I No Longer Roll The Dice With My Work (Because I Can't Afford To)

Being an author is a lot like playing the lottery. I've said that before, and generally it means I'm referring to what happens with your finished product. Because no matter how much time, energy, sweat, and grit you put into your book, there's no telling whether you'll find your audience for it or not. It's impossible to say whether the algorithm is going to defeat you, or lift you up so that everyone can see your work so you can become this week's success story.

Today, though, I wanted to talk about something else. Because there's a weird situation for many authors (especially those of us who are just starting out), where we rely heavily on chance and luck to even get our work published in the first place. And now that I've decided to step out of that particular game, I wanted to mention how frustrating it can be to participate in.

Come on baby... we REALLY need a contract this time...

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Hitting The Jackpot Once is Hard Enough

The first thing I did when I started my career as a writer was look for open calls for short stories. The way these work is that a company will put out a theme, a word count, and a general description of the sorts of fiction they're looking for, and writers can submit their work. Editors go through the pile, pick the ones they want, and those stories will go into the anthology. Smaller companies tend to offer a royalty split among all contributors (which amounts to almost nothing unless they sell a lot of books), some will pay authors a flat fee for the story, and some very few will give you a flat fee and a royalty.

What a lot of writers will quickly find is that unless you are very lucky, you probably don't have a short story laying around that's exactly what an open call is looking for. If you're fortunate, you can retool something you've done to fit. Most of the time you're going to have to write something entirely from scratch, submit it, and then pray to the typewriter gods that you catch the editor on a good day and your story gets picked.

This exact same process happens on a larger scale for novels. So while you might spend a year or more penning a manuscript, there's no guarantee that it will get picked up. You have to find a company that seems to be interested in your kind of book, submit a pitch, and cross your fingers that you get a call back. Worse, a lot of companies have a policy that you can't submit the same book to other agencies, so you're stuck in limbo until they make a decision.

I did manage to get lucky a few times.

For years I went through this process with short stories and novels. Some of my stories hit the mark, like "Stray Cat Strut" which was picked up for From a Cat's View. A lot of short stories I wrote got re-purposed, and managed to find a home in other collections. However, after several years of dancing this dance I had enough content left over to publish The Rejects, which were all the dark little darlings that hadn't managed to find an editor that wanted to give them a chance to shine.

So, to recap, you need to complete an entire piece of work (short story or novel) before you can do anything. Then you ship that piece of work off to a publisher that you hope will be interested in it. Most of the time you have to wait till they say yay or nay before you can move on. This process of back and forth querying can take months in some cases, or years in others. And at the end of the day, your piece might not get picked up by anyone. Ever. Period. Meaning that, from a return-on-investment perspective, all that time in writing, editing, submitting, etc. was just energy thrown into a pit.

Honestly? I don't have time for that anymore.

I Wish I Had a Better Solution

I started thinking about this because a few weeks back a friend of mine tagged me in an open call for short horror stories. It's been a while since I applied to one of these calls, but as I was looking over the terms, payment, timeline, excitement started bleeding out of me. I realized why soon enough.

Because if an editor had tapped me on the shoulder and offered me a spot on this project, I'd have been all in. Being told I had to compete with a group of other authors of varying skill levels and experience to maybe get chosen and get a check? For something that was going to take several weeks to a month of my labor? No. I don't have the margin of error to deal with that anymore.

The pandemic forced me to make a lot of changes, and one of those was putting the majority of my energy into books, fiction, RPG supplements, and stories. Because, simply put, the "safe" clients I was ghostwriting for all shut up shop and stopped paying their bills, while gamers and readers demanded more content as fast as I could put it out. It's why, if you keep an eye on my release flow, you've probably noticed more stuff coming out at an increased clip since roughly this past winter.

I've built up a base of clients and contacts over the years, and at this point in my career if I have an idea that I think will do well I don't have to put together a proposal, submit it to a slush pile, and wait several months for a response from a publisher. Because I either know the platforms where I can put these projects together myself, or I have contacts that I can shoot an email to and ask, "Hey, Charlie, had one of those crazy ideas. If I put it together, would you be interested?"

Either way, publication is going to happen, so the only die I have to roll is trying to make sales once it's out.

Just say the word, and I'll get it done!

I try to be a realist on this blog, which is why I feel it's important to point out once again that who gets published is almost never a matter of talent or quality. Sometimes all you have to do is write in a certain subgenre a publisher thinks will be popular. Sometimes you just need to do something one editor loves (or hates) for them to accept or kill your story. An editor might have had a bad day, or be under pressure, which alters their reading experience. It could even be the order your story was read in, meaning that it got forgotten in a backlog, or stayed with an editor because it was the last one they read.

So many of us believe editors are like Anubis weighing a soul against a feather to determine worth, and that they have some special gift or insight that only lets the talented and deserving get published. They don't. Editors are people, and their decisions are often just as much up to chance, mood, and whim as any other person's. Sometimes they publish great stories from really good writers. Sometimes they publish drek. And sometimes the drek is what sells millions of copies, while the new, unusual, or outside-the-norm gathers dust in a discount rack because the drek is what the reading public was willing to shell out money for.

To cut a ramble short, this pandemic has caused me to write more than I ever have before. At the same time, though, I've grown increasingly mercenary with the projects I take on. Because when the words coming off my desk decide whether my landlord gets paid, and if I have food in the cupboard, I don't have time or energy to waste on open calls that might pay me, if I get accepted. Maybe. Half a dozen months from now.

And the fact that so many people in my profession are forced to run that gauntlet as a matter of course to "prove themselves" or "pay their dues" is something I wish I could change. I don't know how, but I've reached a point where submitting and waiting is no longer possible. I'm sure there are thousands of writers out there for whom it was never possible because you can't take a gamble on a "maybe" when you need your bills to be paid for sure.

Just some professional thoughts for the week.

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That's all for this week's Business of Writing! If you'd like to see more of my work, take a look at my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my noir thriller Marked Territory, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

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