Learn: YA books are booming because adults read them because they’re EASIER TO READ. Break down your own work to 4th grade level and watch your sales blossom. Cynical, perhaps, but accurate advice.
Your writing has to be good enough. Past that, as it improves in quality, it loses readership. The smarter your prose, the fewer will read it. Write like you talk. Use only words you’d use talking to your friends and family. If you come from an intelligent, well-read, articulate family, you’re gonna hafta dumb it way down.
Oh, sure, you can aim for academic accolades or literary awards that pay more than a rocket ship or haunted house or golden dagger. You might even hit those moving targets. If you do, you’ll find making a living impossible. Which it is anyway for 99% of all writers.
Commercial writing is a thing, they tell us. Uh-huh. Sure. Doing scut work like ad copy, technical writing, or producing unintelligible instruction manuals might pay minimum wager, and journalism less than that, but if you’re thinking fiction is the way to cash, you’re deluded.
Pro rate for fiction is set right now at a nickel a word, up from three cents. In short, it’s about the same as it was in the Pulp Era of the 1920s and 1930s. So, a thousand words at a nickel per. Can you divide a thousand by twenty? Every twenty nickels gets you a buck. So a thousand divided by twenty is… come on, you can do it. Use the calculator feature on your device, go ahead, cheating’s expected.
So, what do you get for pay for a thousand words of finely-wrought prose worthy of golden laurels and silver chalices from the gods Gwydion and Thoth? Yep: a grand giddy fiddy bucks.
Gee, a 3000 word short story, which is about average, nets you a whopping hundred and fifty dollars.
You’ll have a mansion and chauffeured Bently in no time, with a private jet on order.
Novels? Yeah, advances for novels, should you be among the 1% who is offered one from trad pubs, is anywhere from $1200 to $5000. Sounds better, but think: This is an ADVANCE. Ahead of what? Publisher’s greed. They wont start kicking in with the paltry 20% royalties on the remaining 20% of the gross income until you’ve earned out. That means the advance has to be covered by them raking in profits.
They’ll cheat and lie, too. Hollywood book-keeping came from publishing, remember. They’ll under-report sales, they’ll whine about returns, and they’ll print un-numbered (and uncounted) copies to sell, unbeknownst to you, overseas in military book stores and other markets.
They’ll make thousands to each dollar they grudgingly pay you. Even if you’re Stephen King, you won’t make anything like the bulk of actual profit. You’ll get a pittance, a cut of the swag the publisher grabs and holds onto.
So you self-publish, right? Yeah, you take on the costs of book-editing, copy-editing, typesetting, commissioning and buying a professional cover, paying a book designer to make it look professional, finding a publisher, paying for paper and ink, for shipping and storage, and for distribution, which means you shoving the few books ordered online into envelopes and mailing them. You buy the wrapping, envelopes, and postage, and you lug the heavy bastards to the post office, so that’s gas money and wear-and-tear on your vehicle. You no longer have a garage for it, either; that’s your distribution room.
Hope you’re rich before you start. You won’t be once you get waist-deep into it, that’s for sure. Good luck finding time to woolgather and write new stuff. Or live your actual life. That’s all gone.
Sorry, but writing isn’t what it never was outside the sappy movies, and to believe otherwise marks you as prime beef for the Hallmark Channel. Watching it, not working there.
So make writing fiction an occasional hobby. Vice, really, like wanking after age 40. Do it only when you have to. When that urge becomes imperative, remember to KISS. Keep It Simply Stupid. I know, that’s my variant, sue me. Which is feasible if you’re oaf enough to write nonfiction, by the way. That route is fraught with litigation and littered with broke true crime geniuses.
There’s always academia, where it’s ‘publish or perish’. They set it up for you so, as long as you toe the orthodoxy line, you’ll find academic publishers for your latest work, which will, if you’re lucky, add incrementally to the mountain of stuff we already know we know. Confirmation bias rules in the ivy-leached stone cells of academia.
“If you can be discouraged from writing, you should be.” Harlan Ellison said that, and he was dead smack on target. Unless you can literally do nothing else, find something else to do. Unless you are compulsive about writing fiction, don’t bother.
Pick up a camera instead of a pen. Play keyboards in a music group instead of tapping fiction through them. You’ll be happier and you’ll stand a far better chance of breaking through. Make podcasts. Start with talking, like radio, then add visuals, at first still pictures, then videos. Pretty soon you’ll be making online movies to thrill your fiends and maybe, just maybe attract enough views to monetize and make some jingly.
/ Samael Gyre, published fiction writer and pseudonym
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“I write to discover, explore, and understand the world and people, not to produce a product to be packaged, marketed, and peddled at conventions and award ceremonies. I write to go deeper, not reach a wider audience. I write for the sake of the fiction, not for others, not even always for myself..”
/ Samael Gyre
