Can you handle the long haul?

[goldhawk]

Also, I'd like to point out--to everyone, since this has been said by many posters before--that it's not helpful to say things like "If it's money you want, find another hobby."

Sorry but unlike other fields of endeavours, hard work is not a guarantee of success. If you want to become an accountant or scientist or a businessperson, study and hard work does mean you will do well. Not in writing. If you write a lot and produce lots and lots of stories, that does not mean people will like what you wrote. You can spend a lifetime writing and make little money from it. So, yeah, if you want to make money, don't plan on getting it from writing.

[Steven L Jordan]

Sorry but unlike other fields of endeavours, hard work is not a guarantee of success. If you want to become an accountant or scientist or a businessperson, study and hard work does mean you will do well. Not in writing. If you write a lot and produce lots and lots of stories, that does not mean people will like what you wrote. You can spend a lifetime writing and make little money from it. So, yeah, if you want to make money, don't plan on getting it from writing.

Funny... I could have sworn I mentioned how unhelpful and condescending that is... maybe I was thinking of another thread.

[tmso]

I don't think goldhawk meant to be condescending. Nor anyone else.

That particular piece of advice is often touted because we don't know why one person succeeds in writing and another doesn't.

Have you tried Twitter? Do you blog? Hold contests and give-away promotions? Have you joined an independent authors organization?

[kmtolan]

And I think that at this point, I have a perfectly good reason to concentrate on sales of the books already written, before I write any more.

I made a dozen or so attempts to reply, but each could've been construed incorrectly as an attack or poking into things that quite frankly are none of my business. I simply want you to move on and start writing, not get defensive.

Excuses are like bandages save that they don't help with the healing.

Kerry

[goldhawk]

Funny... I could have sworn I mentioned how unhelpful and condescending that is... maybe I was thinking of another thread.

The reality is that it's very difficult to make money writing fiction. That's why experience writers jokingly refer to it as a hobby. They may not have planned it that way but that's how it ended up.

[Steven L Jordan]

I don't think goldhawk meant to be condescending. Nor anyone else.

That particular piece of advice is often touted because we don't know why one person succeeds in writing and another doesn't.

Have you tried Twitter? Do you blog? Hold contests and give-away promotions? Have you joined an independent authors organization?

I know no one was trying to be intentionally condescending, insulting, etc. Nevertheless, I read the statement as condescending, and I wanted that to be clear. I also realize the statement sounded defensive, and I could've possibly been a bit more delicate about it, but I wasn't in the mood to labor over the text... my bad. I've been here for awhile, and I'm well past being bothered by such comments, however intentioned.

As to your questions: Yes to all of the above, and then some. But none of them have resulted in sales or word-of-mouth activity. The problem seems to be that most suggestions you might make have already been done by so many others that they have been rendered "bandwagon" activities, and as such, most web denizens now pay them little or no mind. So I need a promotional method that will allow me to "stand out" against the crowd, if that's possible. In 2 years, I haven't been able to come up with such a method.

[suboptimal]

That something is hard to do doesn't mean one shouldn't try to do it. From Steven's posts it sounds like he needn't be advised to keep writing for the sake of it - he's already quite accomplished in that regard. It's a fine idea to try to get paid for the fruits of one's hard work at the keyboard. "Passion" and "inspiration" are passing things that can't always sustain us.

Reading this forum and others about the writer's life has been useful to me as I slowly but steadily gear up to treat writing as something I do seriously. I have a bad tendency to jump from interest to interest without focusing long enough to get things done, a tendency I'll need to overcome to finish the projects I'm organizing. I think I can do it with the help of my wife, who encourages my writing, and my writing friends, who show me that it can be done while balancing an awful lot more than I balance right now, and keep asking about my progress.

What I'm less certain about is how well I can handle the publishing world's demands. I suppose this is a ways away for me (at least a year, and that's assuming my first novel meets my expectations), but some aspects of what is expected of writers strike me as intense drags. Self promotion through social media seems like a very good idea, but I have a pretty strong antipathy toward Twitter, Facebook and the like. Blogging might appeal to me, but the issue will always be time.

[Window Bar]

My lightweight wisdom tells me that people do exactly what they want to do. That's not saying that simple wanting will bring success, but at least it will bring the underlying actions that are required..

Let me word it differently: As long as a person takes more satisfaction than annoyance from the act of writing, that person will write. Success may or may not happen.

Which leads me to another point: marketing. Marketing is a bit of a game, and works the same way as writing. We'll do it if we want to. Personally, I rather enjoy the game, so I do it. By and large it works.

Me? Long haul? Sure.

--WB

[E_Moon]

(snippage) So I need a promotional method that will allow me to "stand out" against the crowd, if that's possible. In 2 years, I haven't been able to come up with such a method.

