Hugh Howey's Blog, page 69

A Publishing Prognostication

Publishing has changed, and many of the consequences won’t be evident for decades. But I’ve got a prediction. I believe we’re going to see a string of stories five, ten, twenty years from now. We’re going to hear from people who gave up on writing who suddenly become bestsellers many years after their most recent publication.

It’s difficult to see this coming, because right now that would be nearly impossible. I’m sure it has happened to a handful of people whose backlist was discovered after they passed away. Philip K. Dick sells better now than he did in his lifetime, for instance. But the reason these stories will sprout up in abundance is because their books will stay just as discoverable ten years from now as they are today. They’ll never be taken off the shelf. I don’t believe we an appreciate how bizarre a development this is because enough years haven’t passed to highlight the power of permanence.

We will one day hear from people who self-published a handful or a dozen titles before moving on to something else. And then their books will find an audience and grow. This will happen to hundreds of people. Thousands of people. Suddenly, they will find that a book they wrote in a different stage of their life is paying for a tank of gas, a utility bill, a college loan. Their stories will take off a decade or more after writing and publishing them. Just watch. Better yet: get writing.

I’m Only a Mild Exception

I recently went over the advantages of self-publishing, and the post garnered quite a few responses and emails. One of the things I really want to highlight is that I’m not an exception to any rule; I’m only an outlier by degree, not kind. I have watched hundreds if not thousands of lives get turned rightside up this past year by hanging out on writing forums like KindleBoards’ Writers’ Cafe. Today, author H.M. Ward shared her amazing story over there.

Two years ago, H.M. had an agent and a book on submission. Editors wanted to change the tone of the book to match what was currently selling. Instead, she took the book and self-published it. It went on to sell 25,000 copies. More importantly, she kept writing and publishing and used her freedom to skip genres with a romance novel.

Two years later (with a baby born during the interim), she has sold her 200,000th book! This is a remarkable achievement, and many other authors are on their way. Because their books are published and available forever, there’s a great chance that someone selling a few thousand copies this year will hit hundreds of thousands over their lifetime, especially if they keep writing.

If you approach this as a hobby and something you love doing, anything can happen. It’s happening to people right now and more than you think. It’s the feel-good story of our age, I believe. Not since Guttenberg has the dream of writing and publishing reached so many. And even if it’s only so that 13-year-old Kelsey Day Marlett can craft a book with the help of her grandmothers and hold it in her hands for the first time, this is something to cheer.

Off to L.A. !!

The plane is boarding right now. I’m at the Pasadena Vroman’s today (Sunday, March 17th) at 4:00. I’ll be at the Redondo Beach Mysterious Galaxy tomorrow (Monday, March 18th) at 7:30.

And then it’s off to San Fran and Seattle to wrap up the West Coast swing!

Power to the People!

I can’t believe we put the event at Powell’s together with two days notice. Thanks so much to the Powell’s staff and to everyone who came out. I can’t imagine this tour without having come here.

During the talk last night, I spoke briefly about how meta the event was. Just like with the first WOOL, there was an outcry from the audience, which led to a change in my plans. The novel that hit bookstores this past week had an origin similar to yesterday’s tour stop. I love this interplay between reader and writer. You can affect what stories I choose to invest my time in; you can divert my flight plans.

To take the metaness one level deeper, isn’t this what WOOL is all about? Someone at dinner last night said that it was very cool of me to spend so much time with readers and to have the attitude I do on fan fiction, DRM, and piracy. It’s difficult to hear these sorts of compliments, because I can’t imagine doing anything differently. I aspire to be like Jules, perhaps. Willingly and willfully naive. Let the truth out. Do the right thing for its own sake. And suffer the consequences rather than suffer living any other way.

Today at Powell’s City of Books

The event last night in Denver at The Tattered Cover will be hard to beat. We had 130+ people there, and everyone says I didn’t screw up too bad. Now I’m on my way to the airport and off to Portland.

