise Workshop and the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop. But back in 2003, she observed: “At some point approximately halfway through the MS, every book is unfinishable. And at about 5/6th of the way through, it’s suddenly the worst tripe ever written.”
Yep. That, my friends, is a writer.
Good article!! I liked that a lot.