Sorry for the long delay! I really meant to push these out in a series, but my writing's been going really well lately, so I was loathe to leave the writing cave. BUT, I'm back now, so let's talk mon-neh!
For those of you just tuning in, this is the final installment of a three part series about writers and money. In Part 1, I talked about how authors make money in the traditional, advance paying publishing system. In Part 2, I talked about self-publishing money. Now, for Part 3, we're going to talk about what you actually need to do with that income, wherever it comes from, in order to make a full time living as a writer. So, without further ado, here's
Writers and Money Part 3: Taxes, Quitting the Day Job, and the Realities of Making a Living as a Full Time Writer
As the meme dog would suggest, here are some DISCLAIMERS!
1) Everything below is written in the spirit of sharing information, not as iron clad rules. I'm not actually a financial adviser (or a dog), and as such I can only speak from my own experience, which is almost certainly going to be different from yours. With that in mind, PLEASE don't make any major financial, career, or tax decisions based purely off what you read here.
2) All the tax advice below is written from the American perspective, and as such might not be relevant in your country. That said, wherever you live, if you are making any sort of significant income off your creative work and you have a specific tax question, TALK TO AN ACCOUNTANT. Yes, they're expensive, but knowing this stuff is their job, and that's worth paying for.
Okay, now that we've established that you're not going to run off and reorder your financial future based off a single blog post, let's get to the good stuff.
I didn't meant to take such a long break between these. Husband got out of the hospital unable to do much except lie in bed and look pathetic just in time for the holidays, so, naturally, life became a whirlpool of insanity. But now I'm back more or less, so let's talk money!
Not to start this post off on a downer, but my husband (the Travis whom all my books are dedicated to) is in the hospital. It's no longer life threatening, but I'm spending most of my days this week waiting in hospital rooms with beeping machines and occasional massive interruptions. Naturally, this makes fiction writing challenging to nigh impossible, so, in the spirit of feeling like I'm still getting work done and to distract myself, I thought I'd do a series of posts on the non-writing author topic I get questions about the most: money.
Money is one of those gauche topics everyone is curious about but no one likes to discuss. I can understand why. In a culture where people are more likely to tell you about their sex life and medications in casual conversation than their financial situation, money talk, especially money talk in public, can feel almost obscene. At the same time, though, one of the most popular mantras in author circles is that, if you want to succeed, you have to treat your writing like a business, but how can you really do that if the most business-like aspect of the whole affair--the money--is couched behind euphemisms and shame?
So, in keeping with the open spirit of my blog, I'm going to spend the next three posts talk openly and candidly about my experiences with the money-side of being an author. Because this is such a broad topic, I'm going to be breaking the subject down into three parts: traditional, advance paying publishing, self-publishing, and how to manage taxes/writing income. For today, we're going to talk about the most obfuscated and confusing of the three, Traditional Publishing.
Enjoy, and please let me know if there's anything specific you'd like to know about money and authorship in the comments below.
ETA: It has come to my attention that some of you hate reading white text on a black background, so I've also compiled this post into a normal, black text on white PDF to make reading easier if that's your thing.
My favorite thing about the indie publishing community is its transparency. I could not have made my decision to self-publish without the sales numbers and analysis posted by the authors who came before me. As all of you who read my blog regularly know, we are big big fans of paying it forward here at Casa de Aaron/Bach, and so it was a foregone conclusion that I would do the same once my own numbers started coming in.
Below, you will find the complete sales numbers/Kindle Universe borrows for Nice Dragons Finish Lastfollowed by a few conclusions and observations I've drawn from my self pub results so far. Please know that I am not doing this to brag. While I did admittedly have a fantastic, amazing, beyond my wildest expectations two months, I'm still nowhere near the top of the publishing heap for either the traditional or self-pub side of the fence. These numbers are provided purely for the edification and benefit of the community of independent authors who have always been so generous with their information. Seriously, y'all rock.
Before we get going, though, a word of warning. I apparently had a lot more to say about this than I realized, because this post is one of the longest I've ever made (5400 words!). That's a lot to ask someone to read on the internet, and I seriously thought about splitting it up into multiple posts for easier consumption. After reading it again, though, I've decided to leave it intact. It was written to stand as one post, and that really is how it works best, so for those of you I'm about to give eyestrain, mea culpa.
I promise it'll be worth the long read! There's some pretty cool stuff in here if I do say so myself. That said, I totally understand if giant, numbers-heavy self-publishing analysis posts aren't your thing. So if picking apart Amazon algos sounds boring to you, why not go read about dragons instead? I won't be insulted!
And now, for those brave souls who are still here and ready to talk serious numbers, let's let this cat out of the box!
I know I promised not to talk about the Hachette/Amazon thing ever again, but it just keeps dragging on and on, and when things drag on and on, ugly things get exposed. The latest of these is a letter to the Amazon Board of Directors from Authors United, a group of authors who've banded together to stand up for the Everyman/woman writer whose books are caught in the middle of the corporate struggle.
To be clear, I have no problem with this in theory. I think authors should have a voice in the business side of their livelihood. In practice, however, Authors United's efforts to be a voice for all authors have been, shall we say, highly disappointing, and this letter is the worst offender yet. Just take a look at this choice paragraph:
We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual, a person whose living depends on his or her book finding readers.
Casual racism much? I'm pretty sure China has many, many talented authors who might take umbrage to the idea that their stories are only important as a cheap replacement for American novels. Also, note how the needs of authors are so much more important than the needs of the people who make razor blades and shoes. Clearly, exploitation of foreign workers is totally cool with Authors United, so long as those workers are not authors.
There's more, of course, but Courtney Milan has already eloquently torn into all of this, so I'll just point you to her post and add "Ditto." My personal bone to pick here, however, is the assertion that books are somehow different from other commercial goods.
This is hardly the first time the "books aren't like all that other stuff, books are SPECIAL!" argument has cropped up in the Amazon/Hachette morass. Even all around cool dude John Scalzi writes "[Readers] do not see books as an interchangeable commodity with a garden rake, even when they aren't bestsellers." But while I agree that novels are not interchangeable, that every story represents the sweat/blood/tears/time/etc. of its author, that books have the power to touch people more personally and profoundly than any garden rake (hopefully), they are still marketable items produced to satisfy wants and needs, which is the very definition of a commodity.
The whole business of book selling is based around the treatment of the book as product. For years, the widest available book format was the Mass Market paperback, whose commercial, commodity nature is right there in the name! Books act like commodities, too, just look at the numbers. My own novel, Fortune's Pawn, is currently discounted to $1.99, and sales correspondingly shot up because that's what sales do when there's a discount. Likewise, publishers will sometimes give a book a different cover if sales are low, as happened to my own Eli books. Why? For the same reason cereal makers keep redoing their packaging: things that look better/newer/more exciting sell more. It's the same pattern you see with hair dryers or rakes or any other commodity.
If books were truly unique, non-commodity works of art, there would be only one copy. New works would be sold in book galleries, and classics would hang in a book museum for people to stand in front of and read as a unique book experience...and it would be HORRIBLE. There's a reason the printing press is hailed as one of the most important inventions in human history. It took books, which had previously been unique, hand copied works of art available only to the rich, and made them reproducible, vastly expanding the number of people with access.
It is precisely the cheap, abundant, easily accessible, commodity nature of books that makes them such a huge part of our lives. Clearly, Authors United thinks so, too, because one of their primary complaints is that Amazon has stopped discounting their books, a move they claim has made sales go down "by at least 50 percent and in some cases as much as 90 percent." To be clear, this is a valid complaint. By ensuring Hachette books have a relatively higher price to the rest of their stock, Amazon is intentionally hobbling sales. BUT OH MY GOD, PEOPLE, you can't say "Books are special! Books are not commodities!" in one breath and then complain that Amazon isn't treating your book fairly as a commodity the next.
