I closely follow tweets by other writers. The most difficult of them for me is those who struggle to finish a novel. Others struggle to edit, or (like myself) simply hate it.
One tweet caught my attention, a woman who’d written and published three novels and working on a fourth. Her question can be summed up as such:
“I’ve spent over a thousand dollars paying for an editor, cover artists and publishing for my novels – yet I’ve only sold a handful. What do I do?”
Why Knowledge of Business is crucial
This – I dare say – is the crux of the matter. Writers need to know business so they can 1). avoid costly mistakes 2). understand marketing issues and 3). decide if they’re in this for the money or for the love of writing.
Now I understand I’m a little unusual. If I learn about something, I try to learn EVERYTHING about it. I can’t just say, “I like sharks” – I have to know EVERYTHING about them. I learn about a genre or a hobby, I need to know what are the controversies, what people like about it, hate about it. For instance, I got whole hog into a rock band recently who I’ve liked one of their songs for 15 years. I knew they existed, but never bothered to listen to any of their other songs. I found out there’s a whole history of controversy around them (including stumbling upon an independent author’s website and being so entranced with one of her stories they even took audio samples of her reading the story and mixing it into a pair of songs based on her story). I can’t buy one album by a band – if I decide to listen to them, I have to buy them all.
Same with learning to write – I have to write, but also I have to learn about every facet of the industry. I understand I’m unique in this way, so I’ll share what I know on this issue.
I’ll answer #3 first. Every writer dreams of writing for a living. Well, that’s kind of like being a musician – we all dream of making millions, and your ideal day being spent living by a lake in the woods (hey, you live where you want to and I’ll live where I want to! Beaches have sand, jellyfish, ten thousand conflicting radio stations, and most cities don’t recognize your ownership claim to any part of the oceanfront – so there’s trespassers legally allowed to lie on land you pay taxes on).
But like musicians, writers have to understand that only one out of a hundred will achieve any kind of success – and that’s the “I’ve sold 45 copies of my book” variety of success. Kind of like those bands that play gigs every Friday night, for $15 a band member.
This is the level of success you’re most likely to achieve.
Then there’s the “I’ve sold ten thousand copies of my book and still have to work a day job” variety. This usually means you’re represented and published.
Then there’s best sellers. The relatively few who make enough money that they live in their house wherever they still live (and wrote their first struggling draft in).
Only Megastars get the huge house or the special country cottage. So if you’ve got rock star dreams of living well in a beachside cottage (bleh), writing is probably not the way. You’d actually stand a better chance of success being a band that plays weddings. Real Estate is the far sure way of making a lot of money, or working in financials such as stock brokering.
So if you’re a writer, you write because you must. Because you were designed to be one. If you take up writing because you’re convinced it’s a get rich quick scheme, try getting a stock broker’s license instead.
So to the woman who tweeted this, obviously, she writes because she’s a writer, designed to be. Has to be. Must be. She has stories to tell.
Answering #1
How to avoid costly mistakes
The first – and most crucial – is learning how to decide, “Is it worth it to spend a lot of money on…”
She’s paid for cover artists. Mistake, or sound decision?
You could go on Fiverr and look for cover artists. Her rationale was, “I could hire someone cheaply and have a color that looks like blobs.”
Mistake, or sound decision?
People judge books by their covers. Bottom line, despite the advice to the contrary. I’ve bought books with bad covers because the genre intrigued me. The books were usually quite good, and the publishers had quite simply spent money hiring poor artists instead of spending much better money on better artists.
Those books invariably were in cut out bins. In other words, the publisher sold out the stock to liquidators to cut losses. End of someone’s writing dreams right there. By the way, one of the more intriguing series I’d gotten this way was a private detective searching for his missing girlfriend – who was a vampire. The series begins with his death by drowning, and transforming into a vampire himself underwater, fighting his way out of the canvas bag. As a religious man, I don’t read things like this any longer, but the author had managed to write several novels like this before the series was cancelled. It never ended, unfortunately. It was well written and imaginative, and I bought every one of them.
And I’m digressing.
