Monday(25 July, 2016)

Steven J Pemberton(StevenJPemberton) on (Great) Expectations?

(Great) Expectations?

Writers who pursue publication, whether by the traditional route or by self-publishing, start off with many expectations about how the process will work and what the results might be. Not all of those expectations are realistic. This article explores the unrealistic expectations and offers pointers about what might happen instead. It applies mainly to book-length fiction in the English-speaking world, since that’s what I know about, and what most of the writers I know write or want to write.

The brief for this article was to treat traditional publishing and self-publishing in an even-handed way. Anyone who’s familiar with my contributions to other forums will know that I’m strongly pro-self-publishing and anti-traditional. I’ll try to be neutral, but don’t be surprised if my biases start showing.

To keep the article to something resembling a reasonable length, I won’t say much about vanity presses and scammers who pretend to be literary agents. I’m assuming that you’re wise enough and experienced enough not to fall prey to them.
I’ll first cover expectations that are common to both methods, then those that are specific to one method or the other.

Expectations Common to both Publication Methods

The most obvious expectation is that your book will sell by the truckload. Of the millions of books that are published worldwide every year, only hundreds or thousands will sell more than a few thousand copies. But it can be instructive to work out how many copies you need to sell per year to earn a nice part-time income, or minimum wage, or a comfortable income. This number is much smaller for self-publishing than for traditional publishing, because of the higher royalties on self-published ebooks.

Your first novel is good enough to publish. You might be one of those rare natural talents, a Mozart of the written word, but most of us need years of learning and practice before we’re capable of writing a book that strangers will pay for. Two often-quoted figures for how much learning and practice you need are ten thousand hours or one million words. It’s important to stress that this is directed practice — take classes and read books about writing, study good books to understand what makes them good, show your writing to people who are better writers than you, and use what they tell you to edit it and make your next piece better from the start. If you just write a million words of whatever comes into your head, it’s unlikely anyone else will want to read the next thing you write.

Your social media following will carry over to sales of the book. At its simplest level, pressing a button marked follow or like takes less time, effort and money than heading out to a bookshop (real-world or online) and finding and paying for a book. In the case of Wattpad specifically, many of your followers may be quite young (still at school), and so won’t have a lot of money. If your sales are mainly online, bear in mind that many people of that age don’t have debit or credit cards to buy your book with. Many of them might not live in a country where your book is on sale. (Take a look at the Demographics tab of your book’s statistics on Wattpad. As well as a breakdown by age and gender, there’s a world map, with countries shaded according to the percentage of your readers there — the darker the shade of blue, the more readers. The distribution might surprise you.)

Your book will receive reams of adoring reviews. The anecdotal evidence suggests that a book needs to sell somewhere between 100 and 500 copies on Amazon to receive one “organic” review. (That is, a review that the reader chose to write of their own accord.) Some of those reviews will be unfavourable, no matter how good your book is — you can’t please everyone. Apart from that, uniformly positive reviews look suspicious if a book has more than a few of them. When I see that, I assume most of them were written by the author’s friends or family, or the author paid for them. One of my friends says she reads the negative reviews because she sometimes finds that aspects the reviewer didn’t like are things she enjoys.

Your book will appear on bestseller lists. Most bestseller lists are determined by what salespeople call velocity — how many copies did you sell in the period that that edition of the list covers? So for a weekly list, if you sell 100,000 copies in one week, you’ll be much higher on the list (for that week) than if you sold 10,000 copies a week for 10 weeks, even though the total number of copies sold is the same in each case. (It’s perhaps worth noting that if you’re self-published, you don’t have to care as much about your place on a list as you do when you’re traditionally published. See The book will be on sale in your local bookshop, below.)