So look, Authors United, I get that you're mad at Amazon and that you don't appreciate being used as pawns in a larger corporate battle, but y'all need to get a grip. No one's saying you have to wholeheartedly embrace the cold, commercial side of publishing, but you do have to acknowledge that it exists. You have to accept that you're not a unique unicorn with magical bookmaking powers and that the basic rules of economics do, indeed, apply to you and your work. Books are commodities. They behave like commodities, function as commodities, and they're going to be sold like commodities. If you have a problem with how Amazon is treating the sale of your commodity, that's fine, but don't try to argue that the rules should be different for you because your book is a special snowflake. It's not. You're not. The rules apply, and perpetuating the lie that they don't helps no one, least of all authors.
UPDATE: After talking to Brian McClellan and rereading his blogpost, The Cost of a Good Book, I realized I misinterpreted what he was trying to say. His point wasn't that $32k was what you should spend, but what Orbit had spent on his book as part of his argument that publishers do a lot for authors in the whole Amazon/Hachette debacle.
I'm not actually sure how I read this so wrong. Apparently I'm illiterate, or at least comprehension impaired. But correct information is what this blog is all about! So I've removed the parts of this post that refer to his because, hey, I was very wrong! (And in this case, I'm really happy about that. Seriously, I couldn't understand how an author I liked could be saying these things. Now I do, because he wasn't. Durrr.)
I've left my own numbers in, of course, because those actually are correct and hopefully still relevant. Mea culpa, Brian McClellan! Sorry about all the hub-bub and fuss! And to the rest of you, sorry about the confusion. That'll teach me to get my britches in a bundle.
Carrying on!
THE COST OF A PROFESSIONAL BOOK
When I decided last year that I wanted to self-publish Nice Dragons Finish Last, the very first thing I knew I wanted was that my self-published books should be indistinguishable in quality and production from my New York books. I wanted my readers to be able to move seamlessly between my series without even noticing who published what.
To achieve this level of quality control, I knew I would need:
After a lot of research into the costs of the services above, I settled on a production budget of $3000. If that seems lower than a lot of numbers you've heard, it's because I made decisions that deliberately kept it that way, lowering my initial risk and hopefully ensuring a successful future for my book!
So what are these decisions? Well, to start with, Nice Dragons is currently ebook only. The reason for this is simple mathematics. Looking at all my royalty reports for my Orbit books across two series, I could see that the print percentage of my sales has been steadily dropping. By 2013, the majority of my books were sold as ebooks. This is critically important. Even with a New York publisher getting my books onto bookstore shelves, I was still selling more ebooks than print copies. Also, ebooks are easier to sell, higher profit margin, and cheaper to produce than print editions. Seeing this, I decided the initial Nice Dragons release would be ebook only, which saved a huge amount of money on the initial production cost.
Does this mean Nice Dragons will be ebook only forever? No way. I still love print, and I know my fans do, too, but data doesn't lie. Every number I had told me that print wasn't where the money was, so I made the decision to put off a print release (and all the type setting and back covers and expenses that go with it) until I had numbers proving Nice Dragons Finish Last could sell enough copies in print to justify the cost.
I also decided to forego an audio book edition.
Just like my decision not to do an immediate print release, this was a personal choice to save money on the initial production cost of my book. Audio books are awesome, and they can make you a lot of money, but they are enormously expensive--$2800 by Mr. McClellan's report, which sounds right to me. This struck me as something I could pursue after Nice Dragons was "earning out," and since self-publishing is a long game, I knew I'd have the time to pursue this later on if I chose.
Again, print books and audio editions and all the other bells and whistles that might seem necessary for a book release are, in fact, not needed to produce a professional quality book readers will buy and enjoy. For that, all you need is a high quality, professional cover, professionally edited text that is free from errors, and, of course, an actual good book.
Again, even leaving these out, my book still cost $3000 to produce, which is actually a lot by self-published book standards. But I was determined to make sure my readers got the highest quality reading experience, and I put my money where my mouth was. That said, I have read absolutely lovely, well edited books with very nice covers produced for less than $1000, so your millage may vary.
Just speaking for myself, Nice Dragons has already made enough money to cover all its costs and justify a print edition (which I will be adding soon!), and it hasn't even been out for a full thirty days. It's also my best received book to date, so I think $3000 was right on the nose--just enough to ensure maximum quality, but not so much I'd have to wait forever to earn it back and try other things I wanted to do, like print and audio.
Is $300 a good cost for you? I can't say, because I'm not you, and your book is not mine. I do, however, feel that $3000 is a realistic price for a professional quality self-published book put out by an established author. Again, YMMV, so always be sure to make a budget you can stick to and price out your freelancers first! The KBoards Yellow Pages for Authors is a great place to start.
Thank you as always for reading. I hope you enjoyed the post. Again, sorry about the edits.
Ever since the rumors started about Amazon's $9.99 a month unlimited ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited (often described as a "Netflix for Books"), there's been a great deal of speculation and doomsaying about what this will mean for book sales. Specifically self-published and small press book sales since the Big 5 publishers aren't included in Kindle Unlimited's initial offering.
The basic breakdown goes like this: readers pay $9.99 a month for unlimited access to the Kindle Unlimited library, which currently boasts upwards of 600k titles, including bestsellers like The Hunger Games, Life of Pi, and every self-published title currently enrolled in Amazon Select, Amazon's exclusive publishing option. (Note, several big name indie authors like Hugh Howey don't have to play by the exclusivity rules. This is great for them! For the rest of us, though, being in KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited means we can only publish on Amazon. More on that in a sec.) Self published authors with books in Kindle Unlimited are paid their usual royalty when a reader hits the 10% mark. (UPDATE! I got this wrong!! Select authors are paid a fixed percentage of the global fund just like it was for the Kindle Lending Library, not their royalty. Last month, this worked out to $2.40 per borrow, which was fantastic for people selling $0.99 books, like myself, but not so great for authors with higher priced books who would normally earn more than that with a sale. I'm updating the rest of this post to reflect this information for the sake of accuracy, though my general argument remains unchanged. Sorry about the mix up!) Small publishers have different deals--some are paid when a reader first opens the book, some are paid at 10% like the rest of us--but everyone gets paid at some point when a Kindle Unlimited subscriber reads their book.
Now, if you're following the math above, you might notice a gap between the $9.99 monthly subscription price and the usual cost of books. Plenty of books start at $9.99. Even if you're buying all indies at $2.99 a pop, that's still only 5 books before you hit ten bucks and start getting books for "free." So how is it, then, that Amazon can afford to let people read all they want and pay authors their usual royalty on the books for only $9.99?!
Up until now, the answers I've seen to this question have either been "They're going to cut royalty rates on borrows! We'll all be getting paid pennies in no time! DOOOOOOM!" or some variation of "Relax, Amazon knows what they're doing."
Personally, I'm not really satisfied with either of these. I don't believe Amazon will suddenly slice the royalty rate on the authors that create all the content they're now selling. Authors, I might add, they've been working very hard on wooing away from traditional publishers for years now. Why would they undermine that just to shore up Kindle Unlimited? That's robbing Peter to pay Paul. It just doesn't make sense, especially not for a company as smart and far seeing as Amazon. On the other hand, I also don't believe in blindly trusting giant corporations to have my best interests at heart.
To truly understand why Amazon decided to launch Kindle Unlimited and how they hope to profit off it (and, hopefully, how we can, too), we need to understand the math behind the Kindle market itself. Naturally, of course, we don't have any exact numbers (Amazon doesn't share those with anyone) but we do have a lot of percentages and derived figures, and those numbers paint a very interesting picture, indeed.
But first, let's start by figuring out how many ebooks Amazon actually sells.
This is the most I've ever talked about my decision to go self-pub (there's an unwritten rule in publishing that you don't discuss business decisions in public, which is one of the big reasons the industry seems so mysterious). I admit, there's very little drama, which is kind of the point of the post actually. Still, I hope you'll find it interesting!
As the smallest dragon in the Heartstriker clan, Julius survives by a simple code: stay quiet, don’t cause trouble, and keep out of the way of bigger dragons. But this meek behavior doesn't cut it in a family of ambitious predators, and his mother, Bethesda the Heartstriker, has finally reached the end of her patience.
