You may imagine that a bunch of writers discuss High Art when they get together, but I'm sorry to say they more usually bitch about the publishing business. (The less obvious reason for this is that no writer can talk about his/her own work in front of another writer with the emotional intensity they really feel; it just doesn't work, socially.)
The business as it is presently constituted consists of three parts: publisher, distribution system, and bookstores, followed at a remove by readers. A publisher's actual main customers are therefore not the readers, but the book chains and the big distributors who in turn supply small bookstores and libraries. Present conditions have the publishers trying to push ten gallons of books into a five-gallon pipeline (the distribution system) into a three-gallon bucket (the bookstores). Something has to give, and it does.
One way to get More Stuff through is to speed it up, which is why books whip on and off the shelves with such velocity (category romance novels are given, count 'em, thirty days on the market before being replaced by the next batch). What this means is, the speed of book turnover has grown to be faster than the speed of word of mouth, a slowish process formerly vital to a new book or author. All but the very first readers to buy a book thus have no way to send economic feedback messages back through the system saying, "More, please." The late reader's vote is not counted; the reader who borrows instead of buying casts no vote at all.
The selling of any book traditionally falls into two periods. The first phase takes place months before the book is published, out of sight of any reader, when the publishers send their sales people out to take orders from their real customers, the aforementioned middlemen. I was bewildered when I first heard of a large ad budget being spent on a book when I never saw sign of an ad in any newspaper or even bookstore. Turns out that money was being spent advertising to distributors of various ilks. Publishers have turned, in something like despair, to attempts to buy room for their books in that narrow pipeline; hence such things as paid placement at the front of a bookstore, front page treatment in book chain newsletters, various complex incentives for high volume, etc. (I won't even get into the horrors of the book returns system.) The sales force works like mad to pitch the packaging of their books to a harried crew of buyers who, given the volume of books to pass through their hands, cannot possibly read the actual texts.
Only after those orders are collected is the size of the print run chosen. So to a great degree, the level of success any book can obtain is set before anyone reads it. If orders are low, the book will never have a chance to find readers through store placement, or ever get near any best-seller list. It's like a glass ceiling; breaking through it seems almost impossible. If a book—or rather, its packaging and the sales numbers of previous books by that author—fails to pass muster at the stuffing-in end of the pipeline, no reader (or very few) will ever learn of its existence in order to ask for it. Reader input is limited to an expensive and wasteful negative—readers can (and do) reject books they do see, but they have no way of asking for books they don't see.
Such was the hair-tearing state of the business up to the middle of the Nineties. Then along came the Internet. And publishers' Websites such as Baen's Bar. And Amazon.com, with shelves that never get too full to hold More Stuff. And, most critically—word of mouth got hyperdrive through chat groups and email. Word of mouth got faster, even, than the system's book-removal rhythm.
And suddenly, publishers had an economical way of getting the word out to the excluded people in this process, the actual book readers, of their books' existences—totally jumping over the unfortunate book-blocking nature of the distribution system. Instead of trying to push books through the pipeline, this intelligence network potentially allowed a thousand or ten thousand actual readers to line up on the other end and pull the books through—the books they wanted, not the ones some desperately overworked distribution exec imagined would sell. It was briefly very exciting and hopeful—until the Internet filled up. Still, those new lines of communication are solidly established now.
It is at this point still unclear to me what the Internet will do in the long run to publishing. It's certainly a boom time for readers: more books are simultaneously available in more formats, more readily accessible, than ever before in history. MP3 downloading of audiobooks over the Internet is a new market that looks very promising. So far, e-books seem to be falling into a supplemental niche just like audio books. Tree books are mortgage money; e-books are (still) pizza money, although as the generation comes up for whom reading off a screen is the default norm, and as reading devices improve, I expect to see more e-books sold, or at least downloaded. But I'm not sure how much this will help the economics of individual living writers, as given the infinite shelf space in such e-book stores as www.fictionwise.com (who are adding upward of a couple of hundred new titles a week), writers finds their books competing for reader attention not just with one season's releases, but with a century's worth of offerings. The glut has been shifted from the publishers' laps to those of the readers. Time in which to read is still only issued 24/7, a hard limit. You do the math.
That said, people still want to write, for reasons that have little to do with publishing economics. I have concluded by experiment that teaching writing is not my strength—teaching is a different, complex, and underrated skill—but I get asked how-to questions anyway. My writing methods have a lot of intuitive elements that I can't even analyze, let alone articulate and transfer, so all my tips tend to cluster around problems I've had to solve for myself, which may or may not be the same problems a learner is having. I suspect one could trace most writers' own problem spots just by the advice they give. With that warning, here's a bag of things I've learned or observed along the way.