You will be interviewed in newspapers or magazines or on TV or radio. It’s not actually all that difficult to get yourself interviewed by the media nowadays — the huge number of publications and channels we have today means there’s always a column or a timeslot to fill. What’s harder is to convert that into sales. Not every reader or viewer will be in your target audience, and not all of them will remember you or your book long enough to go looking for a copy. Research on the effectiveness of advertising suggests a person needs to see a product or brand mentioned several times before they’re likely to recall it, which makes interviews, at best, a time-consuming way of spreading the word about yourself and your book.

You will be paid for any public appearances or contributing a piece of writing to anything. Rather, you’re expected to see it as an opportunity to connect with your fans and gain new ones. It’s not wrong to want to be paid for your time, particularly when it takes you away from other paying work (writing your next book, for instance), but you have to balance that against the possibility that if you ask to be paid for an appearance or contribution, they’ll just go to the next writer on their list, who (they hope) will jump at the opportunity.

You’ll be offered a movie adaptation of your book as soon as it’s published. The numbers alone are against this one. Worldwide, about six thousand feature films are made each year ( https://stephenfollows.com/how-many-films-are-made-around-the-world). Perhaps fifteen hundred of those are in English. Movies these days are split into low-budget dramas (often based on books) and big-budget blockbusters (often based on existing proven properties), with little or nothing in between. For either type, anyone who’s thinking of financing a movie will want to be confident of seeing a return on that investment, so they’ll usually only fund adaptations of books that have already sold well.

(The way movies based on books and other properties usually get made is that a producer will “option” the book. They pay whoever currently owns the movie rights (usually the author unless he’s already sold them) a small amount of money (small in comparison to a typical movie budget). In return, the owner agrees not to sell the movie rights to anyone else for a specified period of time, usually eighteen months or two years. That gives the producer the chance to bring together the necessary pieces — a screenplay, a director, possibly some actors for the main roles, and most importantly, an agreement to finance the movie. If they succeed, they pay the owner a more substantial sum for the right to actually make the movie. If the option runs out, the producer can pay to renew it or let it lapse. In the latter case, the owner of the movie rights is free to seek another buyer. Producers option many more properties than they could ever hope to get made into movies, because they know the chances of any one movie being made are small.)

When the movie gets made, you’ll be able to pick actors / insist on a faithful adaptation / write the screenplay. You can certainly ask for any of those things, but unless you already have a record of successful books and movie adaptations, the likely result is that the studio will laugh and say “no.” They don’t particularly want to adapt your book: they just want to adapt a book (or computer game, or range of toys, or comic, or…). If they get the impression you’re going to be difficult to deal with, they’ll probably choose to save themselves a lot of grief and go to the next writer on their list. In the specific case of being allowed to write the screenplay, writing screenplays is a specialised job, which needs a different set of skills from writing a novel (not least the ability to satisfy the conflicting demands of the director, some big-name actors, and a dozen or more studio executives). As a novelist, you’re probably too close to the book to see what needs to be cut or changed to make it work as a movie.

Writing is an easy way to make extra money. This is partly covered under the previous points, but is perhaps worth highlighting on its own. You might want to work out how many hours you’ll spend writing and editing a book, work out much money you could earn from working at a job for that time, and compare it with how much you’d realistically earn from the book.

Being a writer isn’t a “job” and you can crank out books at your leisure. This one is a little more complex than some of the others. It might be more accurate to say that if you want an income from writing that can replace a full-time job, you have to treat it like a job. Mainly that means taking the time to deliver a steady stream of books that are worth paying for, and being professional in your dealings with everyone you encounter — even the ones who aren’t professional towards you. If you self-publish, you have the option of treating writing like a hobby that sometimes pays you — but don’t then expect it to pay more than a hobby would.

You won’t have to publish more than one book for any of the above to happen. Quick test: name five famous living writers — people you think anyone who reads should’ve heard of. How many have published only one book? I’ll be surprised if the answer is more than one. Sales of most books tail off over time, so if you want an ongoing income, you need to write more books. (The nice thing there is that, as long as your previous books are still on sale, publishing a new book can also boost sales of your older ones, as new readers discover you.)