What it sounds like you want is for someone to give you the magic button that will work...even though you've already heard that nobody here believes such a magic button exists. And you don't want to hear that, and you consider it condescending when people are telling you what they believe to be the truth.

You don't want to write more without getting paid for it...OK, I understand that. But why would you think that some magic promotional trick will make previously unsalable writing salable? Could Ford Motor Co. have made the Edsel salable with a different ad campaign? No: people didn't like the Edsel, for whatever reason, and they didn't buy it. Thousands of products a year fail. So do lots of books.

The only way to make money as a writer is to write more things people will pay money to read. More books, more stories in anthologies, more (as Dean Wesley Smith puts it) different kinds of baked goods in your bakery. "Things people want to read" is as important as "more of kinds of things" and "more things overall." What you've got that people won't buy--your books--is sort of like Ford's Edsel...which, I understand, wasn't such a bad car, for that era. But it didn't suck people in.

Your books aren't sucking people in. You need to figure out why, and fix that. If you can't stand to spend more time figuring it out, and writing more appealing stories, and thus fix it, then you're not going to make money from your books. No brilliant promotion will force people to buy and read your books if they don't want to. If you can fix it, then the books you've worked so hard on will later seem like the boxes of stories I lugged from apartment to apartment to house to house before I finally wrote one that people did want to read enough to pay money for. You'll understand why they didn't work, and why the new stuff you're writing does work.

You ask if any of us would write consistently without making money at it. Yes. I did, for decades before making my first sale. I would write, paid or unpaid, because I enjoy it. I also like making money by writing, but the desire to write came first. Because I needed the money, I paid attention to what people wanted to read and would pay for. I found that some of what people wanted to read and would pay money for was stuff I enjoyed writing. So, after decades of writing without being paid, I'm now writing and being paid.

[Gumboot]

I've been writing the same book/building the same world for fifteen years, and have no intention of ever stopping so yeah, I am personally confident I can handle the longhaul.

Regarding the slight diversion that has cropped up, because of the fickle nature of mass-market artwork and the total unpredictability of success, I am of a mind that anyone who is producing art primarily to earn money is probably doing it for the wrong reasons.

"Art for art's sake", as the saying goes. If there's one thing in common between all the world's successful artists, it's that they were virtually compelled to create their art, with zero consideration of how highly their art might be regarded.

[Steven L Jordan]

You don't want to write more without getting paid for it...OK, I understand that. But why would you think that some magic promotional trick will make previously unsalable writing salable? Could Ford Motor Co. have made the Edsel salable with a different ad campaign? No: people didn't like the Edsel, for whatever reason, and they didn't buy it. Thousands of products a year fail. So do lots of books.

The books aren't sale-able because no one knows they're there; that's why there is promotion. Unfortunately, in this marketing-saturated world full of marketing-weary consumers, getting noticed is tougher than ever. And I don't have a few thousand Facebook friends to help me spread the word.

"Magic bullet" isn't a term I would have used... but as long as you're using it, I'd point out that, since we know that "just writing" doesn't work for everyone, it must be as much as a "magic bullet" as trying different promotional methods.

But since this thread isn't about promotion, I'll bow out of the discussion from here.

[E_Moon]

This is one reason publishers want writers to already have (or quickly get) a blog, a Twitter account, and/or a Facebook page...so they have some online followers, who will (if they like someone's book) help publicize it. Word of mouth is known to be more important in publicizing books than anything else...get the first fifty readers really excited about a book--and a hundred excited about the next--and the cascade has started.

If your work has been out there, even without much promotion, for years--you have ten books available, you say--and you're not getting read and bought, it's time to look at the books, and have a professional in the field look at the books, to see if the books themselves are the problem. Just as fifty excited and happy readers can start a cascade toward success, fifty disappointed readers can start a cascade to failure.

But you're leaving the thread because...apparently...you've got your mind made up that you know better than anyone. You chose to misunderstand the "just writing doesn't work for everyone" and you'll manage (if you even read this) to misunderstand that the "just" referred to "writing the same unsatisfying stuff that hasn't worked yet." Words on a page aren't enough. If they're boring words, nobody cares. Nobody cares how hard you worked, how much self-confidence you had or didn't have, how important you think your work is, how good you think your work is. They care only whether, when they read it, they want to read more of it. So "write more" includes "and write better."

Writing better--in the specific sense of hooking readers in and getting them excited about the story, wanting more of your stuff to read--does work. Working with experienced people to improve writing does work because most writers have blind spots and benefit from editing. That's why, for instance, an experienced publicist like Colleen Lindsay at Penguin USA will blog about the importance of a writing community: http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2012/0...munity-is.html. Making online contacts can work if you come across as a likeable person (more or less--within the limits of that community) and the first one or three or eight or twenty people discover that your work is really fun to read, good stuff.