This will be my frist time visiting. In fact, this will have been my first time to Austin, Houston, San Fran, Seattle, and KC as well. Such a joy to see so many new places. And what a thrill to meet so many readers in each town!

Tonight’s event came about due to popular demand. I’ll be at Powell’s City of Books location at 4:00 and talk/sign until 6:00. Powell’s has been awesome to me. The readers of Portland have been awesome to me. Let’s hope I don’t fuck it up.

 

My Next Four Events

3/16 Portland, OR – Powell’s City of Books @ 4:00

3/17 LA – Vroman’s on Colorado Blvd @ 4:00

3/18 LA – Mysterious Galaxy Redondo @ 7:30

3/19 San Fran – Books Inc. Berkeley @ 7:00

A Book Tour Day

5:30 – Alarm goes off. I check my email in bed. There’s not enough time to get down to the gym, which is why I hit it last night before I went to bed. The hotel room is too nice for how many conscious minutes I spent in it. I eat the apple that I grabbed from the gym and take my vitamins. Greek yogurt is ordered from room service. They ask three times if that’s really all I want. I do some situps and pushups before I shower, mostly to get the blood pumping. My fourth city in four days. Eight more to go. Each book event has surpassed my expectations, and I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, to show up and find four people sitting in the audience. I feel very fortunate thus far.

6:45 – Meet the car outside. I’m in a t-shirt and jeans. Everyone else throughout the hotel is in business suits. I feel completely out of place. A black car is waiting on me. They keep the passenger seat folded forward, but there’s already a pile of legroom in these things. Bottles of water and snacks if I want them. I resist. We hit traffic, which is good. I can’t get to the airport too early. I’m live on Colorado Springs radio at 7:30.

7:30 – We stop at a hotel before the airport and shut off the car since I’ll be live. The radio host is named Tron. I’m dying to point out how perfect this is. We chat for 10 or 15 minutes. When it goes back to commercial, the driver takes me to the airport.

8:00 – My flight boards at 8:25. Enough time to hit two bookstores. The one on concourse B has 16 copies in three different places! It’s on their bestseller list at #19. I sign them all and sell one to a customer. On concourse C, I find another 6 copies and sign these. I get to the gate at 8:30, and they’re already boarding. For someone who likes to get to the gate two hours before the flight leaves, this is a jarring and stressful experience. Can’t wait to get in my seat and get some writing done.

(Left out of this account, somehow, is the interview questions I answered while eating my yogurt, pressing my t-shirt, which was crushed, chatting with my wife for fifteen minutes while she was driving to work, checking in with my dad, whom I’ll see in Denver, responding to FB messages, and checking comments on my website. It’s now 8:40, local time. Once again, I’m going to be the last person on the plane by design, which gives me time on my tethered phone to catch up with stuff like this. Finding room in the overhead bin for the bag I’m living out of for 17 days will probably be a challenge. See you in Denver).

Portland, Here I Come!

Wow. Just — wow. I’ve had so many people ask why I’m not coming to Portland. Looking at my schedule, it seemed impossible. But I had a “travel day” this Saturday, and I asked my publicist if I could give that up and somehow squeeze in an event.

She made it happen! Powell’s is having me this Saturday, March 16th at 4PM at the downtown location! Unreal. I’m hoping for a good crowd to justify the juggling and the extra flight, so if you know anyone who lives in the area, tell them they need to come get a signed book for you and another for them. I have a feeling that this event could be huge, but only with everyone’s help!

My Advice to Aspiring Authors

Yes, that’s an ambitious title for a blog post. It might even been seen as egotistical (it feels egotistical to me). But I recently did an anniversary AMA on Reddit, and this question came up over and over again: “What advice would you give an author just starting out?” It was too big of a question to answer during the AMA (over 700 comments!), so I promised a blog post.