(Thanks to Wattpad users  @XimeraGrey for Your first novel is good enough to publish and Writing is an easy way to make extra money and Terry_Odell for Being a writer isn’t a “job.”)

Expectations Specific to Traditional Publishing

The obvious unrealistic expectation here is that it will happen at all. You often hear of how one in a hundred or one in a thousand of the people who approach a publisher or literary agent will be offered publication or representation. This is true, but misleading for a couple of reasons. The success rate is per agent or per publisher. So if one says no, try the next one on your list. That said, many writers submit before they’re ready. This much-cited article (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html) suggests that as much as 95% of what publishers and agents receive is unpublishable. (Scroll down to “The context of rejection,” where you’ll find a 14-point scale.) So if you’re in the other 5%, your odds are much better. It can be hard to know in advance which category you fall into, though. Critique groups and workshops can help, but the only way to be sure is to try.

If you write it they will find you, rather than your having to query agents and publishers. Many new writers seem to think that agents and publishers trawl Wattpad and similar sites, looking for hot new stories to snap up. There are probably one or two writers who had that happen, but in general, agents and publishers have more than enough new writers coming to them — they don’t need to go looking for any more. Anyone who contacts you on Wattpad, claiming to be an agent or publisher, is almost certainly a scammer, who’s just after your money.

If you’re rejected, you’re entitled to know why, and to receive a detailed explanation of how to fix it. A few years ago, I would’ve said all you should expect is “sorry, not interested,” but even that’s falling by the wayside. Nowadays, more and more agents say you should assume that if you haven’t heard anything with a certain amount of time, they’re not interested. In the BC era (Before Computers), querying took time and money, so writers were selective about who they approached, and agents could afford to respond individually. Nowadays, email means you can query a hundred agents at the same time with only slightly more effort than it takes to query one. (I don’t recommend that — agents like to see that you’ve put some thought into selecting them, even if it’s only “you represented a book I really liked.”) Agents don’t make any money from writers they reject, so it’s in their interests to reject the unsuitable ones as quickly as possible. Generally, that means wearing out the “delete” key.

Getting an agent is the hard part. Once that happens, it’s plain sailing. An agent’s main job is to sell your book to a publisher, and he won’t offer to represent you unless he’s confident he can do that… but “confident” isn’t the same thing as “certain.” (Agents are basically salespeople, and if there’s one word that describes salespeople, it’s “confident.”) If the agent can’t find a publisher for your book, he may drop you as a client. (You might think he’d just wait for you to write another book and start shopping that, but he may not want to spend the time needed to answer questions and dispense advice while you’re writing.)

You can query in June, have an agent in a few months, sell the book by the end of the year, and have the book in the shops by April. It’s impossible to say how long it will take to get an agent, as it depends mostly on factors beyond your control. Once you have an agent, it typically takes six months to get a book deal. Once the contract for the deal is signed, it takes eighteen months to two years for the book to appear on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. They can move a lot faster when they feel the need, for instance in response to the unexpected death of a celebrity, but most fiction isn’t (perceived as) time-critical.

The editor won’t change anything beyond fixing your spelling and grammatical errors. There are two opposing forces here. On the one hand, publishers publish books that they think will make a profit, and if your editor wants a lot of changes, that takes a lot of time, which eats into any potential profit (and can risk delaying the book’s publication). So that gives the publisher an incentive to choose manuscripts that they think won’t need much editing to make them commercially viable. On the other hand, a good editor can lift a manuscript from “commercially viable” to “great,” and possibly make it more profitable than it otherwise would’ve been. (On the gripping hand, it’s not unheard-of for the marketing department to insist on a book being modified to fit better with what they perceive as a hot new trend.)