If you want writing time in your day, you have to take it—no one will give it to you. Often, you can only take it from your own alternate activities; writers' lives tend to get rather stripped-down for that reason. Nowadays, I have more control over my own time, and the limiting factor isn't writing time per se, but the speed with which I generate and refine my ideas. When I was most pressed for time, in my younger days, having a separate place to go work, out of the house—in my case the library, because it was free and quiet—helped focus my energies. Two of my writer friends, back when they both had day jobs, used to have regular lunch dates where they would meet in a coffee shop and write like mad for the first forty-five minutes, eat in fifteen, and go back to work. One, I know, still works in short bursts, just as I still use my outlining system that was originally designed to make my actual people-free first-draft writing time intensively productive, because it was so limited.
Other than a limitless imagination, a fiction writer should possess self-discipline. Writing is great fun, but it's not all fun; if you can't steel yourself to plow through the un-fun parts, you'll never finish anything worth the writing. This quality includes both drive, and relentless self-correction—a continuous search for how to Do It Better, from whatever sources one can find.
We pause now for my "Writer's Block—Your Friend" spiel. There's something in my back-brain which puts on the brakes when I try to do the wrong thing in my book, put in something that the book isn't supposed to be, take a wrong turn. I just go blank. The words won't be forced. It takes a while to sort out if this is what's going on, or if it's just normal distractibility, but when I do get it correctly identified, the only thing to do is go back and revisualize the story itself. Noodling around on the sentence-revision level isn't the cure.
I've come to think theme is an emergent property of a book, and so it really isn't right to talk about a book's theme before the text is complete. But I think what's happening with this kind of block is that the wrong thing I was trying to do wouldn't have fit that complex emergent meaning that doesn't exist yet, but is trying to become. This sense of story, which I often can't even see or name at that point, is the invisible template against which I ultimately test each choice—of action, of viewpoint, whatever. When it finally fits, it all clicks in and I'm off and running again. This process is far more visceral than it is analytical.
Remember that scene from the movie Roger Rabbit, where Roger whips his hand out of the handcuff in which it has been stuck, and the human asks in outrage, "Could you always do that?" and Roger replies, "No! Only when it was funny!" It might seem, in something as apparently generic as an action-adventure novel, that almost any action would do. It doesn't. Only when it fits the theme. Then it's the right one. Then it's unstoppable.
And then there are the writer's blocks that come from simply not knowing what happens next. Some days the ideas flow, some days they have to be laboriously pieced together. Sometimes the attempt at piecing-together jostles the real answer loose. I attack both from the logic-side, scribbling outline after outline, and the long-walk relaxed-visualization-side, and while neither alone is enough, the combination synergizes. Which is just a fancy way of saying, "I think about it a lot, day and night."
In making up a new world, a writer has to be conscious of where language comes from, especially if trying to transport the reader into a different time and place than their everyday normal twenty-first century. (Pardon me while I walk around and admire that phrase. For most of my life, "the twenty-first century" was shorthand for "the future"; now I'm living in it. Time travel the hard way . . . shouldn't we spare a few more moments for marveling?) A writer needs to be a little bit conscious of the sources of words, too. I found in writing books in the Chalion and Sharing Knife series particularly, where the setting is, while not historical, at any rate preindustrial, I had to be constantly watching my vocabulary for anachronisms. I couldn't refer to objects that wouldn't have been invented in those worlds; all my metaphors had to be checked to make sure that they would work in this new context. I puzzled a bit over borderline words like "sanguine" and "choleric," which have their roots in an obsolete theory of physiology that never existed in Chalion, but have since acquired general meanings; I decided to leave them in lest I be stripped of vocabulary altogether.
The inverse of screening wrong words out is putting right ones in. Neologisms in fantasy and science fiction present an ongoing challenge. A certain number of new words are needed for new concepts, a certain number to give atmosphere, but if there are too many the reader may get vocabulary overload. Was that last polysyllable a noun or a verb, a person, a place, or a thing? When as a reader I get saturated like that, the words just fuzz out into meaningless white noise, which is probably not the effect the writer intended.
A large vocabulary and a sense of where words come from, their roots and histories, help keep the writer from going astray. It can take time and a lot of reading to develop this kind of ear, but any newbie can use a dictionary. A quick dictionary check of any made-up word to be sure one hasn't accidentally duplicated a term already taken will help prevent, say, inadvertently naming one's major fantasy character after an airplane part. (True story. Not one of mine, happily.) Checking that one hasn't used some absurd word in a foreign language can be harder, although an Internet search may help here. Ursula Le Guin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," although it applies only to a partial range of story types, is recommended reading to sensitize one to the issues.
