Writing is Art. Publishing is Business.

There is a constant argument in writing circles that I see almost every day. On the one side of it you have people who are here for the art. These are people concerned with the craft of storytelling, with the work of bringing ideas to life, and with the constant need to keep their skills and words sharp. Then there are those who are concerned with actually selling books. These are people concerned with market share, trends in genres, what strategies actually move copies online versus in-person, and all the minutae of making a living in the trade.

Each of these groups have dug trenches, and set up their defenses, each convinced the other is wrong in important, fundamental ways regarding being a writer. However, there is something that's important to remember... this isn't an either/or situation. If you actually want to succeed in this career, you're going to need both aspects of this discussion.

You should work on writing the best books you can... but writing a good book and believing that's all you have to do is like saying if you talk to the cops then nothing bad will happen to you. It's a nice sentiment, but historically, not true in the least.

There's no way around this. I wish there was, but there isn't.

Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Lastly, to be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree!

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Two Sides of The Coin (That Rarely Interact With Each Other)

I've said it before, but there is a truth that bears repeating. I want everyone here, if you take nothing else away from this article, to remember these words.

The success or failure of a book, commercially, has NOTHING to do with its quality artistically.

If you read those words, I want you to read them again. And then one more time just for good measure. Because we all have this assumption that good writing will be rewarded, and bad writing will fail, and there is no evidence to support this belief. We just think that's how it should be, because that's what seems fair.

And this industry laughs in the face of fairness.

Seriously, the Invisible Hand of The Market is just giving you the finger. Always.

Publishing is a business. Pure and simple. The publishing industry does not care about art. It does not care about groundbreaking stories, or well-told narratives, or all those things that matter to most of us as writers. Publishing, on the whole, cares what moves copies, and what does numbers on the market.

That is it. Period.

This is why so much of what you see from the mainstream publishing industry is easily digestible, easily slots into genres, and hits the right bullet points for the largest number of people in the audience. Because publishers are, essentially, gambling on every title they put out. And they do not care if a book is barely-disguised vampire fan fiction with the serial numbers sanded off, or the next great American novel that will move readers to tears and give them a new view on life... if the numbers say the former book is a safe bet, that's what they will publish.

Now, are there publishers and editors who try to elevate books they believe have artistic value, or traditionally come from writers who aren't considered the safest of bets? Of course there are. However, in this case, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The publishing industry, like any other industry, runs on money. A company has to pay a salary to its editors, to its staffers, to its layout people, artists, and everyone else who turns manuscripts into books. Not only that, but there's the cost of printing books, the cost of shipping books, and the cost of all the marketing that's done to help that book move copies. For a book to be a success, it has to not just cover its costs, but make extra profit for the company so that it can take on new titles, and keep doing what its doing. Books that it doesn't think will sell don't get picked up, and that may not be because they aren't good. It may be that they're niche, or that the author isn't well-known enough, or that they're from a genre or style that has, historically, not turned a profit.

At the same time, factors that have nothing to do with the quality of a story or the skill of the author may be deciding factors for getting it published. For example, is the book written by a celebrity or a public figure? If so, then it will likely be greenlit rapidly, because it comes with a built-in audience. Is the book about a hot button issue, or a major historical event that happened recently that people are engaged with? Is this book from an author who has been successful in the past, regardless of the quality of their work? If so, then it gets published.

Art is Just a Product To Money

Consider, for a moment, the world of gallery art. The idea is that if your art is good enough to show in a gallery, and to be purchased for such obscene prices, then clearly your art must be good quality, yes?

It's the same fallacy at work in a different way.

As Adam Conover points out here, the world of fine art is just a grift for the wealthy. They do not care about the integrity or skill of the artist, or the message or quality of the art. They will, quite literally, sell canvases with hot dog smears on them. Why? Not because, "modern art is stupid and ridiculous," but because it makes them money. The art gallery, the rich patrons, and art appraisers work together to jack up the supposed value of this art, and then that art is used as donations, or other ways to avoid rich people paying taxes.

It's a bait-and-switch, and they'll do it with a blank canvas titled Take The Money and Run as surely as they'll do it with a Rembrandt.

Capital doesn't care about artistic integrity. It doesn't care about skill, or pain, or the years it took to tell a tale, or the emotional impact it will have on the audience. Capital cares about profits generated. This is why so many companies were throwing together A.I. slop and trying to get people to buy it; because pushing a button to generate a novel costs them nothing, and can only make profits. Doesn't matter if the product is bunk if it made them money. And if they could do it dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times, even if these books were unreadable, nonsensical drek (or, worse, contained inaccurate, harmful information), at the end of the day, if it made money, it was considered a "good" decision.