You don’t have to worry about spelling or grammar or style, because it’s the editor’s job to fix that, and what they really care about is the ideas. See the above remarks about the acceptance rate. If an editor or literary agent spots more than a few mistakes in your query letter or on your first page, they won’t stop to ask whether your ideas are any good — they’ll reject you without reading any further. Their attitude is that if you don’t know that spelling and grammar are your responsibility, you probably don’t know how to write a book that will hold a reader’s interest over a few hundred pages. It’s like turning up to a job interview in clothes you’ve been wearing for a week, with your hair uncombed and bits of food stuck between your teeth.

The editor makes the changes to your story. Some of them probably do, but they shouldn’t. The editor gives you a list of the changes they want to the manuscript. It’s then up to you to make each change (or present a good case for why you shouldn’t make it). The editor works on several books at a time, and it’s quicker for her to write, “This chapter needs to be scarier,” or “This character needs to be less annoying,” and have you do it. Apart from that, if she makes the changes, they won’t sound like you. And you need to know what the changes are, because it’s your name on the cover, and when a fan asks, “What did you mean when you wrote this part?” you’re going to look foolish if you try to bluff your way through and eventually have to admit that you didn’t actually write that bit.

Because what they really care about is the ideas, what they really want is a love story set in a school for vampires and werewolves, where the school sport involves teams fighting to the death in an arena. Imitating recent bestsellers (AKA chasing the market) is rarely a good idea. You’ll always be compared with the original, and not usually favourably. Given how long it takes most people to write a book, and how long the publication process takes, you’re looking at two to three years (at least) between noticing a trend and having the book on the shelves… and there’s nothing so unfashionable as a must-have from a few years back.

You might wonder why publishers say they want something new, and then publish many books similar to those already on sale. It’s partly that they’re reluctant to take a lot of big risks. The books that are similar to the existing ones are the safe bets that will probably show a reasonable profit, leaving them a safety margin to gamble on a few untested authors. The other reason is the long lead time I mentioned above. The books that arrived in the shops this week were bought by the publishers a couple of years ago, so they’ve had that long to live with the “new trend” — and by now are probably thoroughly sick of it.

You’ll be allowed to design the cover. If you’ve made a living as an artist or photographer or graphic designer, they might let you do it. Or if you’re famous enough that the book will top the chart on pre-orders alone. The cover’s job isn’t to be a beautiful piece of art, nor even to represent what’s inside — though both of those help. Its job is to persuade a reader who’s browsing in a bookshop to pick up the book and read the blurb on the back (or click through on a website). Most of the time, that job is best left to a professional. (That’s not to say they always get it right. Often, the cover designer hasn’t read the book, but works from a brief provided by the marketing department. Often, they haven’t read the book either, but work from a synopsis provided by the editor.)

You’ll be sent on a book tour. (Or, more generally, the publisher will do or pay for any kind of publicity at all.) These days, it’s rare for the publisher to spend a lot of time or money promoting your book, unless your agent talked them into giving you a big advance. Your advance represents part of the publisher’s investment in your book, money they stand to lose if your book doesn’t sell well. The bigger the advance, the more incentive they have to produce a return on that investment. Their thinking is that for a small advance, you have much more reason to market the book than they do. Your book is a big part of your life, so you’ll do everything you can to make it successful. To them, your book is just one product out of many. If it doesn’t sell, it’s no great loss, as they didn’t spend much on it. If they release a hundred books with little or no publicity, one or two will become bestsellers purely by chance. (That’s “chance” from the publisher’s point of view, not necessarily from the point of view of the authors who worked their tails off to promote them.)

The book will be on sale in your local bookshop (if you don’t live in a big city). Assuming you still have a bookshop within easy reach, ask the manager how many titles they carry, and how many new titles they have to consider carrying every week or month or year. Ask them how they decide which titles to carry, and how long they give a new title to prove itself before pushing it aside to make room for something that might sell better. The answer to that last question is typically two to three months, which isn’t all that long when you consider how long it took to create the book in the first place.