There’s a web site where you can get artists to do cover art for you, and they compete by doing the art and then you choose the one you like. I don’t remember the address, but it shouldn’t be hard in today’s information age to find out. This is one option.
So, should she have spent hundreds to find good cover artists? Oh, yes!
This wasn’t a mistake. Getting your nephew who can kind of draw to make a cover is a mistake. So, again, she made sound decisions. If you’re self published, expect to pay a lot of money to see your book in print.
The other issue – editing.
You have three options. The first one is a horrible option: Publishing the first draft with no editing.
Too many writers do this. Don’t do this. Bad decision. No, no, no, no, no! Bad pup!
Decision two – learn to edit yourself. I’ve come up with a seven or eight stage editing process which I’m sure I’ll start teaching people. I like to take huge projects (I never seem to do any other kind) and break it into small, manageable tasks. If you edit this way, use Asana or Trello to manage it.
I’m going to say this is a crucial decision. The more you edit yourself, the better your writing becomes. Little bits of weird writing advice becomes instantly clear, such as “Delete your first chapter immediately!” and “delete the first line of every chapter!” and “Kill your darlings”. Yup, those are crucial bits of advice. Consider that strange sentence that begins your chapter as, “the weird ritual I must accomplish to finish this chapter.”
Next, send it for feedback. Writers’ Digest has the feedback service, and it’s money well spent. If they say, “Why this is marvelous!”, then you edited well, and might want to consider your query.
If the feedback comes back dripping with rejection, critique and comments about your breath, then it’s time to admit you’re not so good at editing and go to option two: Hire an editor.
This is what the woman who tweeted chose. Her rationale? “My novel is a horrid mess, so I hired an editor to make it not a horrid mess.”
Sound decision or mistake?
TWO sound decisions here. She decided rightly that 1). her novel needed help (something many writers can’t recognize – if I got hired by a publisher I’d have signed her to a contract right away on the premise I could work with her) and 2). get a professional. It’s going to cost money. Bottom line.
So she’s made all the right decisions. Good job!
What next?
I’ve referred several times in the past to a music business seminar I went to. The speaker started the seminar by asking us, if we invented the best hot dog in the world, how would we sell them? His answer was advertise. And he spent 30 minutes showing us good advertising and bad advertising. For those of you alive in 1975, what were the best advertising campaigns? Anyone remember? “You asked for it, you got it, Toyota!” The brand name is now embedded into your head. Was this the best advertising campaign? It was successful, but it wasn’t the best. It did however, influence the best advertising campaign ever – because a rock band that struggled for years to be accepted by the industry was able to endure and reach that crucial point where “They’ve been around over 30 years, so they’re classic, legends and industry movers and shakers”. All because they adapted Toyota’s advertising campaign into their stage introduction every concert.
Bad advertising is anything that can’t tell you why to buy the book, gives you reasons not to, alienates the potential buyers (I see people make this mistake ALL THE TIME, including published authors and screenwriters who’ve sold scripts before), or quite simply doesn’t exist.
So, when I saw her tweet, I knew the problem was – no advertising. There needs to be a successful book campaign that acknowledges the first three novels. You need a campaign that culminates in a release party event. So around the time the fourth book is completed, there needs to be the starter of an advertising campaign that will sell not only book 4, but will advertise the existence of books 1-3.
This means when book 4 is released, the advertising must include the question, “Book 4 is out now! Have you read volumes 1-3? Order all four and save dollar three ninety five!” or whatever the package deal is.
I probably should start pitching myself to publishers as an in-house advertising and publicity expert (hey, I was able to advertise my band to a point we were getting nation wide interest, offers from overseas and even the offer of a reality TV show – which we should have taken but didn’t – subject of another blog post I guess).
It’s a little more complicated selling package deals, but not impossible. The key is to advertise book 4 in such a way that you’re also raising the hype of the other three books.
Conclusion
You need to learn business because if you don’t – you’ll end up with only a dozen novels sold. Hey, that’s not bad, when you think about it. Over a dozen people bought your novel, and enjoyed being in your created world. But we want better. Remember the reason we write – we have stories to tell, and we want people to enjoy it.