When you finish book one, don't just sit down and wait for it to sell; start on book two. Novel publishers want writers who have proven that they are capable of doing continuing work, and at a steady rate, not one-book-wonders. And your second book, or your third, or fourth, may actually be the one that breaks the barriers for you. If you're lucky, as I was, you'll be able to clean out your manuscript drawer then and there (remember, publishers want more than one book, at least until your books tank and then they don't want any). Also, writing the second or later books may teach you more about writing, and more about how to improve your early work, than getting caught in an endless loop of revising the same material and rehashing the same problems.
Right revising is a most excellent thing. Perpetual revising that eats new work is not.
My best advice to aspiring writers is to write what you are passionate about, rather than trying to write "to the market." After all, if you try to write what you think others will like, and its flops, it will have been an absolute waste of your time; worse, if it succeeds, people will want you to write more of the same, not what your heart is set upon. If you love your work, there is more of a chance that others will too, and you are more likely to produce your best—which will create it own market, the mad gods of luck and publishing willing.
So, this ambles roundaboutly over to the next set of hard tasks, not terribly closely related: marketing one's tale.
I landed my first novel sale to Baen without an agent, but I wouldn't recommend this course of action to a new writer. I did it the hard way—wrote seven published books and won my first Nebula. Then I found my agent. On the bright side, she was a very good one.
Besides checking books on writing and Net-based sources, which have grown far more abundant these days (if varied in utility), if a new writer is looking for an agent it certainly can't hurt to attend the larger science fiction conventions, such as Worldcon or especially World Fantasy Convention, where a high concentration of agents and editors appear, and better still, appear on panels, where you can actually ask them your questions. Beyond that, it's just the usual slog of query letters and partials-and-outlines, as described in the many how-to books. If you have a published friend, you can sometimes get an introduction to their agent, but beware that you're putting your friend's professional reputation on the line when you do this. Your offering had better justify it.
Keep in mind, agents are not, normally, writing instructors. (Some agents do critique their clients' work, some don't. Mine mostly doesn't. It's not her job. Wrestling with French tax forms, or Bulgarian pirates, or publishers' accounting departments, or corporate-speak contracts, that's her job.)
Since the mid-Eighties when I broke in, the slush piles have grown bigger and the number of publishers who will even look at unagented submissions has grown smaller. Baen is one of the few publishers who still read slush (unsolicited novel manuscripts), but even they can only "start" perhaps one or two new writers a year. It's worth it to try every channel, but if you can land an agent who likes your work, so much the better. While no agent can sell a book that wouldn't sell on its own, once you have an offer, you'll want an agent anyway to do things like retain subrights, be sure your contract is reasonable, and market foreign sales.
Most agents do not handle short work even for their established clients, so of course new writers who can work at both lengths should send off their short tales to the magazines themselves. There isn't much to negotiate or change in most magazine contracts (though you should be sure you have a proper reversion clause), and a short story sale looks good in one's cover letter when offering a novel. No, it is not necessary to write or sell short stories before tackling novels; different writers have different natural lengths, and it's not a bad idea to play to one's strengths in the beginning.
Much depends on whether one writes better at short or long lengths. Many (not all) writers have a length that comes most readily to them. Both my friend Pat Wrede and I tend to be natural novelists. Our good ideas come in novel-sizes. Her first five sales were novels, before she ever figured out how to construct a salable short story. A lot of famous writers seem to be natural short-form writers. One is most likely to sell whatever one writes best. (Duh.) The odds are about the same, i.e., ghastly. (The mantras "They have to buy something," "Odds are for other people," and "There's always room at the top" are useful when contemplating this. Also "If s/he can do it, so can I." At least when "it" is properly understood as "the bloody hard work.") The short story market is shrinking at present, and many more people complete, and therefore submit, short work than long, so it's very competitive. On the other hand, the turn-around time for new novel submissions has become unconscionably long, literally years sometimes, and one can't simultaneously submit works of fiction. Any professional sale is a good thing, and will look good in the cover letter—selling either a novel or short work to an editor's respected colleague establishes your professional status, and the editor is likely to give your next submission, of whatever length, a closer glance.
There is a lot of on-line help out there these days that did not exist when I was breaking in. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America has a valuable Website—the page at www.sfwa.org/writing is a gold mine. I suggest starting with Patricia Wrede's "Worldbuilding Questions" and Tappan King's "The Saga of Myrtle the Manuscript," and going on till you come to the end. Newsgroups such as rec.arts.sf.composition are on-line hangouts for both new writers and some helpful old pros, and hundreds of on-line critique groups of varying value have sprung up. E-mail had freed writing groups from geography. The SF publishing news magazine Locus is probably the best resource for publishing, bookselling, and convention news, as well as having extensive review columns and excellent interviews with writers. Not to mention photos of both famous and important behind-the-scenes faces—I was able to recognize my new publisher in an elevator crush at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon because I'd seen his photo in Locus.