Selling the first book is the hard part. Once you get a book deal, it’s plain sailing. There’s a saying in the movie and music businesses — you’re only as good as your last film (or album), meaning that it’s difficult to recover from a release that sells badly. There was a time when publishers were willing to invest in an author’s career over the long term, and would take a loss on the first few books, in the hope of bigger profits later. Nowadays, though, the major publishers are all owned by companies much bigger than themselves, who see them as little more than a line on a balance sheet. That makes them reluctant to do anything that might cost them a lot of money, so if your first book doesn’t sell well, there’s a good chance they’ll drop you to make room for someone else who might do better. There’s also a good chance that they’ll drop you if your tenth book doesn’t sell well, even if your previous nine did. (This is why they now insist that the first book of a series stand on its own — so that if it flops and they cancel the sequels, they don’t have to deal with angry fans demanding to know where the rest of the story is.)

The publisher is your partner. You can trust their contract to protect you both. I hope the preceding paragraphs have convinced you otherwise, but it perhaps bears some explanation. A contract invariably favours the person who wrote it (or who paid their lawyer to write it). In theory, everything about a contract is negotiable before you and the publisher sign it. In practice, if you’re not yet a bestseller, the publisher will refuse to budge on most of the clauses. They have a hundred other manuscripts they could publish instead of yours. Why should they make concessions for you?

Publishing contracts are becoming more and more author-hostile, in the face of declining revenue (bookshops closing) and increasing competition from self-publishing. Publishers nowadays want to make sure they get a cut of any money the author earns by any means. It’s common now for the contract to last for the duration of book’s copyright (your life plus seventy years, in most countries). It’s common for the publisher to take all rights (translations and adaptations in other media), not just the ones they need to publish the book. And it’s common for the contract to have a non-compete clause. Non-competes come in several variants, from the relatively innocuous “author agrees not to publish a book with the same main characters with anyone except us for a year after this book is published” to the indentured servitude of “author agrees not to publish anything with any other publisher (including self-publishing) without our prior permission for the duration of this contract [i.e., the life of the copyright].” If you sign a contract with that sort of clause, the publisher can’t force you to write a book that you don’t want to, but they can prevent you from publishing any other book.

(Thanks to Blayde for If you write it they will find you and @XimeraGrey for Getting an agent is the hard part, You can query in June…, The editor makes the changes to your story, Selling the first book is the hard part, and The publisher is your partner.)

Expectations Specific to Self-Publishing

You can slap your first draft on Amazon and people will buy it. Well, you can, but you probably shouldn’t, unless your first draft is as good as anyone else’s final edit. (Hint: it almost certainly isn’t. Most new writers, and many experienced ones, have difficulty seeing their own flaws.) When you ask people to pay to read your words, make sure they’re worth paying to read. Don’t assume readers will go easy on you because it’s your first book, or because you’re young, or because you couldn’t afford an editor, or because your book is a tenth of the price of the “professional” ones.

You / your friend / mother / teacher can edit and proofread your manuscript. Unless they work as a professional editor (and can charge professional rates), they probably don’t have the skills or stamina to do a proper job of it. (Full disclosure: I’m arrogant enough to believe this doesn’t apply to me. I do my own editing and proofreading, but I have a couple of excellent critique partners, who find most of what an editor would find, in return for my doing the same for them. I’ve managed to fool at least a couple of reviewers into thinking I did hire an editor.)

You can slap your first draft on Amazon and paying readers will happily act as editors and proofreaders. You can then publish a revised edition with their corrections. This is a very disrespectful way to treat your customers. Don’t be surprised if they write reviews warning other potential suckers away. People buy novels because they want to be entertained, not because they enjoy finding all the mistakes and problems you were too lazy or incompetent to fix.