Now, sealed in human form and banished to the DFZ--a vertical metropolis built on the ruins of Old Detroit--Julius has one month to prove to his mother that he can be a ruthless dragon or lose his true shape forever. But in a city of modern mages and vengeful spirits where dragons are seen as monsters to be exterminated, he’s going to need some serious help to survive this test. He only hopes humans are more trustworthy than dragons.
A little housekeeping before we get started. I did two interviews last week, one where I interviewed Elizabeth Moon for Orbit (SQUEEE) (Here's where she interviewed me), and another really fun interview where I talked Devi (as well as hints of future Paradox books) with Not Yet Read. I had a blast with all of these, and I hope you enjoy them! Thank you to Orbit and Tabitha at Not Yet Read for having me!
Now, on to the controversy of the day.
(UPDATED with Amazon's official response at the bottom of the post)
As I'm sure many of you have already heard, Hachette Books, the behemoth international parent company of my own publisher, Orbit, is currently engaged in a very nasty round of negotiations with Amazon, the largest bookseller in the world. I, of course, am not privy to the substance of such high level power plays between corporate giants, but considering the entire reason Amazon and Hachette are at the table now is to renegotiate ebook pricing models after the US Department of Justice slammed Apple and the world's five largest publishers for colluding to fix ebook prices in 2012, it's not a big jump to guess that how much ebooks should cost, and who controls that price--the publisher or the bookseller--are the main bones of contention.
This is not a new fight. Amazon and publishers have been going around this same ring since ebooks were invented, and it probably won't be settled any time soon. With more and more of the world moving to ebooks as their primary book buying venue, the quarrel over who controls the prices for that market will only get dirtier and more contentious. What really has people up in arms this time around, however, is that Amazon, in an effort to flex their mercantile muscles at Hachette, has delayed the the shipment of paper copies of Hachette's new releases, and is now removing pre-order buttons from certain unreleased Hachette titles, thus effectively preventing those books from gathering any pre-release sales.
This is a pretty big deal. Though technically not a monopoly due to other booksellers like Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, and even Wallmart (plus indie shops and many other large, non-American chains), Amazon is hands down the biggest online seller, bigger than next dozen internet retailers combined. If they decide not to sell your stuff, then for all practical purposes, it ain't getting sold. Amazon knows this, and right now, they're using that enormous market power to squeeze Hachette into accepting their terms.
Some, like my fellow Orbit author Lilith Saintcrow, have called this type of behavior evil. Amazon supporters like Joe Konrath call it capitalism working exactly as it should. Personally, I think it's both. After all, the entire point of capitalism is to be more ruthless, clever, and efficient than the other guy. It's a system where the strong eat and the weak are meat, and, for the most part, I have no problem with that as it applies to the book industry. Modern publishing is a cobbled together mess of old, outdated business practices and assumptions. It needs to be shaken up, have a few bites taken out of it, before it collapses under its own ponderous weight. My problem with this fracas comes from where, and more importantly, whom Amazon decided to bite.
If you want to know just how much losing a preorder button hurts, consider the debut author. Imagine the following scenario: after years of rejection, you sell a series to a publisher. Hooray! Now, after a year and a half of edits, copy edits, cover designs, and so forth, your book is finally launching in July of 2014. You're racing around to get ready, doing blog posts and trying your best to get the word out. The marketing dollars your publisher has put into launching your book are in full swing--books are going out to reviewers, your cover is being featured on their site and twitter feed, and you're starting to see real buzz about your writing for the first time...and then, due to a dispute so far above anyone involved in your book, Amazon removes the pre-order button from your book's page.
Now, all that buzz you worked so hard to generate, the interest your publisher's marketing dollars bought, has nowhere to go. You can try to point people to other places to preorder your book--other stores, indies, all that good stuff--but you're not even published yet. Most people have no idea who you are. And those potential readers, the ones who read a good review of your book (on that same review site where your publisher sent your book as part of their pre-release promo) and decide to go check it out? They'll click over to Amazon and find no preorder button. Some, of course, will go to another site or call their local bookstore order that way, but most will decide not to bother. They'll go on about their lives and forget all about your book, and you'll never even know about them because no one but Amazon can track how many people visit a book's page and don't buy.
For an author trying to get their first foothold, this is a death knell. An under-performing debut can ruin an author's career before it begins. This is the real fallout of Amazon's tactics--not the publisher or the big sellers or even the midlist authors like myself who already have dedicated readers, but the new writers. People who are just starting their first series, or who only have one or two books out. These are the most fragile members of the traditional publishing ecosystem, the ones who can't easily weather this sort of disruption, and they're the ones whose careers will ultimately pay while all of this shakes out.
The most obvious solution to this of course would be to just get out of this all together and self-publish, but the authors this is happening to signed those publishing contracts two years ago. Even if they did decided to say screw it all and go publish their next work on their own, that doesn't save the book that's losing sales right now. Also, as I've already talked about, not everyone wants to self publish. That is their choice, and it is just plain awful that those authors who did everything right according to their publishing choice are getting bashed around by giant powers they have no control over. And yeah, I realize getting stepped on by massive forces you can't control is life, but we're not talking about tornadoes here. Tornadoes are unfeeling natural phenomenons. Companies, on the other hand, are made up of people. You can bet your bottom dollar that someone at Amazon, probably a lot of someones, knew exactly what their decision to employ these sort of tactics on Hachette would mean for these authors, but they did it anyway. They made the decision to be ruthless. That's capitalism, but it's also cruel and needlessly harmful to the very authors who write the books Amazon and Hachette are fighting over.
Long story short: I don't object to Amazon strong arming publishers. I actually think we'll end up with a better, more efficient ebook market once all of this shakes out. What I object to are the callous tactics being employed. There's always a choice in these things, and Amazon's decision to use Hachette's authors as hostages in their negotiations says a lot about them, most of it not good. We'll never know exactly how many sales were lost in all of this. It very well might be that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or it could be enormous, we simply can't know. But I stand firm on my belief while capitalism can and has done great things, it does not excuse bad behavior wholesale.
Just as freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism, good business decisions do not mean freedom from morality. I can't and wouldn't want to keep Amazon from doing business, but I can stand up and call it out when I think it's gone too far. This is the natural push and pull of society. And who knows? Maybe if we all make enough of a stink about it, even a giant like Amazon will think twice before pulling a stunt like this again.
EDITED TO ADD:Amazon has issued an official explanation of the situation from their side. Basically it says that they've been doing this for a while, and they don't anticipate negotiations with Hachette to go anywhere anytime soon. They're also talking about setting up an author fund to cover loss royalties, but that smacks of PR BS to me, and I'll believe it when I see it.
As I mentioned in the comments below, this whole situations is super depressing for me both as a Hachette author and as someone who generally likes traditional publishing and wants it to survive. This failure to come to even a modest agreement over months of negotiations shows there's a fundamental disconnect between how Hachette and Amazon see the future of ebooks. But if history has taught us anything, it's that once these digital revolutions get rolling, there's no stopping them. If that's the case, then the weight of change is already on Amazon's side, and if Hachette, and the rest of traditional publishing, can't adjust and compromise and find a way to thrive within that, nothing's going to get better.
That said, this is just one author's opinion. I do not speak for Hachette or Orbit or Amazon or anyone but myself. Ths is just an armchair publishing commentary from someone with a lot of skin in this game. :D
First up, OMG Fortune's Pawn did so well as the Kindle Daily Deal yesterday! Thank you everyone for helping to spread the word and make it a success!! Now, back to our regularly scheduled blog...
Back in November (before my life went crazy. Ahhhh, those innocent days!) I had a ton of fun doing my annual National Novel Writing Month Q&A thread on the Fantasy forums. There were a lot of good questions, but a few in particular came up over and over again. I was very happy with my answers, but these days you have to dig through 13 pages of forum posts to find them, and no one likes that. I still want to get the info out there, though, because these are clearly the issues that weigh on people's minds! So to preserve the information I put out, I'm going to be doing a series of posts here on my own blog answering these Frequently Asked Questions, starting with the single most popular query:
Do I need a strong social media presence as an author?
