The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (32 page)

All this is definitely true for fiction writers, and it will also be true for many nonfiction writers, except, perhaps, for celebrated entrepreneurs, popular experts, trendy memoirists, and others who can command a big advance from a traditional publisher.

Is self-publishing easy? No and yes. “No” in the sense that no ambitious venture is truly easy. “Yes” in that it’s a rational enterprise in which your result depends largely on the quality of your effort and investment, especially in the areas of marketing and sales. That alone is a big improvement over traditional publishing, which for many writers has basically been a misery-generating crapshoot. But don’t take my word for it—here’s best-selling author and Internet marketing guru Seth Godin (who has also given up traditional publishing in favor of self-publishing) on why even obscure authors should self-publish:

No Knight, No Shining Armor.

“Sure, Seth can do that, because he has a popular blog.”

Some people responded to my decision to forgo traditional publishers (not traditional books, btw) by pointing out that I can do that because I have a way of reaching readers electronically.

What they missed is that this asset is a choice, not an accident.

Does your project depend on a miracle, a bolt of lightning, on being chosen by some arbiter of who will succeed? I think your work is too important for you to depend on a lottery ticket. In some ways, this is the work of the Resistance, an insurance policy that gives you deniability if the project doesn’t succeed. “Oh, it didn’t work because we didn’t get featured on that blog, didn’t get distribution in the right store, didn’t get the right endorsement...”

There’s nothing wrong with leverage, no problem at all with an unexpected lift that changes everything. But why would you build that as the foundation of your plan?

The magic of the tribe is that you can build it incrementally, that day by day you can earn the asset that will allow you to bring your work to people who want it. Or you can skip that and wait to get picked. Picked to be on Oprah or American Idol or at the cash register at Borders.

Getting picked is great. Building a tribe is reliable, it’s hard work and it’s worth doing.
6

The fact that you’re reading this book shows that self-publishing can work even for someone much more obscure than Godin. I’ll tell you the steps I took to get here in Section 8.9. First, however, let’s examine the essential differences between empowered and disempowered careers—one of the most important topics in this entire book. And then we’ll explore the details of strategy and marketing for empowered self-publishing writers.

1
Piper, “She’s Looked at Life From Both Sides Now,” Smith (blog), August 4, 2006 (www.smithmag.net/memoirville/2006/08/04/shes-looked-at-life-from-both-sides-now/).

2
Tara Bannow, “Amanda Hocking Signs Four-Book Deal With St. Martin’s Press,” March 24, 2011 (www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/24/amanda-hocking_n_840169.html), originally published by the Associated Press.

3
Geoffrey Fowler and Jeffrey Trachtenberg, “‘Vanity’ Press Goes Digital,”
Wall Street Journal
, June 3, 2010 (online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html).

4
Barry Eisler, “Why I’m Self-Publishing,” The Daily Beast (blog), March 24, 2011 (www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/03/24/barry-eisler-explains-self-publishing-decision.html).

5
Both the Wilson and Konrath stories are from the
Wall Street Journal
article cited in footnote 4. Regarding Wilson’s story, note that when traditionally published books go out of print, the rights to them typically revert to the author. This story also illustrates how traditional publishers often give up on books that still have a lot of life—and sales—left in them.

6
Seth Godin, “No Knight, No Shining Armor,” Seth Godin’s Blog (blog), November 11, 2010 (sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/11/no-knight-no-shining-armor.html). © 2010 Seth Godin. Used with permission. (By “Resistance,” by the way, he’s referring to Steven Pressfield’s conception of procrastination, from The War of Art.)

I
t is very important to your writing, and your life in general, that you understand the difference between disempowered and empowered careers.

Disempowered careers:

• Are vague and irrational
  .
  The goal (“to have a best seller”) is often ill-defined, and so is the path for getting there. Luck plays way too large a role, so it’s hard to make wise choices and you can’t predict the outcomes of your efforts. (Note how closely this irrational, luck-dependent scenario gibes with, and supports, perfectionist grandiosity; Section 2.2).
  Two related problems are:
  

Faddishness.
Publishers are notorious for jumping on the latest fad—be it drug memoir, chick lit, or something else—and then just as abruptly jumping off. If your book happens to even vaguely fit that fad, lucky you—although you might regret it later if your book gets hideously mis-marketed. But if your book doesn’t fit the current fad, you’re going to have a tough time getting noticed.

As alluded to by Godin above,
overinfluential and often arbitrary gatekeepers
with disproportionate power over your fate. In publishing, these aren’t just editors or agents, but teachers in MFA programs who connect favored students with agents and publishers (Section A.8), and the legions of overworked, underpaid, underqualified, low-level staffers who are often the first-line reader at many agencies and publishers.

• Are unstrategic/unplanned.
  Of course, you can’t plan within an irrational system.
  
• Don’t leverage your strengths
  .
  (Or others’.) As Grimes’s story illustrates, it’s hard to act effectively within a disempowering system. Your strategic, creative, business, and other talents will all largely go to waste.
  
• Force you to spend time on low-value activities.
  For instance, mailing out dozens of query letters, or spending hours trying to convince your publisher to make sane marketing decisions.
  
• Mire you in overgiving and codependency
  (Sections 4.8 and 4.9). For instance, jumping through hoops to get an agent or editor, and then doing most of the work to maintain that relationship. Also, lots of boundary violations—e.g., relationships that merge the professional and personal—and lots of unspoken needs and motives.
  
• Reject or underutilize 21st-century technologies and business models.
  Even into the 1990s, many agents and editors were not accepting queries via email. More recently, many publishers remain behind the curve on ebooks and social media.
  
• Tend to isolate you or embed you in unhealthy communities.
  Such as bitchy, competitive workshops or cult-like coteries of acolytes of famous writers or editors.
  