You can reuse your Wattpad cover. Usually the covers on Wattpad are too low resolution (not enough pixels) to be accepted at the retail sites. If the cover uses images that someone else made, you probably don’t have the necessary licenses to use them commercially. If someone else designed the cover for you, you need their permission to use it commercially (separate from any permission to use the images in the cover, if the designer didn’t create those). In some countries, if there’s a recognisable person on the cover, you need that person’s permission to use their likeness (this is known as a model release). You can certainly get permission for all those things, but it can be a hassle if the people you’re dealing with aren’t used to working commercially.

Whatever you do, don’t just upload the cover without asking anybody and assume everything will be OK. If your cover designer or anyone who owns any of the images finds out, they can demand payment (which will be a lot more than if you’d asked them first), or they can demand that you stop using their work. If you refuse, they can sue you, which will be even more expensive. You may also acquire a reputation as someone who doesn’t respect other people’s property, which will make other professionals reluctant to work with you.

You can put a cover together in a few minutes from pictures you found with Google Image Search. Most of the pictures you find online aren’t licensed for commercial use by whoever downloads them. You run the same risks as reusing your Wattpad cover — if the person who owns one of the pictures finds out, they can demand a large payment, demand you stop using their property, or sue you. There are sites that offer what’s known as “stock photography” — libraries of images that have been produced specifically for other people to reuse. You pay a small license fee for each image you want and are then free to use it without any further complications. If funds are limited, you can buy a “premade cover.” An artist creates lots of generic, genre-appropriate cover images. You pick one and pay about $30 to $60. The artist adds your name and book title, then removes that cover from sale, so other books don’t get the same one. You don’t get any customisation, but it’s a lot quicker and cheaper than going back and forth with a designer, trying to perfect the cover.

Anybody you ask to review the book will be happy to give you a glowing 5-star review. The reviewers whose opinions make a difference to sales have long queues. Don’t be surprised if they claim to be too busy, or ignore you, or publish a review that tears your book to pieces. One of the reasons their opinions make a difference is that they don’t say they like everything that comes their way.

You don’t need to do any marketing. This is partly false and partly true. It’s true that a new book is unlikely to be found among the millions that are already on sale without some kind of publicity. But if you have only one book on sale, you’re usually better off writing and publishing a couple more. If you have only the one book and do a lot of marketing, you might sell a lot of copies, but those readers will largely forget about you in the time it takes you to write and edit the next book. (And time you spend marketing is time you can’t spend writing, which will delay the next book.) If you have three or more books on sale, people who buy one of your books and like it can buy another one as soon as they want it. And if they buy every book, the chances that they’ll remember you when your next book comes out is much higher than if they had only one book to buy.)

The way to sell books is to spam social media. (Of course, nobody who does this calls it “spam” — spam is what other people do.) The clue is in the name. People join social media services to be social — to connect with their friends and others whom they find interesting. They don’t join them to be advertised at. A constant stream of “buy my book, buy my book” will get you ignored, unfollowed, blocked, and in extreme cases, reported for breaching the terms of service. Occasional mentions of your book are usually acceptable, if they’re mixed with posts about other interesting things. If you want to advertise to people who might buy your books, start a mailing list. By definition, anybody who willingly joins that wants to hear announcements about what you have for sale.

(Thanks to XimeraGrey for You / your friend / mother / teacher can edit and proofread your manuscript.)

Conclusion
I hope I’ve cleared up a few misconceptions and given some useful guidance. There are many more unrealistic expectations I could’ve explored, but space (and your time) are at a premium. Really, though, I think all of them stem from two things — lack of understanding of how the industry works, and lack of self-awareness on the part of the writer — what you want, what you’re good at, what you could improve, and what you’re better off leaving to others. If you make the effort to study the industry and yourself, you’ll be much less likely to fall into traps or end up disappointed.

About the Author

Steven J Pemberton lives in England, where he works as a software developer. He is the author of The Barefoot Healer series of young adult fantasy novels. The first of these, Death & Magic, is a Wattpad Featured Story. Find out more on Wattpad (StevenJPemberton) or on Steven’s own site, www.pembers.net.