Which brings us to reviews. Good reviews are always heartening, bad ones depressing. Curiously, a few bad ones manage to be far more excoriating than the ten or twenty good ones are uplifting. There's a psychological study in there somewhere, I'm sure. Ignore the first, enjoy the second, and don't take either sort too seriously.
The most popular novels have both a good story and a good set of characters, accessible to a broad range of readers, not just to a tiny elite. (Though I will cheerfully maintain that elites deserve their reads, too, "elite" and "best seller" don't usually occur in the same sentence for an obvious logical reason.) Books with legs usually need to be books that sell themselves, that people will recommend to each other; clever or expensive publicity can boost a book up onto best-seller lists for a moment, but only the story itself can keep it there for any length of time. There is also the question of cracking that critical mass, of getting enough people recommending it to each other (or arguing about it) that other readers become curious just because they've heard about this thing six times in two weeks in several completely different conversations, and start to actually remember it well enough to go look for it.
Some of a writer's necessary work lies midway between art and commerce, as in learning how to deal with editors and agents and contracts and business etiquette (many writers have no business background, and unfortunately it shows). Paranoia is certainly one of the pitfalls that up-and-coming writers need to avoid. No editor is trying to steal your work, really. It is perhaps also wise to avoid buying too blindly into the "whine and cheese" fests some writers indulge in. Dissing one's publisher, agent, or other professional colleague in public is as unappetizing to listen to as someone dissing their ex-spouse, and can lead the uninitiated newbie into mistaking for adversarial parts of the publication process that are, in fact, best accomplished in a cooperative spirit. It's a good idea for any writer, though, to become aware of what level of sales constitutes success for one's chosen genre, so as to avoid either inflated expectations, or selling oneself short. "How far is up?" can be a confusing question to answer.
I've discovered as my career advances that "take the money and run" is not an option for a responsible writer. By the time one's latest book arrives on bookstore shelves, a lot of other folks have bet their own time, money, and reputation on its success, only starting with its purchasing editor and publisher. The book needs to succeed for them, as well. So I've discovered that some degree of financial independence doesn't actually free me from needing to compete, after all, and that I still care.
Which brings me to authoring. Which is another whole job, demanding yet another skill-set.
While in normal speech "author" and "writer" are used interchangeably, I've found it handy to hijack the terms in order to make a useful distinction. Using the two synonyms gives me a way to talk about two separate aspects of a writing career: the actual sweat and uncertainty and frustration and joy of writing, which no one sees (and which would be very boring to watch); and the promotion, which is where the author gets out in public, but which has nothing to do with writing and can sometimes, for the shy or low-energy writer, be actively detrimental to creativity. The promotional/"author" side involves things like interviews, book tours, convention or speaking engagements, Net-based promotion, writing about one's writing (as I'm doing here), answering fan mail, and the like.
The people who imagine that writing is a glamorous profession tend to be looking at the "author" side of things; reasonably enough, since that's the most visible, and when a writer is out in public like that, he or she is usually trying to look as attractive as possible, in hopes of luring readers to their prose. At home we are much grubbier.
There are moments when one is "only" an author, books tours for example. I certainly get no writing done on book tours. All my attention is taken up with not missing planes, trying not to get sick from the travel stress, trying to pay close attention to a rapid succession of people, and never, ever losing my cool with a reader, even if it's the thirtieth time I've been asked the same question that week. After about the third stop I can get pretty tired of listening to myself. And I develop nightmares about airports.
It takes me two to four weeks to recover enough from such a tour to pick up my thread of thought and begin writing again. About the same for an international trip. So they are very expensive in terms of lost writing time. But then, book tours can feed the writer part of my brain just through being intense experiences—getting out and glimpsing new places and meeting folks and listening to the stories they tell me, not to mention sometimes staying in fascinating hotels that would normally be quite beyond my budget.
After I'd been on a few book tours, I really began to wonder about their economic utility for my publishers, not just their huge time and energy costs for me. It's exhilarating when a mob of readers turn out for a stop, and booksellers are always cool folks to chat with, but surely anyone who'd come to an author's signing would have bought the book anyway . . . ? Book tours alone can't increase sales that much, though they may cluster them in early weeks in an effort to game the system of best-seller lists. It all harks back, I finally realized, to those middlemen again. I theorize that having a tour signals a book as receiving a major push from its publisher, just as raised gold foil lettering once did, and so the wholesalers presumably order more copies nationwide. Either that, or it's pure cargo-cult thinking, or a trap like the returns system; a few people tried tours, sales went up, everyone got into the act, and now no one dares be the first to stop. As they said in Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite films about writing: "No one knows. It's a mystery."