• Unsustainable
  ,
  financially, emotionally, and otherwise. Also, negatively impact the rest of your life.
  How much inequality, rejection, poverty, and stress can you take?
  

Disempowered careers are also characterized by:

• Unequal access.
  See, for instance, Tom Grimes’s interactions with his agent (Section 8.1).
  
• Automatic bias/disrespect.
  Consider the term “slush pile,” which agents and editors use to refer to their stack of unsolicited queries or manuscripts, each representing some writer’s cherished dream.
  
• Disparity in investment, and return-on-investment (ROI).
  You spend years writing a book and someone spends minutes evaluating it. Or you spend years writing it, and considerable time and money promoting it, but get only a minute fraction of each sale.
  
• Devaluation of your needs.
  For example, for a prompt reply to a submission, or prompt payment, or a clear royalty statement, or a cover that reflects the book’s intent.
  
• Harsh or callous rejections
  .
  See, for instance, the Grimes and Culver examples in Sections 8.1 and 8.2.
  
• Misaligned incentives and objectives.
  Meaning, people get rewarded for the wrong activities—or no activity. For instance, booksellers who get full refunds from publishers when they fail to sell your book, and therefore have no incentive to actually sell it—especially when the latest celebrity tell-all just flies off the shelves. Or, the amount of effort you want your publisher to put into marketing and selling your book versus the amount they’re actually prepared to put into it, given that they’ve got dozens of books—including that tell-all!—to promote this season.
  
• Rigidity.
  It’s the publisher’s (or editor’s) way or the highway. (Another perfectionist symptom, by the way; see Section 2.7.)
  
• Short-term thinking.
  Publishers often abandon books if they don’t sell strongly within the first 90 days. (And yet another perfectionist symptom.)
  
• Victim-blaming
  .
  Despite all of the widely recognized shortcomings of traditional publishing, if a book doesn’t sell, the publisher is likely to blame the book or writer.
  

Empowered careers, in contrast:

• Have precisely defined goals, and are rational.
  The goal is clearly defined, and so is the path for getting there. The role of luck is minimized, and there are no overly influential gatekeepers.
  
• Are planned and strategic.
  Strategic means the plan is crafted by working backwards from goals. (See next section.)
  
• Leverage, and build on, your strengths
  , and those of others. Also,
  let you invest most of your time in high-value activities
  (Section 4.8), such as writing, building your audience, and supervising the Web developers, marketers, and bookkeepers whom you can, in an empowered career, afford to hire.
  
• Support clear and healthy boundaries.
  Responsibilities are transparent and rational, and everyone’s responsible for meeting their own needs but also motivated to support everyone else in meeting theirs.
  
• Leverage 21st-century technologies and business models.
  The bulk of these are hugely empowering of writers—which may, in fact, be why publishers have been so slow to embrace them.
  
• Engage you in healthy, egalitarian communities.
  For instance, the professional writers’ associations (romance, science fiction, mystery) mentioned in Section 3.9.
  
• Are financially, emotionally, and otherwise sustainable.
  In fact, they add joy, meaning, and sustainability to the rest of your life.
  

Empowered careers are also characterized by:

• Equality of power and access.
  
• Respect
  .
  
• Reasonable returns-on-investment (ROI).
  In most cases, a writer who self-publishes a salable book can expect to make much more money per book than one who goes with a traditional publisher. How much? For a paperback book, you should aim for
  at least
  a 50% profit over your production and marketing costs (Section 8.9). For an ebook, you should expect to retain anywhere from 60% to 100% of the sale, depending on whether you sell the book off your own site or off another site that takes a commission. You’ll have to subtract credit card fees (usually 2% to 3%), and perhaps the cost of an inexpensive shopping cart service, from the above profits. But even after you do, your profit will far outstrip the measly 5–10% royalty payment you could expect to earn from a traditional publisher.
  
• Compassionate rejections
  .
  Because (1) you’re dealing with equals, (2) codependency is minimized, and (3) everyone is operating in a climate of empowerment and abundance, instead of disempowerment and scarcity. Also
  consideration of your needs
  , for the same reasons.
  
• Aligned incentives and objectives.
  The freelance artist, editor, and marketer/Web developer whom you hire to assist you—and who probably want you to hire them again for your next book—are far more likely to care about doing a fantastic job than your publisher’s overworked and underbudgeted marketing team.
  
• Flexibility.
  You can try different publishing or marketing tactics and see what works. Flexibility is a hallmark of empowerment, and one of the really fun aspects of self-publishing.
  
• Long-term thinking.
  I.e., in terms of what’s best for your career and life, instead of having to reactively chase the latest fad.
  
• Problem-solving, rather than blaming, orientation.
  And when conflicts arise, they are resolved cooperatively (Section 4.11)
  

Can you be empowered in a disempowering system?
There are two answers to this:

(1) Perhaps, but why bother? There’s plenty of empowerment in the world.

(2) To do it, you need to know exactly what the rules are AND you have to be at the top of your game. In fact, that’s precisely how successful authors have always succeeded—by treating publishing like the business it is, and ignoring grandiose misconceptions (Section 2.2), pervasive deprecations (Section 6.7), and especially disempowering strictures concerning how writers are “supposed to” behave—e.g., that they’re supposed to be grateful for the opportunity to be published, and satisfied with the crumbs from the publisher’s table.

In the absence of today’s fabulous print-on-demand and Web technologies, those authors didn’t really have a choice but to work within the system. We do. So, I repeat: Why bother? The fantastic Konrath quote that I began this chapter of
The Seven Secrets of the Prolific
with bears repeating:

For the first time in the history of publishing, writers have the upper hand. Don’t piss that advantage away by thinking that this is still 1995.