Do people prefer well-written stories that touch them? Do readers like characters that stay with them long after they close the covers? Absolutely. However, getting your book into the hands of actual people can be hard as hell when you have to ride the roller coaster of figuring out what obscure factors the all-knowing publishing oracle thinks will or won't make your project a horse they should back.

So What Does This Have To Do With All Of You?

Why am I telling you all this? After all, if you've been around here for any length of time, chances are you already knew most of this. And if this is new information to you, well, you may be wondering what you can do to change it. You probably don't work in the publishing industry, and all you can really do is vote with your wallet, right?

Remember how I said that publishers make decisions based on numbers? You are one of those numbers, and all the things you do, and all the activity you generate, is what makes those numbers go up for the authors whose work you love, and whom you want to support.

As an example, take this novel of mine.

Take my novel Marked Territory, a gritty, gangland noir mystery where the entire cast are street beasts from NYC. This book currently has 19 ratings and reviews on Amazon, and it sells a handful of copies every quarter since it's re-release. Its sequel, Painted Cats only has 12 ratings and reviews, and moves about the same volume.

Now, if I were to write more books about Leo, I'm sure my publisher would take them, and publish them. However, if both of the existing books started getting a lot of ratings and reviews, and moving big numbers (hundreds to thousands of copies a quarter, rather than a few dozen), I daresay that my publisher would be calling me up. Firstly to congratulate me, and secondly, to ask me how long it would take me to get another book into their hands so they could ride this train a little further. It's even possible that, if these books developed a large following, that projects like putting out an audio book, or even going into discussions for film adaptation rights might happen.

And you know something? With the money those sales would generate, I could actually focus on writing those books as the main part of my workday, rather than trying to fit in a few hundred words here and a few hundred words there at the end of the work day.

Money talks. Everything else walks.

I happen to think these books are well-written, fun, told with a wry sense of humor, and that they generally leave readers satisfied. However, even if these books weren't good, that wouldn't matter if they were still doing the numbers I mentioned. If the product makes a profit, it gets published, and gets all the bells and whistles. If it doesn't move those numbers, no matter how much care, love, and art went into it, it sits in the bottom of the bin waiting for someone to dig down deep enough to find it.

And that is where a majority of us are, as creators. We don't have baskets of money to buy advertising for the stuff we make. We don't have legions of followers, or huge controversies getting our names in the news. We just have the books we wrote, and a sincere belief in our work.

But that doesn't move copies, or pay the bills.

So remember this. Because if you want that author you like to succeed, you can't trust that the invisible hand of the market is going to recognize their talent. Be the change you want to see. Be the number on their spreadsheet. Buy copies, leave ratings and reviews, follow thier social media, share their stories so other people can see them. Be an active participant in their career. Because the more people that stand around and cheer, the more people are going to wander over, wondering what it is that's gotten you so excited.

And that is what it takes to make us successful in business.

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Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

That's all for this week's Business of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Writing a Book is an Investment, as Well as a Gamble

For those who don't follow my social media feeds, I complain about being broke a lot. I'm not currently in debt to my landlord, and I'm managing to hold things together as best I can while the pandemic rages, but I'm still well below the threshold for a lot of public aid programs. And while I'd love to suddenly have the fickle finger of the zeitgeist make me an overnight bestseller, until that happens I just keep chugging away and putting out as much content as I can (books, articles, blogs, and more) in the hopes that something gets traction.

What a lot of folks (particularly aspiring writers) don't seem to get, though, is that books are an investment. Something you write today might not catch on by the end of the month. It might not get popular till next month, next year, or even ever. Worse, the bigger the project is, and the more time and energy that goes into it, the more of a risk it is as an investment.

Smut projections look good... if you've got steampunk, off load it yesterday!

I wanted to talk about that this week. Because I've been getting dozens of ideas for novels while I've been staying home and out of circulation, but I also know that a lot of them are a big risk for me as a creator when it comes to time versus profits. And I want my readers to understand the thought process that determines what comes out next from my work desk.

Writing a Book Isn't Free

When a lot of people think of books, they imagine creating something out of nothing. It's just words on a page, after all, and in today's digital world where ebooks are a huge part of the market it's possible to build a successful career for yourself by making and marketing an entirely ephemeral product. However, even if you do the writing, the editing, the book layout, the cover design, and the marketing on your own, that book still cost you something to produce. It took your time, your energy, and your creativity, along with parts of your sanity in many cases.

Speaking of, go get your copy of my book today!

In exchange for all of that time, that energy, and that sheer mental sweat, this thing you've created has the potential to give you money. That's the nature of work, after all; you perform the task, and in exchange you are given money so that you can cover your expenses while also indulging in the occasional bit of excess.

What a lot of folks don't seem to realize, though, is that the more return on investment you need to make a project break even, the harder it can be to actually justify the project in the first place.

