No, I’m not going to tell you how to be a good business person. Well, I am, in a way, but it’s a more do what I say than what I do, because what I do is spend years completely forgetting to market or do anything vaguely commercial, and then spend some months marketing.
But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. What I want to talk to you about is this: What you do might be art, but it’s also a business.
You should, at least at the back of your head be evaluating what sells and what doesn’t.
No, I don’t mean let it control what you write, or why you write it. No. That’s not on. It’s not how any of this works. Not if you want to stay sane, and not if you are one of the people who gets novels delivered in head and has to write them. Trying to control what you write because “this is selling now” will just drive you insane. Trust me on this, it took me years to stop doing that. And I knew it was stupid even as I did it. More on that later. both of those bits.
But suppose you write a science fiction series that sells so so and a regency romance series that brings in piles of cash. (This would be normal, btw. For me the genre sales ratios don’t seem to apply. No, seriously. My science fiction sells better than my fantasy and my mystery. It’s inexplicable.) Unless you love sf and hate romance, you should prejudice your working time and resources towards the regency.
Also, you should know which of your books is selling best. (DUH.) And you should keep track of which promotions work and which don’t.
For instance, the Little Pickle (younger DIL) wants me to do more cons for promotion. But that might be silly because my sales don’t go up over cons or the couple of weeks after cons. (They actually tend to go down, as I do less writing/promo.) Now she says that’s because I’m enormously entertaining on panels and NEVER MENTION MY BOOKS. She…. er…. might be slightly right. Anyway…. moving right along.
For instance, I know the shifter series is my worst selling series. I suspect I know why, because as Urban fantasy it’s a super-odd-duck. It’s not sexy, the shifters have no pack dynamics, and…. well, it’s not really fantasy if you look at the internals. Anyway….
You might still have to write it, and you should at the very least bring it to an upright and locked position before you hare off, but you can prioritize the things that make you money, if your brain lets you, at least.
So, that is it for how to run your writing business: try to run it as a business, not as this thing you do in the backroom and don’t tell anyone about, including the neighbors. (FYI they think it’s some weird sexual perversion you do in there. They told me.)
But then there is another level of complication: every so often one of you gets a wild hare and decides you’d be ever so much better off if you were traditionally published.
Look, I get it, I do. I was there once. In my defense I was young and stupid (the two often go together) and also there was really no other option, beyond “have a bazillion books printed and sell them off the back of your car” which given my accent and introversion just weren’t going to happen. (With my accent, people would expect weird sexual perversions. With pictures. No, I don’t know why. It just seems to be the assumption.)
Anyway, I had no other choice. But I also believed a whole bunch of nonsense which was never true for me (note it seems to have been true for other people. At least I had some very weird conversations with one author for whom it worked like this, but it never did for me, nor for any of my friends, including the bestsellers.)
But I’d read a lot of books from the forties, where writers were friends with their agents and publishers, and the agents and publishers helped them out with loans, or visited to see why they were depressed, or helped brainstorm the next book, or–
It’s not like that.
You see, publishing is a business. At this point, what with indie and tech catastrophic innovation, it’s an even crazier business than it was when I was working with trad pub, but it’s still a business.
What does this mean? Well, they have their own interests. They will buy or not buy your book based on their interests and what they think will make them money.
Which has bloody nothing to do with whether your book is good, or even great.
Publishers buy what they think will make money. And because they’re big businesses compared to you, they will tend towards the “middle ground” for what they think will sell.
Unless they’re a publisher run by a billionaire as a hobby or a tax write-off, they actually have to run it according to “average taste” and “average interest” and such.
So publishers will prioritize Fantasy over science fiction, Mystery over both, and romance most of all. Because Romances sell best, followed by mystery (actually mostly thrillers) and then fantasy, with science fiction dead last.
And if you try to bring them science fiction, they will not buy space opera, unless you already have a name in space opera. Because they’ve become convinced non mil-sf space opera doesn’t sell.
Look, we all attended school a long time. We tend to think of publishers like we thought of teachers.
