AI. Lack of sales. Publishing business scammers. Copyrighting your work. Bad reviews. Marketing activities taking too much time away from your writing. People stealing your work. Diversity taking over publishing or not enough diversity in publishing. Amazon blocking your books or ranking them low. The difficulties in getting a literary agent. Choosing between self-publishing and traditional publishing. People copying your titles. People copying the plots of your books. Bad books selling while good books aren’t. The publishing process taking too long. Unethical publishers, editors, ghostwriters, book doctors, etc. Poorly attended author events. Jealousy of other writers’ successes. Wanting to give up because you aren’t getting noticed. Don’t Let the Noise in Publishing Get in the Way of Your Writing!
The fact of the matter is that all of the above are noise, and you shouldn’t worry about it, because most of these issues are out of your control. Yes, some of them are valid issues—I don’t mean to criticize your concerns. But these issues will be valid issues in the publishing industry for as long as you and I are alive. Your job is to ignore them. To push them aside. To not let them get you down. Your job is to write. It is to produce the best works you can, without getting distracted or disappointed that there are as many hurdles to your success as stars in the universe. I’m not saying you aren’t going to have to deal with one or a few of these issues as you seek publication of your work; you will. But they shouldn’t influence the time you spend working on your novel, your short story collection, the novella that you’ve been working on for the last five years. You’ll have to deal with what you have to deal with it when the time comes—but you should continue writing. Don’t let the negative aspects of publishing interfere with who you are. You’re a writer. You’re here to express yourself in whatever manner you wish to express yourself. The rest, as I mentioned, is noise.
I’m a member of a lot of writing groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and a few other social media platforms. I’m also a long-time member of a group of published authors who get together yearly to workshop each other’s novels. And yes, a lot of these groups are meant to share experiences with other members of these communities in order to gain knowledge and support each other. To help one another develop the skills and expertise when it comes to navigating the often confusing aspects of the publishing industry, of writing, of word counts, of ideas in general. All good stuff. But in these groups I see a lot of depressed writers. A lot of angry writers. A lot of writers who take things personally in a business where most of the criticism or rejection isn’t meant to be personal. Writers must have tough skin. It’s the one thing that’ll help you from going crazy in an industry that’ll drive the best of us up a never-ending wall. Are there assholes in publishing? Yep. Are there unethical people in publishing? Yep. Is the publishing business only about who you know and not based on good writing? Sometimes. But you gotta keep on truckin. That’s the name of the game.
Everyone’s experiences are different. Some authors overwrite. Some don’t know how to plot. Some think they don’t have to write more than a first draft before they send out their work to agents or before they self-publish. Some think putting their books on Amazon means they’re automatically going to sell thousands of books. Some constantly let everyone know that they’re going to quit writing because the odds are so against them why bother even trying. I’ll tell you why: BECAUSE YOU’RE A WRITER! And writers write. They take the hits as they come, and they deal with them as best they can. They know that not everyone is going to be a John Grisham, a Salman Rushdie, a Colleen Hoover. Those writers are exceptions to the rule. I have a lot of friends who are well-respected writers. They put the time in. They know the craft like the back of their hands. They publish. They’ve won countless awards. But guess what? They aren’t riding around in yachts. They aren’t living in million-dollar houses on the water. They aren’t going on massive book tours or selling hundreds of thousands of books. That’s just the name of the game. Writing a great book isn’t always going to make all of your dreams come true. You should enjoy the process of writing. If you don’t, only then should you maybe consider doing something else. I forget who said it, but there’s a famous writer that said something to the effect of, “If you don’t like writing, for heaven’s sake, choose another profession.” And I believe that with all my heart. Unfortunately, part of writing, or at least the publishing part, has, as a by-product, shit that isn’t going to be pleasant. But if you want to see your work in print, you’re just going to have to suck it up and do what needs to be done. If you want that for yourself, you do what you must. You hire an editor, and if they are no good, you find another one. If your book doesn’t sell except to your friends and family, and that pisses you off, get over it and keep on writing. Or go be a server, a programmer, a paleontologist. Whatever. Maybe one of those things will give you more joy than the uppercuts the business of writing does.
Now, I’m not saying you don’t have a right to be upset or disappointed with how things are right now in the publishing world. You do. Anyone, and I mean anyone, can publish a book. My personal pet peeve is when someone complains about their lack of recognition and sales when they haven’t put the time in to learn either how to write or how the publishing industry works. They’ll be proud of not having read, or not having the time to read, and so they don’t know how writers accomplish what they accomplish. They don’t learn about point of view or plot (or they’ll think they don’t need one), they have no idea about structure or how scenes break up the monotony of giant blocks of text for the reader, they think because they wrote it that everyone’s going to automatically love it. Newsflash: they probably won’t. Writing is a craft, and it’s also a business, and like any business, there will be successes and there will be failures. Betamax was a far superior product than VHS was, but VHS won out. Beta had better image quality, their cassette size was smaller, they had better reliability, and so on. But VHS won because they had longer recording times, relationships with movie studios, were cheaper to produce, and a number of other pluses. But these days, if you want to watch one of your old videos, you have to take it to a store that’ll convert it into a digital format. Bye bye VHS.
The point of the matter is this: don’t let the noise of the publishing and writing industry get you down. You picked up a pen or typewriter, word processor or computer because you had a story to tell, and only you could tell it. You got excited and motivated to write, and you thought, Yes, I can do this! Maybe you shared your writing with some friends or fellow writers, and they gave you the encouragement you needed to continue working on your story. Keep doing that. Keep chasing your dream no matter what. Like your protagonist, you’re going to face hurdle after hurdle, but also like your protagonist, you’re going to overcome, in one way or another, the hurdles put before you. You may come to a win or a loss, but you’re not going to stop. You’re going to not worry that someone stole your title, because you can’t copyright titles. You’re not going to worry about someone stealing your work, because you know that there are about a million novels published every year, and most of them only sell a few copies. You’re going to push AI aside, because that’s just something you can’t control and never will. What you’re going to do is write the best damn book you can write, and when the time comes, you’re going to tackle the things before you that are getting in the way of you getting published. Do not despair. Do not talk yourself out of chasing those shooting stars. Do not let your publishing adversaries get the best of you. You’re a writer, my friend, and you will grab the bull by the horns when the bull presents itself to you. Now go forth and write that book, the one that you want to read that hasn’t been written yet. There are people waiting to read it, and we want you to succeed.
Cully Perlman is an author, blogger, and Substantive Editor. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
Very true.