Let's Talk Numbers

So, let's say I wanted to write a novel. For this scenario I'm possessed by the ghost of Robert Louis Stevenson, and so I will be able to complete a manuscript in one month (for those wondering where I'm getting this number, it's the length of time it originally took him to pen The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). My average expenses throughout the month, for the bare minimum, include:

- $400 for my part of the rent

- $40 for Internet

- $80 for utilities

So discounting food, transportation, and other expenses that can go up and down depending on my household's status, I would need to make at least $520 from spending my month's energy writing that novel for it to really break even.

Yeah, that math checks out.

That is a tall order to ask for one project, working at the level I'm working at. The important thing to remember is that books can continue to sell over time, though. So if your monthly expenses remain relatively stable, and you continue making sales, you actually need less performance from future works to make sure you break even. And in an ideal world you have enough popular material on the market that your cushion will carry you from one month to another regardless of what else you put out.

Let's say I've been at my desk for a few months, and I've kicked out 5 novels in as many months. Now I just need each book to make about $104 every month in sales to cover the expenses I listed. That would be impressive, but far from unreasonable. And if I had 10 books on the market? Well, each one would need to make $50 and change in sales every month (on average) to maintain that cushion.

So on the one hand it's true that the more stuff you put out on the market, the better the chances you'll be able to keep your bills paid. On the other hand, nothing you do as a writer is guaranteed... and that's the rub.

It's All About Time, and Luck

Let's go back to that above scenario. That first book I wrote while I was harboring the spirit of a famous author had to sell a few hundred copies in order to pay my expenses for the month. If it manages to do that, great, I have essentially bought myself time to work on the sequel. And if it really captured the reading public's attention and sold gangbusters? Even better.

But what if it only sold 100 copies? Or a few dozen? What do I do then?

Well, I tried. Guess my luck wasn't good today.

If that happened in that first month, that would be devastating. Now I've got the power company wondering where their money is, a landlord threatening eviction, and on top of that I'm not eating. But what if it happened with the third book? Or the fourth one? It would still be inconvenient, but if the others were doing well enough that they could shoulder the weight then it wouldn't be as much of a problem, and I could probably muddle through to the next month where the next new release would be able to help boost my earnings.

You know the real issue, though? It doesn't take me a month to write a novel. That's an unrealistic turnaround time for most authors out there (for those of you citing Stephen King and other prolifics, the exceptions prove the rule on this one).

Maintaining a solid daily word count, I can write a first draft of a novel somewhere between 7 months and a year. If you want a cleaned up and edited version that I've gone over, and which the beta readers have seen, you're looking at a minimum of 10 months if I had a serious fire under me. If that novel is going to a traditional publishing house, it could be an additional 6 months to a year before it comes out, depending on their release schedule.

So that one novel would need to earn me more than $6,000 in sales just to make up for some of my bills in the time it took me to write it (to say nothing of additional time waiting for the publisher to put it on the market). And that's assuming there are no hiccups, no delays, no re-writes that add onto the time, and that I can immediately turn around to work on the next thing as soon as it's done.

Then, just to add insult to injury, even if the book does do well it's going to take more than a month for earnings to clear and be sent to me. Sometimes I'll only get a check during a particular quarter, depending on the publisher. So even if the book is clocking sales, I need to have the resources on-hand to wait for the money to actually get to me no matter how popular my work was.

If the game sounds rigged, that's a feature, not a flaw.

This is an even bleaker break down of what I talked about back in "You Can Only Be A Writer If You Can Afford It" Tells An Uncomfortable Truth. Because it takes time for you to get good at writing books, and it's unlikely the first one you write is going to get published. It's also unlikely the first book you publish is going to soar onto the bestseller lists. So you have to sink in even more time, more energy, more sweat, and more research to (as many Dark Souls players will say) git gud.

The Audience is What Really Makes The Difference

With all of this said, the important thing to remember is that writers aren't the ones with the power. You, the readers, are the kingmakers in this game. You are the ones with the power to help ensure that we can keep doing what we're doing.

Because it doesn't matter if we've written one book, a dozen, or a hundred... if no one reads them, our checks will all look the same.

Basically the opposite of this.

This is why I stress so much that if you know an author who's struggling, they need your help! And if you're not sure what to do, just follow the 10 Concrete Ways You Can Help The Authors You Like. If you have money, buy their books, contribute to their patron, buy their books as presents for your friends, and so on. If you don't have money, boost their signal, leave reviews, write blogs or make videos about them... spread the word so other people can find out about the creator you want to support.

Because there is only so much we can do from our side of this equation. And if you help open those floodgates, you're going to get a lot more books into your hands a lot faster.

Like, Follow, and Stay Tuned!

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 sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife as well as my recent collection The Rejects!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!