Agent blogs must really be pushing this, because people were obsessed with this question! I can see the anxiety. I mean, writing a book and trying to sell it is a daunting challenge already, but then be told you have to go out and gather a huge herd followers on Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram/Goodreads/etc and maintain a popular blog/website? That's a lot of pressure.
At this point, I feel the need to reiterate that I'm not an agent and I haven't been a new author since 2010, but I do have a little experience with the author side of this whole "publish books" thing, and I'm just going come out and say that I think people are putting too much weight on this as a requirement.
When you're trying to convince someone to take a chance on your book, be it an agent, publisher, or the general reading public, it's nice to be able to say "oh, and I also have 500,000 Twitter followers and get 1000 comments on every blog post." Preexisting popularity is a good sign that you've got something to offer. It makes you seem less like a risk and more like a success bandwagon (with a built in potential audience) everyone wants to ride. But while it's undoubtedly much easier to get people on board if you're already a star, none of this changes the fact that you still have to have something amazing to give them once they get there.
As much as publishing has changed over the last few years, one core fact remains as true as it ever was: the book is everything. An new author with no web presence and an amazing book will beat a new author with a huge social media network and a lousy book every single time. That said, of course, people with huge networks usually have all those followers precisely because they're entertaining and amazing (see The Bloggess and Hyperbole and a Half as two fantastic examples), but the impressive social media reach is the effect, not the cause. They became popular because they created something other people wanted to read, not the other way around.
So to anyone out there wringing their hands over the idea that a giant social media network is somehow vital to being a successful author, don't. I'm not saying you should ignore social media. You need to have a website up with basic information no matter what, and having professional accounts on the major social network sites you enjoy is also a good idea. This is your business front, the professional face you show to the world since writers don't have shop windows. (It's also a good way for potential agents/publishers to see whether or not you're crazy.)
That said, no one expects you to have a huge social media reach yet. They'd love if you did, of course, but it's hardly mandatory. A great blog/Pinterest/Instagram account is always a bonus, even if it's not writing related. So if you already have a social media platform you enjoy, go for it! But if the idea of blogging regularly makes you break out in hives, don't worry about it. No one wants to read a blog where every post is "Sorry I took so long to blog," anyway. To get started as an author, all you need is a clean, sane, professional presence on the web and a great book, and you can guess which of those is the most important.
I hope that helps relieve some anxieties! Again, this is just my opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, I've yet to meet anyone in publishing who would turn away a book they loved because the author failed to meet the required number of Facebook friends. Social media presence can be built later, but a good book is priceless. Never let the hype take your eyes off the prize: writing a book everyone will want to read.
My husband and I have been on a Project Runway binge lately (we've only just finished season 8 so NO SPOILERS!!!). A few days ago, I joked on Twitter that I was going to do a post on all the lessons I've learned about writing while watching the show. Things like "When someone tells you they hate your book/look, don't argue, just quietly hate them." (Seriously, Gretchen, SHUT UP. You are only digging that hole deeper when you argue with the judges!) or "Make separates and accessorize. The designer/writer who makes the same cocktail dress/book every time always goes home early."
Anyway, the whole thing started as just an excuse to make Project Runway jokes on Twitter, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't actually joking...
At its heart, Project Runway is a show about being creative under pressure. It's about putting your work and yourself out there to be judged, often harshly, by a jaded and fickle industry famous for chasing trends. It's about staying true to your artistic vision even when other people hate it, because if you change your style to try and please everyone, all you end up with is boring. It's about balancing art with commercialism, drama with practicality, structure and craftsmanship with time limits, all while staying within the constraints of a tightly defined medium...
Sound like anything else I talk about on this blog?
The parallels between writing and designing are by no means perfect, but the ones that do exist are pointed enough that I feel justified in making an entire post on the subject. Please note that while I won't be referencing specific events in the show, I will be assuming at least a basic understanding of Project Runway and reality TV elimination shows. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the Wikipedia article on the show has a great breakdown of the basic format. You can also watch several seasons for free at Lifetime. Note that I am not being compensated by Project Runway or Lifetime in any way for this post or these links. I just really freaking love this glorious, redonk, catty circus of a show.
You tell it like it is, Heidi.
Anyway, now that's out of the way, on with the post!
Art vs Commercialism, or, "You Have to be True to Yourself as a Designer"
The more I think about this topic, the more excited I get, and not just because it gives me an excuse to post pictures of Tim Gunn (though that was a definite bonus). See, as I've done my yearly "Ask an Author" thread on the NaNoWriMo forums, one of the themes I run into again and again is this idea of "What should I do to sell my book?" This question manifests in many forms, from the ever popular agent questions to "I notice there's a lot of X out there, can I write Y and still get published?" to questions about how long a novel should be in order to be acceptable to publishers. My answer to these questions is always the same: keep the restrictions in mind, but always stay true to your story and your vision. And every time I say I say this, I hear Tim Gunn in my head saying "you have to trust your instincts and be true to yourself as a designer."
I know this all sounds a little cheesy, but work with me here. On Project Runway, the ultimate goal, the Holy Grail, is an outfit that is creative and beautiful, but still wearable. A dress you can't walk in is useless, but a dress that's too plain is boring (which is the kiss of death on Project Runway). The judges always go crazy over the outfit that is wearable, but still interesting. Something that is exciting and sexy and beautiful without being costume-y or overwrought. They want something that will make them go "Wow!" but can still be sold at a department store.
This delicate balance between creativity and commercialism is also at the heart of publishing. Publishers and readers are constantly looking for the next new thing. They want a story that knocks their socks off and shows them something they haven't seen before, but at the same time it can't be too far out there. The book still has to be readable, and it has to be something that can be summed up in a 150 word blurb and make people want to buy it. Bonus points if the story's on trend for what's hot in reading right now, but it can't be too trendy or it will seem old hat before it's even published.
Just as the designers on Project Runway are scrambling to meet this seemingly impossible standard, so are writers struggling to balance their own creative vision with the needs of the modern publishing world. Even people who self publish have to meet reader expectations. Books that are too weird might be extremely creative, but readers and publishers will often pass over them because they're too strange to be taken seriously. Does this mean the book is bad? No, it simply means it's not publishable, which isn't the same thing at all.
It is perfectly possible to have a fantastic, non-commercially viable book just as it is perfectly possible to make a gorgeous dress that is a work of art and yet will never be mass produced or available for sale. But publishing, just like Project Runway, isn't about art. Or, at least, it's not wholly about art. It's not a show for making dresses that will sit on mannequins in a showroom. It's about who can make the best, most interesting clothes that could potentially be sold toreal women.
By the same turn, whether you're going through a traditional house or doing everything yourself, commercial publishing is about writing books people want to buy and read. This is why it's so important to know what you want from your writing career. If you want to be an artist first, then commit to that. Accept that your vision comes before sales, and don't get upset when you're not commercially successful. If you want to be a bestseller, same story. You need to commit to your decision and focus on how to make the biggest, most interesting splash while still playing within the tightly defined rules of your genre. And if you want to be both (which is what I and I think the vast majority of authors really want) then you need to commit to learning how to balance art and commercialism.
I'm not saying this is easy. Reliably creating a new, exciting, wonderful stories that are commercially viable is just as difficult as creating beautiful, interesting, new types of clothing that are still wearable and comfortable. If this crap was easy, everyone would win Project Runway, and everyone would be a mega successful author.
Personally, I take great comfort in the fact that it's not easy, because then, when I fail, I know it's not because I'm a failure, but because I've set myself to a nearly impossible task. I also know that I can pick myself and keep working, because unlike Project Runway, I don't have to worry about getting sent home and losing all my dreams forever if I have a bad day. Bonus!
The Vast Effort behind "Effortlessness"
Nina Garcia and her dreaded Death Glare.