I've been asked whether I think high-profile author blurbs are important to the sales of books. In my experience, readers are largely indifferent to blurbs. The place they seem to be important is, again, during the pre-selling phase, just like the gold lettering and book tours. Like sausages and the law, it is perhaps unsettling to know too much about how books are made—or at least, sold.
One less baffling perk of being an "author" is the authorial meal with an editor. These have various subtle social functions that took me a while to figure out. They are not, as I had somehow expected in dithering anticipation of my first official editorial meal—a breakfast at the '86 Atlanta Worldcon with my then-new publisher Jim Baen—to work out the details of book contracts. Those are done by telephone, with lots of long, thoughtful pauses between calls. What these meals are for is to make the next phone call easier. When you've never met face-to-face, the lack of visual cues over the phone, and presence of unrestrained writerly imagination, can create confusion and misunderstanding. When you can picture the real person, with their actual tics and tones and grimaces and grins, those phone calls somehow go more smoothly ever after. Still, it's a bit startling in the convention green room to witness the fannish cry of "We're hungry—let's go find a restaurant" transmute into the authorial version of, "We're hungry—let's go find an editor!"
The other charm of editorial dining, of course, is the chance to venture into upscale restaurants that neither writer nor editor, in our scruffy at-home personas and income levels, would ever get within whiffing distance of. An editorial dinner was the first time I ever had a waiter come around between courses and rake the tablecloth free of detritus (the area around my plate always seems to have lots) with one of those cute little brass scrapers. At such a dinner with my friend Lillian's editor at a convention hotel restaurant in Dallas, we were all charmed and boggled when we were each brought, between courses to clear our palates, a small scoop of sorbet—sitting on half a lime—sitting in an individual sculptured ice swan about a foot high with a tiny white Christmas light in the base. I swear we hadn't even ordered lighted swans; they just swanned in, as if naturally.
That wasn't quite as surreal, however, as the editorial dinner at Chicon V in Chicago, when Jim and editor Toni Weisskopf took Elizabeth Moon and me out to some tower of power reached only by marble-lined elevators. The vegetable course, a mounded puree of what I dimly remember as featuring mainly turnips, arrived—decorated with a microscopically thin layer of gold foil about five inches square. As a science fiction writer, I take it as my duty to try any food once, a dubious rule that once led me to eat a wichetty grub, but that's another story. Elizabeth, however, was quietly horrified by the gold, and carefully ate around it and under it, cautiously excavating with her spoon. "Elizabeth!" I murmured in maternal reproval. "You're not eating your gold!" We let her have her dessert anyway.
I've been asked what has surprised me most about writing and the writing business. Actually, I live in a state of perpetual surprise. "My God! The Bulgarians paid me after all! I signed that contract three years ago!" "Good heavens! The Dutch sub-agent has disappeared with all the receipts!" "Publishers Weekly gave me a starred review!" "My first quarter's estimated taxes are higher than my first quarter's income!" "The fans put/didn't put that one on the Hugo ballot?!" "They're putting that cover on my book? Eep!" "They're putting that cover on my book? Hallelujah!" "They went to six figures?! Oh! . . . well . . . how much past?" "Somebody e-mailed me from Kazakhstan/Alice Springs/Finland/South Africa/Portugal/Pakistan/Croatia?" "What's 'The New York Times Extended list'?" "A fan who is dying from cancer wants to see my book early?" "The fan I sent the story to last month passed away yesterday." "I've been stuck on this same damned plot point for 2/3/4/5/6 weeks!" "Pirated in Greece? I didn't even know they read SF in Greece!" "My brother/mother/cousin actually read my latest novel!" "How many days ago did you mail it overnight express?" "Korean rights?" "I can't figure out what the devil happens in Chapter 4." "The Russian fans are holding a Bujold convention in Moscow!" "The new minor character, who I hadn't even imagined last week, just hijacked Chapter 4 and is closing in rapidly on 5 and 6. Will my putative hero ever get another sentence in edgewise?" "We got a blurb from her? Wow!" "Perth?" "Spain?" "London? . . . England?" "St. Petersburg? You mean the one in Russia?" "Where is Zagreb?" "New Zealand?"
All real examples. If a week goes by without a surprise, these days, I get pettish. From fried wichetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.