Sure, sure, you want to be traditionally published because you don’t know about covers, and you don’t know how to market, and you just want to write and turn the book over. Yeah, whatever, except if you read here you know most trad pub also doesn’t market most authors. And covers can be hit or miss, and if it’s miss you’ll still have no say.
So, really when you come to me telling me you JUST want to be traditionally published, what you really want is assurance your writing is good, that you’re a real writer, that you’re worth something.
And that is nonsense.
You could write the best book in the world. If it’s a brilliant literary hard sf and you’re a writer on the political right, it’s very likely it will never be published. Why? Well, because if it’s not a Baen kind of book, no one is going to touch you unless your politics are leftist. That’s all.
The other people are convinced people on the right don’t read, so they don’t want to publish a book they think no one will read.
And Baen has to look out for its own bottom line, and while I happen to know they love hard SF, the “literary” part would give them pause, and probably make them decline.
This wouldn’t mean your book wasn’t the most brilliant book in the world.
JUST that the publishers, following their own interest, wouldn’t buy it.
Now, if you have the type of mind that can guess what the publishers think will sell (the number of times they’re wrong is astonishing, but that’s something else) then yes, you can sit there and write to the publisher taste, and you’ll probably get published and might even get the publicity and all (But that’s doubtful.)
BUT if you have that type of mind, you can do analysis on what sells indie (the numbers are available various places) and just write to the actual market.
It might even work, since the indie production time allows you to jump on trends while it’s hot.
Now, if you think you have that kind of mind, please check. Because I could do that, to a point, but after a while started getting so depressed and burned out I couldn’t write at all. So, make sure that’s not the case with you.
However, if you can do it, do it. And if you really want to go with trad pub, do so. Provided you do it as a business: make sure they’re paying you enough, read the contract well and get it read by a lawyer (agents are not very good at telling you to just walk) and make sure they’re actually doing all the stuff they’re supposed to, and you’re not doing it, plus letting them take the lion share of the money.
Because the publishers are a business. No matter how cordial they are with you, they’re not buying your books and publishing them for their amusement. They’re doing it for a business.
You’ve heard it said about your mother, but it’s much more so with your publisher: if your publisher says he loves you? Verify it.
Don’t confuse the relationship with feelings. Do your job and let them do theirs.
And if you find it’s either getting in your mind or that you’re not getting what you want out of it?
Take a walk on the indie side.
Because it’s there, it’s available, and there’s no reason not to.
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “The Business of Art”
Snickers. I’ve read your books. You think they’re wrong? 🙂
Well, not in the way they’re imagining anyway.
Or it could be too long and so intricately woven that there’s no place to cut or split it, or it could have a character who speaks pidgin English even if it makes sense for that character and that’s how you can convey the difficulty of speaking or understanding a foreign language. You can still have every editor, publisher, and agent in the world proclaim it as brilliant and still turn it down. Worst of all, you could waste 12 years of your life trying to sell the literary equivalent of the Sistine Chapel and get nothing in return. Been there. Done that. (Actually with my wife’s book, not mine.)
I’m convinced I have a path to a market via Indie. Also I can get a trickle of income along the way while I slowly establish a reputation unlike trad pub, which is like betting your life savings on double-zero and hoping to hit the jackpot. There’s a local writer’s support group (no, not a critique group), but I quit going because they’re focused on trad pub. I just don’t care anymore. Yes, I still crave validation. Duh, I’m a storyteller. It’s just that I crave validation from readers, not “authority” figures. Yes, I know that validation will only come in trickles and will take a lot of time. Yes, I also obsessively follow whatever numbers I can latch onto like a drowning man reaching for a scrap of his wrecked ship, especially because the statistics are so minuscule at this point. That’s how I know Maxwell Drake is right when he says for every twenty sales, you get one fan.
Fortunately, I’m not 22 and hoping, nay desperately pleading, to make a living thereby anymore. No instead I’m 74 and only have so much time to write what needs to get out before I succumb to dementia and end up babbling to an uncaring worker in a rest home who just wants to change my sheets.