Not to betray my endless Tim Gunn love, my favorite point of view on Project Runway is actually panel judge and Marie Clare Creative Director, Nina Garcia. Where Michael Kors is the (bitchy) voice of the pro designer and Heidi Klum fills the role of the potential client, Nina is the voice of the Fashion Industrial Complex. She is the one who looks beyond artistry, beyond technical skill, even beyond her own personal taste to see where a design can successfully go. She thinks about how a dress would be styled in an editorial spread, she thinks about hanger appeal, she is constantly asking "Who is your customer? Who wears this dress?"
These are all amazingly pertinent, professional questions that a lot of designers don't consider, especially in the beginning of a season. But if we replace the word "dress" with "book" and "designer" with "writer," all her questions are still important. It's very easy as a writer to get caught up in your own vision of the story, and having someone like Nina Garcia haul you up and ask "Who reads this book? How will this book be sold?" can be fantastically eye opening.
If Project Runway was Project Bookshelf, Micheal Kors would be the Tom Clancy style big bestseller, Heidi Klum would be the book buyer, and Nina Garcia would be the acquiring editor. Fortunately for us, most fiction editors are not nearly as mean as she is, at least not to their authors, but it's their job to ask these same sorts of questions. And that's really important, because these are vital issues a lot of authors don't consider, or worse, don't feel they need to consider until the book is done. But just as those designers got a lot better after they started taking Nina's criticism to heart, I think we as authors can't help but improve if we start out our projects thinking about the realities of the markets our books are going to face and incorporate those decisions naturally into our writing process rather than trying to shoehorn our vision into a commercially acceptable shape later (or worse, standing on the runway and arguing with the judges about why they're wrong. No one wins that fight.)
All of that said, however, one of Nina Garcia's favorite words is "effortless." You can always tell when she really likes something because she'll trot out that word, especially if draping is involved. But when she says "effortless," she often qualifies it with the reminder that effortless doesn't mean easy or undesigned. This is because "effortless" in fashion and writing only means the appearance of serendipity. Just like Heidi Klum's ageless makeup, it is an illusion of careless grace that actually requires an enormous amount of care, thought, and work to produce.
Illusion is the key. When all that work is visible, garments (and novels) are criticized for being "overworked" or "overdesigned." Designers (and writers) are told they're "trying too hard" for adding purposeless details like zipper embellishments or piping in their effort to show how much work went into something. Nina's other favorite phrase is "you need to edit." She is constantly telling designers that they need to step back, look critically, and edit their work down to its essence. "Less is more," she says over and over when some designer has stuck 50 bows on his dress and styled his model's hair in a big Lady Gaga style bow bun. "You need to remove, not pile on."
Of all the advice I steal from Project Runway, this is the sentiment that translates most directly. Writers are creative people by definition, and as creative people, it's very easy to get lost in our own work. When you have an amazing idea that doesn't really fit the story but is too cool to leave out, writers will think of all kinds of wacky rationalizations why they don't need to cut the scenes they love. We often defend these decisions by saying we're adding depth and hooks to our novels when, in reality, we're doing the writing equivalent of over designing.
To be fair, a lot of over written books do well, but then, a lot of ugly, over designed clothing gets sold for reasons I can not fathom. But just because some people get away with it is no excuse to go easy on our own editorial eye, because the best books/designs, the ones that endure, are the novels/dresses that appear effortless and natural. The end goal of all work in writing is to appear like no work at all. To give the reader a story that simply flows like it was always meant to be.
In writing as in fashion design, if you do your job right, no one will even notice how hard you worked to do it. They will not see your struggles or your late nights or your botched scenes or how you rewrote the first paragraph 100 times. All they will see is the beautiful, effortless finished product, perfectly presented, and that is as it should be.
"Make It Work"
I couldn't possibly do a Project Runway themed blog post without talking about the show's famous catch phrase, "Make It Work." I might not be working 18 hour days, sewing and creating under enormous pressure just for a chance not to get eliminated from the show that has promised to make all my dreams come true, but it's still powerful mojo. When I am upset, the sound of Tim Gunn saying "Just make it work" is like a Pavlovian trigger for my ability to get up and press on. And that's really, really important, especially in writing, because the moment you start writing on a deadline, Make It Work becomes your mantra.
Whether you're writing for yourself or for a publisher, there are times when the book just has to get done, and you don't know how it's going to get there. Maybe you've written yourself into a corner, or maybe you went entirely the wrong direction and now you hate everything. Maybe you're just stumped on a plot point and you have no idea what to do next, but you need to figure it out pronto, because if you don't get this book ready to turn in to your editor in the next month, you're going to throw off your entire publication schedule. Your book will be late, your readers will be mad, and you won't get paid when you thought you were going to be. DOOOOM!
Okay, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but when you're in the middle of the crisis, the idea that not finishing this book on time will destroy your career feels absolutely real. More than one author has crumbled under the pressure, but funny enough, this is where Project Runway has us beat, I think. Because no matter how stressed those designers get, no matter how crazy the time limit on the challenge, when it comes time to put on the show, they always have something to send down the runway. It may not have been their best look, but in the end, the designer who can pull it out and make it work is the designer who is successful, and the same goes for writers.
I usually shy away from generalizations, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that every writer has faced a moment where they didn't know how to go forward. When this happens, especially under a deadline, the difference between writers who choke and writers who succeed is their ability to do like Tim Gunn says and make it work.
This isn't just a careless bon mot. The ability to resist panic is not a natural one. We're born panicky, wary animals who seem predisposed to jump to the absolute worst conclusion, and the ability to rise above this, to be calm and creative under pressure and get the job done, is the line that separates the professional from the amateur. Fortunately, it's also a talent that can be learned, and part of Tim's role on Project Runway is to teach this ability to panicked designers who've just realized how screwed they are.
No matter how carefully you plot or how good you are at managing time, if you pursue a career in writing, you will eventually come face to face with the "I'm totally F'ed" moment. When this happens, it is perfectly natural to freak your shit. Once that's over, though, it's your job to calm down and find a way to make it work. Because you're a professional, and professionals always find a way to deliver. The same "never give up" attitude that gets you published keeps you published, and the harder you embrace that truth, the more quickly you recover from disappointment and find your way to make it work, the more successful you will be.
***
One of the most amazing things about being a professional artist, or professional anything, is discovering that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The pressures of being a commercial artist vary wildly from industry to industry, and yet the core remains unchanged. Designers, writers, graphic artists--we all face the same struggle to produce creative yet salable work under pressure while not sacrificing the vision that makes this art our own.
My situation is very, very different from the contestants on Project Runway, and yet I can still learn from their mistakes, and that's a lot more than I ever expected from a cheesy reality show about making high fashion dresses on ridiculous deadlines out of random crap. So thank you, Project Runway. I learned a stupid amount about myself from your ridiculous programming.
I hope you enjoyed this absurdly long blog post about a television program! Thank you for putting up with my waxing rhapsodic over reality TV personalities, and as always, good luck with your writing!
First up, I wanted to share with you a preview snippet from some promotional writing I'm doing for Fortune's Pawn. It's a bit out of context, but I'm so proud of this paragraph I think I might burst.
"I'd actually say that the most pernicious aspect of sexism in Science Fiction isn't that there aren't enough of us [women], but how often the women who are here and have made huge contributions to the genre get ignored and passed over in favor of their male contemporaries. This vacuum of recognition isn't just unfair and dumb (seriously, why would you want to ignore Ursula LeGuin? That's like ignoring cake), it leaves every new generation of women writers feeling like lonely pioneers when we're really just the latest addition to a long, wondrous, and tragically undervalued cannon of female authored Science Fiction."
Ahhhhhhhhh.
Okay, now that I'm done tooting my own horn (for now, at least), I want to talk about something much more serious. It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of SFF book review blog The Book Smugglers. I don't always agree with their reviews (because who always agrees with anyone?), but I absolutely love the way they approach genre fiction, a class of literature that often skates past critical scrutiny on the grounds that it's "escapism" and therefore below reproach, with the sort of serious analysis good writing deserves and bad writing needs. I especially love the way they call bullshit on sexism, racism, and privilege whenever they see it, and their take downs are some of my favorite reading on the internet.