But the long haul requires a willingness to do some serious self-evaluation--and do it repeatedly--as a writing career goes on. No writer is perfect. No writer is unchanging: life happens to us all. So every writer needs to ask; "Where are my weaknesses, as a fiction writer? What can I work on, in the next book? What are my strengths, and how can I preserve them while tinkering with the bits that don't quite jell yet? Are my beginnings, or middles, or ends better than the other parts? What are more reader-glued passages I've written, and which are the least effective?" and ask again on the business side: "Am I reliable? Am I easy or hard to get along with? Does my editor look forward to, or dread, hearing from me? Do I show respect and admiration for the others involved in producing my book? Do I get along with many (if not all, because none of us is perfect) other writers? Have I made more friends than enemies in the business?" We all have bad patches, when we're moody, grouchy, defensive, hard to get along with...recognizing those, and deliberately not showing the full extent of the nastiness inside, not indulging ourselves at others' expense (especially not in the business) helps build a reputation that--as in any endeavor--yields benefits of various kinds, some monetary. When a book tanks (or several books tank) the writer with a publisher is apt to blame the publisher for a lousy cover or bad publicity--and yes, lousy covers and bad publicity choices do occur. But I've had a best-seller with a less-than-perfect cover...and the "not great cover" books that didn't sell well were also not my best books. Writers over the long haul need to face their own limitations, as writers, before blaming everyone else. And self-published writers whose books tank...have all the responsibility for the tankage. They have to figure it out--was it the cover? Was it starting promotion too late? Was it pushing people too hard online (people don't like to be pushed) or whining/griping all the time online? There's always a way for an unsuccessful self-pubbed writer to find out if it's the book itself that's the problem: send it to an agent or a publisher. If it's really good, they'll probably take it; if they don't, they'll say why ("Sorry, we have fourteen mysteries with a penguin detective already lined up--just bought the series--so we can't take yours. Wish we'd seen yours first...") If you get the form rejection...it's the book that's the problem.

[sullivan_riyria]

I see from time to time claims that there are writers expecting "instant success." Personally I've never run into any.

Most people know that writing takes years, sometimes decades to master. Stephen King estimates you need to write 1,000,000 words before you'll be any good. Outliers says it takes 10,000 hours of doing something to become proficient at it.

Everyone knows it takes months or years to find an agent. It usually takes 9 - 24 months from signing until you get books on the market.

It can take years to build a following (and usually multiple books).

I can't imagine that anyone doesn't realize this is the nature of the beast and seriously entertain that writing is a profession for making "a quick buck."

[The Seraphinium]

Sorry Michael, but I completely disagree. Writing is actually the easiest way to make a quick buck. Here are my 2 easy steps for wealth through writing (I should offer this in a manual on Amazon for $2.99 a pop, but I'm feeling generous.):

1. Scribble this note on a piece of paper about the size of your palm;
"I have a gun! Put all the money in the bag."

2. Head to your local bank branch and present that beautifully worded jotting and a backpack to the friendly teller.

Voila! You have just used your talent to make a quick buck.

Sorry about the silliness, but "the starving artist" is a cliche for a reason. Discovery doesn't happen because you want it to. It takes a combination of talent, drive and kismet. You may possess the talent and drive in abundance, but the magic bullet to success can be elusive.
I agree that it can be amazingly frustrating to believe in your talent and not see the rewards for your work (monetary, praise or whatever else drives you), but I also agree that the process in itself is a reward. If you are the rare individual that possesses the time and resources to choose a secondary vocation for a supplemental income (most people are overwhelmed by their primary vocation), why wouldn't you pick something that provided a modicum of pleasure in the process?

[kissmequick]

Sorry, but right now, I just don't have the heart to write a story that no one's going to read, nor to put in hundreds of hours on work I won't get paid for.

Lots of answers to this

1 - But if you don't put in the work, you won't have anything to sell? Writing well requires work, and a lot of practice. And a lot of people do a lot of things they don't get paid for because they want to get good at something, or any number of reasons. You want to have a product that lots of people want to buy? You need to write and write some more. And then do some more writing.

2 - The best promotional tool is a new book - someone picks it up, likes it, they go looking for other stuff you've written.

3 - The difference between unpublished (or not selling) writers and published (or selling well) writers is persistence.

If you don't want to write, that's fine and cool. But if you want to sell books, you need to write them first. Maybe what you have out there just isn't what the market wants. Maybe your next story will be. Maybe a hundred other things. How can you tell, if you don't write it?

Writers write.