Sharpening our expectations about publishing – Unsettling Futures - Issue #19
We're told not to expect success. How will that help?
This is a newsletter about science fiction and fantasy, so let me tell you a fantasy story.
To become a successful author in SFF, you start with short stories. You hone your craft, and you mail your manuscripts (complete with SASEs) to Fantasy & Science Fiction, to Asimov's, to OMNI, to SciFiction. You get rejection slips in return – maybe you save those in a filing cabinet folder, or on a nail next to your typewriter or word processor. You keep doing that until you get rejections with little hand-written notes from the editor – "Nice idea, but work on your pacing." "Not bad!" "Almost there!" and then eventually, you sell a story.
You sell more stories, and you write longer works. You build a reputation, and when you send your novel manuscript (complete with SASEs) off to agents or "over the transom" to editors, they might recognize your name already.
You might have to do this a few times. You will probably trunk some novels along the way. But once you have a novel contract in hand, your arc as an author is almost complete. Now all that remains to determine is if you will sit comfortably in the mid-list, turning out a novel every year or two, still working your day job maybe, but putting away a nice fund for retirement, or if you will hit the bestseller lists, line your mantel with golden rocket ship trophies, and end your "About the Author" with "he divides his time between New York and a rustic cabin in Muskoka he shares with his spouse and three Weimaraners."
This is the story you heard if you were an aspiring science fiction writer for decades, repeated in books about writing advice, from con panels, implied in the profiles of successful authors from the Golden Age up to the cyberpunks.
It was always a fairy tale, largely composed of survivorship bias and passing over the authors whose careers stumbled or stalled at various stages, ignoring the impact of sexism and racism and inequality on which writers had the time and resources and social capital to walk the path to the end.
But it's not a story anyone tells anymore.
Starting sometime around ten or fifteen years ago, and accelerating from there, a new story emerged, and it's told to all aspiring writers, to newly published short story authors, even to folks with their first novels debuting, agent and two-book deal secured.
The story is: Everything is chaos. Hard work may or may not be rewarded. You can do everything right, and still fail. Extrinsic rewards? Forget about it – you must write for the love of writing, because success is so uncertain, so meager if attained at all.*
The last little bit of mythology to die was probably "you just have to write a good enough book." That canard still pops up every now and again, if only to be shouted down.
A good chunk of this change in the story-of-publishing seems to come from the radical honesty enabled by social media. We now know when an author we idolized has seen their sales bottom out, is without a contract after a dozen books. We can look at past Year's Best anthologies and see how many of those names fail to get a novel deal, or fade from short story markets. Writers repeatedly characterize writing books and novellas and short stories in terms of "buying lottery tickets," hoping one project will break out.
The main source of the change, though? Things really are tougher out there.
Was there ever an Arcadian age of publishing in which authors simply ascended from short stories to novel manuscript to contract to midlist on the strength of skill and drive alone? No. But there was a previously-trod path of sorts, and that path has been eroded – publishing mergers, Amazon.com, the Great Recession, lack of publisher reliance of a few big hits over a broad list, a butterfly flapping its wings in China, take your pick of causes. Whatever the reason, the result is the midlist is widely seen as dying, and many "successful" writers live in a constant state of precarity.
If you pay too much attention to this sort of thing, in an attempt to keep up with the market (if you are, just for example, someone who's published a number of short stories and has a pile of trunked novels and is toiling in the agent query mines, ahem) it's pretty fucking disheartening.
Serious question: why should I or anyone else at this stage keep trying to get an agent? Why should we strive to publish a novel only to see the publisher give it exactly zero support? Should a new writer thrill to a five-figure advance or quail in terror that they won't earn out and will be dropped?
It's a sickening feeling, trying to break into publishing for years, accumulating small successes here and there, only to be told that "success" is awful, that it never gets easier, that the only thing you can do is adjust your expectations to match a cruel reality.
Some days, I'd prefer it if people would go back to lying to me for a while. I don't know if you noticed, but things are pretty stressful out there, have been for the last 18 months/five years/since the recession/this entire fucking century so far. Can't someone just reassure me, just for a day or two, that yeah, hard work pays off? That working on your craft might actually be worth it? Bring on the survivorship bias again! Tell me that what worked to make an author successful in 1987 will still work today!
That's one way of dealing with the tsunami of negativity.
But since we're constantly told to adjust our expectations, let me suggest that we aspiring writers adjust our expectations in the opposite direction.
When I sell a short story, I expect professional treatment from the editor and publisher there, I expect prompt payment, I expect a contract that doesn't try to swipe away important rights. And y'know what, that's been my experience with pretty much every interaction in SFF short fiction sales!
Do you know why that is?
It's because we're sci-fi writers, and that means something! It's because we're the spiritual descendants of the grubby pulp wordsmiths of the 1930s who hammered out tales of tentacles and ray guns for half a cent a word to pay the rent. It's because we believe "the money flows to the writer" is a law as unalterable as gravity. It's because whenever a dumb new publisher turns up and tries to charge submission fees, they get gutted on Main Street for it.**
We write for money, damn it. And we write for money because our work has value, because publishers expect to make a profit when they sign a contract. It's in our history, it's in our bones!
So yeah, adjust your expectations towards SFF book publishing.
Expect better.
Start with the assumption that your book deserves promotion, that your publisher should be invested in its success. Your publisher should be telling you how many ARCs they mailed out, and to where. They should tell you how much they're spending on online advertising, about mentions in their email newsletters of new releases. They should be coming to you with, at a bare minimum, suggestions of podcasts and blogs to contact for promotional appearance opportunities. About radio and press coverage. About how they're featuring your book on their Instagram, their Twitter, their Facebook page.
Did your first book earn out? You should get a bigger advance for your next one, period. You're a proven commodity, why should you get less after you made them money?
How about quitting your day job?
Does the CEO at your publisher work a second job bagging groceries at the Sack 'n Pack? If it's a very small press, maybe? But otherwise, you're not on an even footing if you're subsidizing the publisher's profits by treating writing as a (fuck this term) "side hustle." Lots of people make a good living in publishing. If you want to quit your day job and write full time, what is your publisher's plan to help you get there? Ask, see if they have an answer.
I admit, right up front, that adjusting expectations in this way may get you, or me, or anyone, a big fat nothing. It may fail utterly.
But if I hear one more podcast, see one more interview, where the authors talk about how you can't expect anything other than intrinsic reward from writing, I will lose my shit. If our work didn't have value, no one would be in the book business. If we teach everyone to expect nothing, nothing is exactly what we'll get, that's guaranteed.
It is not a sin to aspire to make a decent living doing the thing you love.
So consider this a release valve.
I am going to try – I expect this to be an ongoing and difficult process – to adjust my expectations. As I continue to hammer my skull against the wall of publishing, waiting for the cracks to emerge, I think in terms of demanding more, and better. If for no other reason than to keep from giving up in despair, and to help future writers avoid that same sinking sense that they've failed before they've even begun.
I don't want to give up. I want to become a better writer. And I want there to be a reward for that effort if I succeed.
End Notes
*This observation brought to you by reading the same advice in two different places, twenty minutes apart the other day. Here and here, for reference.
**Nothing makes me prouder to call myself a science fiction and fantasy writer than watching some ignorant asshole back down from daring to suggest he could take so much as a dollar from writers without giving back some useful and needful thing in return.