But while Reader Rachel eats this stuff up, Writer Rachel gets a little nervous. This sort of criticism (which is by no means limited to The Book Smugglers. There's a whole host of fantastic review blogs out there putting genre books through the wringer and being entertaining and informative while they do it) sets a very high bar for thinking about my own choices in a novel--how I represent gender, is my cast all white, am I falling into any blind zones of stereotype, etc.
Now make no mistake, this sort of thinking is a Very Good Thing. Choices in novels should be carefully considered, that's what makes you a good writer instead of a thoughtless hack churning out unexamined drek. But at the same time, it's easy to overthink yourself into a panic, especially if your book is about tough topics like racism, sexual violence, addiction, or any of the other darker parts of the current human condition. You want to tell your story in an impactful, hard hitting way, but you (or, at least, I) don't want to get called out for being an insensitive jerk when that's not what you meant at all.
So how do you do it? How do you safely write about the hard stuff without softening it up? Well, the easiest path is just to stay away from controversial topics. No one can call you out for handling rape badly if you don't write it, right? And if you never write a character of a race, gender, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic background other than your own, you're safe on that score, too. We're also missing the point.
The truth is, it's pretty much impossible to write anything that matters safely. Art, even the stuff produced purely entertainment purposes, is meant to push boundaries. If it doesn't, it's only reinforcing the same old status quo, which is a problem in and of itself. But just because it's pretty much impossible not to step on toes when you're herding sacred cows doesn't mean we should just let them be. These are powerful stories, and they need to be told. The key, though, is to always be sure to allow these topics the room and depth they deserve within your narrative, and, most important of all, to be sure you actually know what you're trying to say and feel proud standing behind it.
That fact that you're even considering how to write hard things the right way already puts you miles above the really problematic authors (you know the sort), but it can still be a complicated minefield, and one I was especially afraid of entering. It took me years to gain the courage as a writer to start tackling the harder topics, but caution can be rewarding, and I think I've worked some good rules of engagement over the years to make sure I don't accidentally come off looking like a jerk. And since this wouldn't be a Rachel Aaron writing post without a list, here they are!
1. Don't be a jerk.
This is kind of obvious, but considering some of the author reactions I've seen, it clearly needs to be said. If you are an actual jerk with jerky opinions who writes jerky jerk work, then all the writing tips in the universe won't stop readers and reviewers from calling you out for it. That's the price of jerkdom; not being liked or taken seriously. This isn't to say that you can't be a mega-bestselling jerk, but if you insist on putting offensive material in your books, then you can't get mad when people get offended. You will get mad, of course, because you're a jerk, but you have no ground to stand on. Not that you'll see that.
Fortunately, you, my lovely reader, are not actually a jerk, and so this point is not for you. Unless, of course, you are a jerk, in which case I'm very glad to have made you aware of your jerkitude. Acknowledging you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.
Caveat: this isn't to say you can't include characters who are jerks. Villains are the obvious example, but side characters and even protagonists can be homophobic, sexist, entitled, racist assholes and still be good characters. The key here, though, is to make sure the narrative calls these people out on their awful opinions and behavior. Have another character say something, or have appropriately bad things happen to them as a result of their biases (Woman Meteorologist, "Don't go out there! It's acid monsoon season!" Jerk, "Pah, what do women know about weather?" *Jerk goes out door, is melted by acid monsoon* and SCENE.)
That example's a little extreme, but you get the idea. The key here is that you're using the narrative to separate a jerk character from the story as a whole. You may not be a racist, but if you put a racist character who says racist things in your book and then allow those ideas to go unchallenged, readers have no reason not to think that's what you actually believe. I'm not saying that every character who's not a well-adjusted saint has to get melted under an acid monsoon, but there's got to be something that lets your reader know that this character's bigoted opinions are not reflective of your own. Unless, of course, they are. In which case, see point one.
2. If you're going to tackle a big idea, make sure you give yourself the room to do it properly.
Say you have a character in your book who is raped. That's heavy stuff. Maybe it happened a long time ago, or maybe it happens during the course of the plot. Wherever or whenever the rape occurs, though, it changed that character enormously, and it's not the sort of thing you can gloss over or hand wave away. Rape is not character development, it's a real and horrible tragedy that 17% of your white female readers, 18% of your black or latina female readers, and 34% of your Native American/Alaskan female readers have personally suffered.
Think about that for a second. That is some heavy heavy ordinance, and it needs to be handled as such. I'm not at all saying that a raped woman's character needs to be defined by rape (god, PLEASE don't do that), but at the same time, it's not something you can ignore, especially since there are readers (myself among them) who often just won't read books with rape in them because it is so upsetting and it's often handled so so badly.
Does this mean rape is a verboten topic? Absolutely not. But it's also not the sort of thing you can just throw in because you want something bad to happen. You can't have a character get raped and then be fine in the next scene. You can't have a character rape another character and then patch everything back together with an apology and a thirty second "You know what I learned today" life lesson. You can't have a character condone or ignore a rape and then expect us to like them without a serious "oh God, how could I have been so wrong!" character redemption arc. Rape is the nuclear weapon of things that can happen to characters, and if you're going to put it in your story, you have to be ready to handle the fallout with the respect and care that it deserves.
Rape is just one example. There are plenty of horrible, horrible things that people do to other people, and if your book is going to be widely read, chances are that parts of your audience have suffered those humiliations and pains first hand. So if you're going to tackle a hard topic, don't insult your readers, the people who make your dream of writing possible, by reducing their tragedies to a plot point. Instead, give yourself the narrative space to explore the implications and consequences of serious issues properly. You don't have to pull your punches, in fact, I hope you don't, but you do have to think long and hard about where they land, and, more importantly, whom you're knocking out.
3. Don't make the victim the butt of the joke.
Man, this is getting heavy! Let's lighten it up. Let's say for a second that you're like me, and you like to write fun, action packed books, but you still want to include issues like racism and sexism because they're important and make for cracking good stories. How do you reconcile serious heavy matter with a lighthearted story? Is it even possible to joke about this sort of stuff?
This is a pretty loaded topic, but I'm a firm believer than joking about the hard stuff is actually the best way to start breaking it down into something we can actually deal with. The key (as always) is that you have to be aware of what your joke is doing. Even a joke about sexual assault can be funny, provided you never ever ever make the victim the butt of the joke.
For example, comedian Louis CK has a very famous clip about how there's no greater threat to women than men.
In this bit, he talks about how a woman agreeing to go on a date with an unknown man is an incredibly courageous act, and also insane, because men are the greatest cause of injury and suffering for women. “If you’re a guy, imagine you could only date a half-bear-half-lion," he says. "‘Oh, I hope this one’s nice! I hope he doesn't do what he’s going to do.’”
At its heart, this is a joke about rape. Yet unlike other, awful, white-hot rage inducing rape jokes, this one actually works, because the victim is not the one being made fun of. We are not laughing at the person who was raped, or rape itself, or even the rapist. We're laughing at how screwed up our society is where this sort of thing is still allowed to happen.
By pointing the joke in that direction, Louis CK gently leads his audience to consider "hey, that is screwed up." And then maybe they'll start thinking about it, and maybe the next time they see something questionable happening, they'll say something, or do something they wouldn't have done if they hadn't heard that joke.
That's the power of making fun of awful things, it tricks people into thinking in ways they're not used to, or don't want to. That's the power of fiction, too, but as Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility. This sort of humor takes a lot of careful thought and consideration, and even then, humor is subjective. What I find funny, other people may find in horrible taste, that's just how it goes. But if you think about what you do before you do it and always take the time to consider "whom am I really making fun of here?" you can find some really new and creative ways to tackle difficult issues in a non-depressing fashion, and that's always a good thing.
So that's my post. I hope my box of tricks helps you tackle your own stories. I'm always interested to hear how you've tackled this sort of thing in your own writing, so leave a comment below if you care to. Also feel free to leave comments telling me how you disagree. I'm not quite as happy to get those, but they are important none the less.
As always, thanks for reading, and happy writing!