72, here, and boy-howdy I hear you on that. I have a whole ‘nother series beating a hole in my head that I want to get out in time, but I’m racing against time trying to get my retirement finances secure enough that I can get back to writing.
I know how to indie publish (several books), but eventually that will evaporate, and there’s only so much time…
I couldn’t possibly publish No Man’s Land in trad pub. Just couldn’t. Too big a risk for them.
As far as I’m concerned, the absolute fundamental thing about indie for a beginner is this — that Print-on-Demand means you can spend years writing and publishing and not making any money — but you aren’t really losing any either. Or at least, you don’t have to be. That means that you can keep trying. Business-wise, if you lose money that’s game over. I’d love to make millions. Currently, I’m settling for the realization that there are five or ten people, who are not my family, who derive enjoyment from my books. Between those two groups I can pay for cover art and amuse myself writing. I know that my next step is to learn marketing, and I know what the next business steps would be if I were a sudden success, but till then, I’m keeping it real.
Just keep writing and publishing. You’ll get there. What you describe is infinitely better off than most who pursue trad pub. Writing is like craft selling with one HUGE advantage. You only have to write a book once, and you can sell it a million times, and with todays copyright laws, basically forever.
Sarah, especially over the last 10 years, I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s turned into a money laundering / welfare system for Democrat politicians. Which means that a major factor in whether any non-Baen will publish you will be your donation record as found on opensecrets. Heaven help you if your donation record isn’t a) present and b) 100% Democrat.
How much longer this scam can go on is an open question, but it’s something to be aware of NOW.
You beat me to it — ‘Trad-Pub is a money laundering racket for corrupt politicians.’
And has been so for a lot longer than 10 years. Multi-$million advances for books nobody will ever want to read. Most of which, the only words written by the politicians were their names.
There might have been a transitional period of “we’re publishing this because known name, and the ghost writer will pick up the slack” accelerated by “but we are not going to publish works by public figures we don’t like,” but if so, that period dates to when I was in college, which was um, a while ago.
One other thing I will say about Trad Pub is that, if you’re male, your options are much more limited. I was hanging out in the library the other day, waiting for my mother, and browsing the new fiction shelves. The ratio was something like 5 female authors for every male author—and in YA, it was much higher, closer to 10 to 1. It’s not fair, and it’s not right, but it also seems to be reality at the moment.
I’d read a lot of books from the forties, where writers were friends with their agents and publishers, and the agents and publishers helped them out with loans, or visited to see why they were depressed, or helped brainstorm the next book.
I wonder how many of those bits were thrown in due to the fact that the author wanted to flatter the agents and publishers he was hoping would represent and buy his book…
Oh yes. It was already like that — it’s female biased — by the time I broke in over 30 years ago.
The funny thing is that htey whined continuously about how men had it better.
“they actually have to run it according to “average taste” and “average interest” and such.”
If traditional publishers had the faintest idea what average tastes and interests really are, they wouldn’t be in their present parlous state. Losing sight of what most people wanted to read was why the publishers switched to using their own tastes and interests as a proxy in the late 1990’s.
And the decline in print runs starting from that date both shows how poor a proxy that is, and explains the growth in exploiting and abusing the authors selling to traditional publishers. The pie is shrinking, and the publishers don’t know why; they can’t make it bigger, but they can take a bigger share of it, and stay in business a while longer. Until, that is, the authors stop working for crumbs and the pie vanishes completely.
yes, of course. but it’s THEIR perception of what the average taste is. And its’ their money, so….
You assume it’s not a way to hide bribes.
Indie publishing is probably one of the things we should give thanks for this Thanksgiving
Oh, most definitely yes.
My uncle’s advice for if someone wants to be an artist was to get a degree in business.
Basically, you’ll learn your art by doing it, but all the stuff around making your product into a living you’ll need to get somewhere else.
Eldest is absolutely obsessed with drawing and wants to become an illustrator. I’m definitely steering her in that direction in between feeding her art supplies.
I wish I’d done that.