This is a post for writers, about career planning and publishing. (It’s Wednesday, after all, writing or publishing day on the new schedule!) This post is part of of a workshop I’m putting together for January for TRW.
One of the things I’ve learned in 19 years in publishing is that the entire business – and all the relationships within it – work best for the author when the author knows exactly what he or she wants from publishing. As authors, we tend to think this is easy stuff – we want to succeed! – but the truth is that each of us will define success differently, and our respective goals can make a big difference in the choices that we make.
In fact, knowing what we want is the best way to find a path through the maze of publishing.
Here are some examples to illustrate. Meet Author A, Author B and Author C. All want to succeed. All want to write books. But if we look closer, they have very different goals. They have different definitions of success and different measures of how they’ll know when they get there. As a result, they will each make different choices.
First up, definitions of success and concrete measures.
Author A wants to be famous. She wants to walk into any bookstore in the world and see dumps of her latest book. She wants to be on television, interviewed on radio, be on the cover of magazines. She is prepared to write whatever is necessary and to do whatever is necessary to make this happen. Her concrete measure of success is having her book at #1 on the New York Times list of bestselling books.
Author B wants her voice heard in the world. She has very firm ideas about her books, and about the way they should be written and maybe even how they should be marketed. She wants to see them published exactly as she wrote them. She wants to leave a legacy of her creative work and vision. The concrete measure of success for this author is having a hard cover edition of her book in the library, catalogued and shelved in Fiction.
Author C has more modest goals. She’s not interested in fame, or the demands of publicity, because her life is full of other obligations. Maybe she has young children or is a caregiver. Writing is the one thing she does for herself, but because of her family’s financial realities, she wants that writing to earn enough money to justify her doing it. She wants to contribute to the household’s finances on a steady level, without feeling pressured to choose between work and family. Writing can give her the opportunity to work part time from home and make a steady income, without needing to hire sitters or other caregivers. Author C’s measure of success is earning the same amount per year from her writing that she could make from a part time job outside of the home – she’s defined this as an annual gross income of $25,000.
Let’s look at some obvious choices that fall out of these author’s respective goals.
The Work:
Author A will need to write in a genre that sells well. She will need to ensure that her writing style is accessible – she will need to develop her voice but it will probably not have much edge. It is likely that she will publish commercial fiction and will target single title publishing programs. It is likely that her books will have a strong commercial hook. Author B, in contrast, may write in any genre at all. She may self-publish her work to have more control over it. Author B is the most likely of all three authors to cultivate a strong voice as her voice will be the key to her success. Author C’s goals, in contrast, will be more readily met with category work or work-for-hire or even technical writing. Although her work will be accessible like that of Author A, she will have less need to develop a voice – in fact, authors who do this kind of work often have very soft voices. That allows them to blend together instead of standing out.
Representation:
Author A will need an agent to meet her goals. She will probably want a fairly high profile agent with strong connections in the Big Six publishing houses, as their publishing lists still populate most of the NYT slots. She will probably choose an agent who is known to be a tough negotiator. Author B, in contrast, may or may not choose to have representation. If she does hire an agent, that agent’s primary task will be defending the creative integrity of Author B’s work. If Author C hires an agent, she will want one who is involved in a lot of packaging or work-for hire as this agent will be able to get her more work. If she chooses to publish in category, she will not need representation.
Publicity:
Author A is going to be the publicity hound of this group. In fact, she may need to establish a marketing platform on her own in order to get the publishing deal that she wants. She will likely want to teach workshops, attend a number of conferences, and participate in online forums and vlogs to build her visible presence before the first book’s release – or even its sale. She may wish to hire a publicist, an image consultant and/or a personal assistant to make all of this possible. Author B may or may not actively self-promote. She might focus on the work and believe in long tail marketing – if so, self-publishing might suit her style best. Author B will probably enter more contests with her work, to achieve both kudos and visibility, and she may forge stronger relationships with libraries than Author A. Author C may be essentially invisible, in terms of promotion. If category is a good fit for her work, and if she is prolific, she could have a number of releases (print and digital) per year. She would not be required to do much (or any) publicity or marketing if she went this route, and could thus more readily balance her personal and professional lives. It’s likely that her audience would build over time – if she continued to deliver the same balance of elements and that balance proved popular – so that 10 or 15 years from now, if her life/work balance changed, she could have the choice of moving to single title, with an established audience to support her.
Just with this brief summary, you can see the way that publishing decisions for each author follow – almost inevitably – from the clear expression of each author’s goals. Perspective percolates through everything, though. If an editor, for example, suggested to these authors that a given project would sell better if X was changed to Y, you can see that Author A and Author B would have very different reactions. In terms of the contract, Author A is going to be more interested in having co-op, promo and escalators defined in the deal, while Author B is going to be more concerned with moral rights, whether author or editor is ascendant in any editorial dispute, reversion of rights and option clauses. Author C might be most concerned with deadlines and payments.
You can likely see that it’s very useful to know exactly what you want to achieve as a writer. What are your goals? What is the concrete measure that will prove to you that you’ve succeeded? Then, here’s the big question – Are you making the publishing choices that are most likely to deliver those results?
Deborah Cooke: Author 