- Rachel
So there's been noise around the internet about this article by Tor UK editor Julie Crisp. The basic gist of the post is that the low number of SciFi books by women on the shelves isn't because publishers are locking the door on women, it's because they just don't get a lot of SciFi submissions by women, and they can't publish what they don't receive.
Now, there have been some thoughtful posts decrying this as buck passing: "Oh, it's not our fault the vast majority of genre books coming out are written by dudes. Lady authors just aren't writing the stuff. Step it up and solve sexism, women!" And while I don't entirely agree that's what's going on here, (okay, that's exactly what's going on here, but I don't think it's being done mean spiritedly), the truth is that sexism everywhere, but specifically sexism in genre fiction, is far far FAR more insidious and deeply rooted than this sort of "the numbers don't lie, boss" reductionism would imply, especially when it comes to Science Fiction...
...Annnnnnd since, (SHAMELESS PLUG) I have a SciFi novel coming out in November that is not only written by a woman, but has a female main character (DOUBLE RAINBOW!), I thought I'd take a moment to explore why many women aren't drawn to space in books.
The lack of women in SciFi fiction is really strange and striking when you consider the overwhelming female fanbase for SciFi in other media franchises. Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, and (everyone's favorite) Firefly all boast impressive female viewership and fandom (and fanfic writing). Clearly, women are capable of understanding and enjoying the hell out of space stories, so why aren't more women writing/publishing Science Fiction novels?
Well, first off, women ARE writing Science Fiction. I actually grew up reading SciFi written by Anne McCaffrey and Ursula Le Guin. I also read Dune and a metric ton of David Brin, and of course all the Hitchhiker's books. Today, I read Anne Aguire and Elizabeth Moon and Elizabeth Bear. But while there are lots of women telling successful Science Fiction stories, the undeniable truth is that they are the vast minority of the Science Fiction out there.
I think a big part of the blame for this discrepancy can be placed squarely on the shoulders of Science Fiction's rep as a "man's game." For example, all those female authored SciFi books in the last paragraph that I grew up with? They were from my mom's shelf. I read them in the classic tradition of teenage reading: because they were what I had. And I loved them, don't get me wrong, but when I grew up and started buying my own books, I went almost exclusively into Fantasy (UF and Epic) and all but ignored Science Fiction. Looking back, I did this because subconsciously I knew that SciFi was "for guys," and even though a specific book might look interesting, it would probably just be a bunch of dudes doing manly, dude stuff with no female characters of note. So I didn't buy.
Was this dismissive of me? Sure. Did I miss a bunch of awesome books because of my own preconceptions? Almost certainly. But I got those preconceptions--that space stories aren't for me, that I wouldn't understand, that I'm not welcome in this genre--from Science Fiction itself. From the way it is marketed and discussed, from the covers, from the truly sexist SciFi dudes who make it their mission in life to keep girls and their girl cooties away from their hallowed spaceship tomes. True, no one ever stood in front of a bookshelf and told me I couldn't buy Science Fiction, but there was definitely push back, and as a woman in a book market where I had so many choices about how to spend my reading time, I simply didn't see the point of putting in the effort to read a genre where they didn't want me around in the first place.
This is the cycle that has ultimately created such an enormous gender disparity in Science Fiction readership and authorship. Stories are written by men and then marketed to men, who read them and become inspired and write their own male-centric stories that get published and then marked again to men, and the whole thing starts over. In general, it's not a mean or vicious "No Girls Allowed" sort of thing (though that does happen). It's just the rut, and ruts are very easy. Sexism, in general, is easy. It's a lazy way of thinking that replaces complicated actual experience (ie: women are people and thus come in every personality imaginable and are often self contradictory) with a label (Women, yeesh! Amirite, guys?!) which is why it's so so so hard to combat.
The trouble is, this sexist rut is hurting everyone. Even as popular culture at large becomes nerdier and nerdier with big SciFi movies like Star Trek and Pacific Rim coming out as the huge summer blockbusters, Science Fiction as a written genre continues to be small and stagnate. It's not for lack of quality, amazing books are coming out, but so long as SciFi continues to allow itself to be perceived as old, sexist, white guy reading, that will be its audience.
It's almost laughable that a genre built on big new ideas and pushing boundaries has let itself be pigeonholed into such a small box. But if it wants to break out, then everyone involved in the genre--marketing, publishers, writers, and fans--needs to work together to break down the harmful stereotype that Science Fiction is a boys club. How you ask? Any number of ways! How about covers that feature female characters doing badass things? How about marketing Science Fiction book that also feature strong romantic plots to Romance readers? How about writing more interesting and rounded female characters into your stories? How about making sure Science Fiction conventions are places where women can feel safe rather than excluded and/or preyed upon? How about having a main cast that is something other than overwhelmingly white and male?
There are any number of ways to open up the Science Fiction genre to a wider audience, and we should be scrambling to do them. These stories deserve a wider readership, and, in turn, a wider authorship. Because writers tend to write what they read, and until the SciFi readership is balanced between men and women (and people of color) we're never going to see a true parity of male/female authorship in the genre or a wider range of non-white authors, and that's just sad for everyone, especially people who want to keep reading new and amazing SciFi stories.
To be clear, I'm not hating on or attacking Science Fiction itself. Hell, I wrote three freaking books about a powered armor user who shoots aliens and flies through known space on a trade freighter. I love me some Science Fiction, and I want to write a lot more of it, which is why I'm writing this post. Because Science Fiction as a whole is never going to escape the low sales numbers corner it's painted itself into by catering only to white men until it starts reaching out and welcoming a wider readership.
So let's stop digging in our heels and passing the buck on sexism and start working to change things. Because this genre deserves more than this. We deserve more, and we can have it if only we have the will to reach.
When I was a kid I played the violin, and I hated it. Looking back, it was actually a terrible instrumental choice for me. Unlike the rest of my family, I'm not very musical. I have a very bad ear for tune, and the violin gives you enough rope to hang yourself twice over in this since you can literally put your fingers anywhere. I probably would have done much better with piano, where you hit a key and get a note, but by the time I started piano I was 5 years into violin and I'd already learned to hate anything that resembled practice.
My mother made my practice my violin every morning before school. EVERY MORNING. I understand now why she did it, she was trying to show me how practice makes perfect and that by sticking to something through the hard parts, they would stop being hard and I'd be happy with my progress. Unfortunately, none of these lessons took at the time, mostly because 1) I hated the violin, and so 2) I didn't pay attention in practice, just went through the motions so my mom would get off my back, and therefore 3) I never actually got any better.
I quit violin the second I got to High School and never touched another instrument. Way I saw things, I'd toiled in the violin mines for 5 years with nothing to show for it. Therefore, clearly, violins were stupid, unplayable instruments that only freakish naturally talented people could ever hope to master.
I didn't realize it until years later, but I took many of the lessons from my battle with the violin with me to writing. You see, back when I was first getting serious about the idea of actually creating a story for other people to read, people said (as they say now and have always and will always say) that I needed to write every day. I had to stick with it, to push past the hard parts and get my words, and bit by bit, all those 500 word sessions would stack up into a novel.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is a true point and an excellent sentiment. If you write so many words every day, eventually you will have a novel. Many, many novels are written this way. I've written novels this way. But there's a difference between writing every day and forcing yourself to write.
I harp on the idea that writing should be fun a lot. It's one of my core beliefs. If I'm not enjoying what I'm writing, then I stop and figure out why. Sometimes, I don't write it at all (notice how I didn't say "I don't write" just that I don't write the thing I didn't like). I believe that an author's love and passion for their own work can't help but shine through the prose. That energy that consumes you when you're writing something you love gets transferred to your reader and becomes infectious. Also, it is phenomenally easier to find the time to write daily when you're looking forward to the exercise.
This is why, when I hear people talking about daily writing practice, I get a little tic in my jaw, because it makes me think of that damn violin. Not to willfully misunderstand the usage of the word "practice" here (meaning both "the act of" as well as "doing some to get better" in this instance) but the connotation is not a pleasant one for me, because that trial I endured every morning through elementary school and middle school is something that I never, ever, ever want anywhere near the joyful, wonderful event that is writing.
