Here’s the only thing you need to know about shortcuts to a successful writing career: There aren’t any.
There are alternatives to the traditional process. Lots of them. But none of them are shortcuts.
Let’s look at a few.
1. It’s who you know.
Connections, as I mentioned in my post on Dealing with Rejection, will open a door for you, but that’s all they’ll do. They won’t walk you through it and they won’t guarantee what will happen on the other side. Networking can absolutely make you in this business. It can open opportunities you wouldn’t have dreamed of… but only if your product is good enough to stand on its own. Someone might take a chance on you as a favor, but not if it’s a losing proposition that might hurt their own reputation. Nothing’s going to happen for you unless you’ve already put the work in, developed your craft, and built the kind of credibility that will make your contacts proud.
Also to consider: Networking opportunities cost money. Even if you can write off your workshop or convention airfare and hotel as a business expense, you’ve still got to have that money on hand to lay out. There are a lot of networking opportunities happening around the world every year and it’s not realistic to go to all of them. You’ve got to pick and choose them carefully. And conventions, when you attend them as a professional, are work. You’ve got to have your networking persona on 24/7, have your pitch always at the ready, and still maintain the charisma and control not to come off as unfriendly or desperate. Then there’s the researching and preparation for your panels and the bookkeeping that follows up on the sales you make. The time you spend at conventions and conferences also needs to be balanced with your day job, your family time, and your writing time.
2. Self-publishing
Self-publishing isn’t a shortcut. Don’t listen to the people who tell you it is. Yes, it’s a shortcut to getting a bound copy of your work, but it’s not a shortcut to success. All you’re doing when you self-publish is trading the long hours and hard work of submitting to agents and publishers with the long hours and hard work of tirelessly marketing and self-promoting. You won’t have any support system to sell and distribute for you, it’ll be all you, all the time. You will have to eat, sleep and breathe book just to break even on your print costs, and even then you’ll be fighting against an enormous handicap. You’ll have a very hard struggle ahead of you to get taken seriously by publishers and booksellers, and your opportunities for distribution will be extremely limited. You’ll be selling from your website and from the trunk of your car, and your most important challenge will be finding creative marketing strategies that make people look beyond the “self-published” label and actually read your writing.
Don’t confuse small press with self-pub. Small presses are still legitimate publishers and their place in the market is growing. To print with a small press, you still have to submit your manuscript, get it accepted, get a contract, and then the publisher prints the book.
Self-publishing is where you go out and pay a printer yourself. There’s no acceptance procedure, just a simple business transaction. You hand over your money and your file, and you get books. The bias against self-publishing exists because of that lack of acceptance procedure. Self-pub does away with the gatekeepers — the agents, the publishers — who weed out the stuff that’s not up to professional standards. Thus, a lot of the material that’s self-published is of amateur quality and really isn’t ready or suitable to be published at all. That’s not to say that it’s all amateur. It isn’t. But there’s a popular perception that it is. If you’re throwing yourself into that pool, it doesn’t matter how good your book is, the struggle to distinguish yourself is going to be very hard work.
3. Podcasting
Recording a podiobook isn’t a shortcut to success any more than self-publishing is a shortcut to success. These writers aren’t circumventing the hard work that goes into landing a deal with a major publishing house; if anything, they’re working harder. While traditional paths to publishing deals involve sending and keeping track of a lot of mail, creating a professionally polished podcast with top-notch editing and mixing is a much harder and more time-consuming endeavor — even moreso if you’re determined to do a release with a full voice cast and ambient music and sound effects. Doing it for free in hopes of gaining some devoted fans and the ear of a publishing executive is really nothing more than a labor of love for the craft. It requires a lot of skill-learning and a serious investment of time.
A growing number of writers are finding success through podcasting their fiction. The podcasters who produce the high-end podiobooks that earn attention, really earn the attention they receive. They put out excellent, polished books with excellent, polished production values. On the down side, many of them will tell you that the editing and mixing takes up a large portion of their time, and that means that it takes time away from their writing, too. On the up side, fan feedback and praise can be a great boost to balance out the sting of rejection letters while you work on getting your novel noticed by people in high places. Is it a viable avenue to a print publishing deal? Definitely. You can even do it concurrently with the traditional query and submissions route. But it’s not, by any stretch, a shortcut.
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The point I’m making here is that, no matter what, your product has to stand up for itself. It has to meet a standard of quality and it has to be something people want to read. There are less-traditional paths toward publication that are open to you, but they’re no less work, they’re only a trade-off in terms of how and when you do the hard work.
You can do the legwork up front and send out hundreds of submissions to get yourself an agent or a publisher, go to a ton of conventions and workshops to make good contacts, or you can put the product out first and do the legwork afterwards in the form of tireless promotion and marketing. One form of work may be easier or more natural for you than another depending on your personal skillset and situation, but the amount of work is still the same.
The success stories that you hear about aren’t fairy tales that prove that shortcuts exist; they are examples of what can happen when top-notch talent and determination meet in the right place at the right time.
- Self-Publishing, SF/F, and Standards of Quality (43.1%)
- Learning to Delegate (43.1%)
- 2010 Parsec Finalists (13.8%)
- Parsec Finalists (12.9%)
- Podcasters in the News (10.5%)
{ 1 comment }
Gabrielle,
Excellent post, thank you for that. You have laid out the reality that serious self-publishers have always faced, regardless of the technology available to print books. It really is a significant leap for most authors to go from writer to publisher, with all the specialized knowledge, marketing and pr that that implies. The niche non-fiction author with a reputation or a business need in their field who decides to self-publish knows how to treat the business as a business. But shortcuts? That’s pop mythology.
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