I'd almost rather you not write at all than force yourself to write when you hate it. You see, resentment is like grime. It builds up slowly and poisons everything around it. I know. I did this to myself a few times in the early days, forcing myself to get up every morning and write words I didn't care about. It was just like the violin. I resented the work, resented how it didn't get any easier or better. I resented my writing, and that is a horrible, horrible feeling for someone whose great ambition and driving force in life was to be a writer. I felt I was betraying myself, betraying my dream and all my work. I felt like a failure.
It was fear of this feeling, fear of losing my stories to my resentment, that taught me to stop treating writing like the violin. The only way you become a better writer is through practice and observation, writing stories and figuring out why they work and why they don't. But if you're just writing because you have to, to meet a quota, then you're like me with that violin, and you're not getting any better, which kind of defeats the whole point, doesn't it?
One of my greatest triumphs over nine years of writing seriously was learning to love my writing instead of just practicing it. I still write every weekday (I'd write weekends, too, but I have a toddler who wants my attention for some reason. Something about being a mother? I also have a house that doesn't clean itself. Jerk.) only now I refuse to write things I don't like. These days, though, I take daily writing even more seriously than I did when I was writing to a quota, but for a new and much better reason.
One of my absolute favorite sayings is that "writing begets writing." The more you write on a story you enjoy, the easier, better, and more exciting the next day's writing becomes. When I write every day, I build up momentum, like running down hill with a hang glider. Get going fast enough, and the story will lift you up all on its own and take you flying, which is every bit as awesome as it sounds. This is my goal in every book, to reach that lift off point, and the only way I get there is by writing regularly on projects I love. And let me tell you, my word counts on the flying days? Breathtaking.
Today's going to be a flying day for me. I hope you have the same.
Sorry for the extended blogging absence. I fell down a writing hole... of the very best kind! Most of my conversations over the last 2 weeks have gone like this:
Husband/child/dog: *expresses need for food and/or attention*
Rachel: CAN NOT LEAVE THE PRECIOUSSSSssssssss...... (clutches laptop)
I did manage to poke my head up to watch a very good TED talk, though. It doesn't specifically deal with writing per se, but I still found it very relevant.
I've been on the fringe of the Amanda Palmer storm for years now, but this talk convinced me to drink the Kool Aid. The whole video is totally worth watching, but the gist is about how difficult it is to ask for help and compensation vs. how much others want to give it. "Asking [as an artist] makes you vulnerable," Palmer says. "There's always that voice in the back of your head: get a job."
This talk REALLY hit the nail on the head for me, because the single hardest thing I've had to learn as a writer is how to ask people to buy my books without feeling like a huckster or a fraud. It's not that I'm shy. I'm the opposite of shy. I am the biggest extrovert you will ever meet. But asking someone to pay money and read my work is harrowing in a way I have trouble putting words to.
I constantly joke to my friends that someday this writer thing is going to dry up and I'll have to go get a "real job." But the kicker here is that writing is a real job, and not just in the "you should treat your writing as a job if you want to be a professional" kind of way. I mean that writers are entertainers who provide a service, a book, and that is worthy of compensation.
When I ask people "buy my book?" I feel this overwhelming sense of shame and guilt. Who am I, after all, to ask these people to put forth their hard earned cash to take a trip through my imaginary world? But it's all in my head, a product, ironically, of my own pride. In asking someone to buy my book, to like my story, to invest in me, I have to open myself up to the fact that might say no. I have to make myself vulnerable. But as Palmer says, when you trust in people, most of the time, they trust back. If you give them an honest experience, a good story, then don't begrudge you the asking, or the money.
The point here is that writing, singing, entertainment, these are real jobs that provide real benefits. We've all read books that we would have paid twice as much for. There's no shame in asking people to buy my book, it doesn't make me a fraud or a huckster. It doesn't make me a sell out. It makes me a working writer, and that, I gotta say, is the best job ever.
There's an old Buddhist story I think about a lot. It goes (more or less) like this.
A farmer was having a hard time of things: his crops were failing, there was a drought, etc. Desperate, he went to ask Buddha what he should do. When he got there, though, Buddha told him he could not help.
"What do you mean?" asked the farmer. "You're supposed to be a great teacher!"
"All humans have 83 problems," Buddha replied. "Even when you resolve one, something new rises to take its place. In the end, no matter what you do, you'll always have 83 problems."
"But what's the good of all your teaching if it can't solve my problems?" the farmer cried.
"My teachings can not help with your 83 problems," Buddha said. "But maybe I can help you with the 84th."
"Which is?" asked the farmer, crossing his arms over his mud stained chest.
Buddha gave him a kind smile. "That you don't want to have 83 problems."
***
I read a lot of books. I did this before I was an author, but now that I can write them off on my taxes, I read a LOT of books. In fact, I'd say the only thing I read more than books are the book blurbs I go through trying to figure out what to read next.
I mention this now, because if there is one sentence I've read in blurbs more than any other (especially in YA) is "Character X had a perfect life."
I see this all the freaking time, but I have never understood why. What is up with all these characters having perfect lives that proceed to fall apart? First, perfect lives are booooooring, good only for wrecking so the real action can begin. Second (and the reason for this post), is that perfect lives don't exist.
One of the things about trying to write characters who are also people is that they suffer from universal human complaints. One of these, as the story above illustrates, is that everyone has problems. Even people who appear to live perfect lives--the famous, beautiful, fabulous people eternally adrift on a sea of family money so vast they can never spend it all--have problems. In fact, the problems of the rich and famous are the most well documented of all.
It's easy to write these complaints off as First World Problems, which indeed they are, but the fact still remains that even these ostensibly "perfect" lives are riddled with annoyances and frustrations. Everyone has things that annoy them, things they consider problems to be fixed or eliminated or ignored. The reason you only hear about perfect lives in fiction is because the very idea of a "perfect life" is the greatest fiction of all.
This isn't to say a character in hardships can't remember the life he/she lost as perfect. Romanticising the past is a character trait. But when an author declares, "this person's life was perfect until X happened!" I declare, "Bullshit."
The point I'm trying to make here is this: if you are an author, and you want to start your main character off in a sweet spot so that they can have a precipitous fall into the main plot, that is totally cool. That opener is a classic for a reason: watching a fall is almost as enthralling as watching a rise. But please, please don't ruin it by describing things, or worse, having your character describe their own life while they're in it, as perfect.
If a character is a person, they will find something in their life that annoys them. It's human nature. No one describes their own life as truly perfect unless they're talking about a foggy romantic memory or they're trying to impress you. To that end, even a character who starts a novel in a "perfect" life should be entirely consumed by their 83 perfect life problems. Maybe their private chef never cooks their eggs the way they like, maybe their insanely rich parents don't love them like they think they should be loved, or maybe their unicorn ate all the clover and now there's a bare patch on the crystal palace green.
To whit, the character who resides in arguable perfect should still be annoyed about SOMETHING, and this annoyance can actually be a huge source of character development once the real plot kicks in. You thought the unicorn thing was bad? HA. You would kill to have unicorn problems now, wouldn't you, kiddo? That sort of thing.
I mean really, which sounds better? "Caroline had a perfect life, lead role in the high school musical two years running! But it all came crashing down when zombies invaded her small town." VS. "Caroline thought her biggest problem was keeping the lead role in her high school musical for an unprecedented third year in a row, but when the zombies show up to auditions, she has to choose between making the final cut and making it out alive."
Okay, so those are really dumb examples, but you get the idea! Everyone, even characters leading ostensibly perfect lives, has 83 problems. It is our nature, our super power. We can literally bitch about anything, no matter how petty or mundane. And when that basic humanity is not reflected in a character's situation, those scenes can't help but come off as flat and unrealistic.
So please, fellow authors, if you must have perfect lives, fill them up with First World Problems before you smash them down with Real Plot Problems. The fall from grace will still be horrible and engrossing, only now the person tumbling down the mountain will be far more believable.