I’ll start by knocking the ego right out of the lungs of this thing and say that what works for one author may not work for another. I’ll also say that this is a massive topic and could easily lead to me writing a book. Not that I will. For both of these reasons, this blog post is going to ramble and often contradict itself. Such is my nature and the nature of the topic.

First off: If you want to become a writer in order to be rich and famous like me, that’s a bad idea. It isn’t why I started writing, and it isn’t why you should start writing. You should write because you love it. But I imagine you’ll want an audience (what artist doesn’t?) And so my advice is geared toward helping authors get to the end of their manuscript, polish it to perfection, and then gain the widest readership possible. This is the best you can hope for. I think it’s possible for every writer who gives it their all.

To begin with, you need to write. This seems axiomatic because it is. The only way to amass a pile of words into a book is to shovel some every single day. No days off. You have to form this habit; without it you are screwed. I’m going to assume everyone who keeps reading already has this down. If you don’t — you won’t make it. My best advice on how to form this habit is twofold: Get comfortable staring at a blank screen and not writing. This is a skill. If you can not write and avoid filling that time with distractions, you’ll get to the point where you start writing. Open your manuscript and just be with it.

Secondly, learn to write rough. Stop caring about spelling and sentence fragments and plot holes and grammar. Get the story down. Listen to the dialog and try to keep up with your fingers. Get to the end of your manuscript and THEN worry about the quality. If you can master the art of powering through to the end of your story, you are on your way.

When I finished my first novel, I was on a complete high. This is when you think your book is the shit and you wonder why Oprah hasn’t called. You’re gonna be rich!

This feeling lasted a few days. That’s when I started writing my next work. My father at the time wondered why I wasn’t spending all of my time promoting that first book. I told him I had my entire life to promote my works. I only had now to write. I stuck to that principle for years, writing and publishing several novels or short stories a year. I wrote a variety of genres and with a slew of styles and voices. 1st person, 3rd person, fiction, horror, sci-fi, novelettes, short stories. I also read a wide variety of works, but hardly ever in my genres. I read literary fiction and history, non-fiction and science. I try to read the newspaper every day.

My father now agrees with this approach and sees the value of having a dozen titles available. This is going to sound strange, but you are MUCH better off with your 10th work exploding than your 1st work. You’ll never have quiet time to crank out quality material ever again. And when your backlist matches the growth of your first breakout, you’ll do very well for yourself. Be patient. It’s been said by many others, but I’ll repeat it here: self-publishing is a marathon.

Now would be a good time to explain the advantages of self-publishing over traditional publishing. When writers ask for advice, they are often asking how they should proceed with their completed manuscript. I’m going to explain why every author should begin their writing career self-publishing, even if their dream is to be with a large publisher. There’s a lot to say. Bear with me.

Your manuscript won’t change. This is the biggest logical fallacy I see in the self vs. trad debate. The idea seems to be that if you self-publish, somehow your work drops in quality. It’s the same work. The words won’t change because of perceived association with what else is out there. Querying an agent won’t make your manuscript better. Self-publishing won’t make it worse. It’s either a story that appeals to readers or it isn’t.

Know your gatekeepers. Appealing to readers is the endgame. They want story over prose, so concentrate on that (aim for both, but concentrate on story). Agents and slush-pile readers are often the opposite, which is why they bemoan the absence of literary fiction hits and cringe at the sale of Twilight, Dan Brown, and 50 Shades. You are writing for the reader, who is your ultimate gatekeeper. Get your work in front of them, even if it’s one at a time, one reader a month or year.

Publish Forever. Working at a bookstore was a dream job but also a sad job. I saw how books sat spine-out on a shelf for six months, were returned, went out of print. That’s a narrow window in which to be discovered. If you self-publish, you will have the rest of your life (and your heirs’ lives) to make it. Your print-on-demand books will always be available. Your e-books will always be available. You can keep writing and promote later. You are building your backlist. Think about this for a moment: The self-pubbing revolution is in its infancy. The people writing and publishing today have had no time to be discovered. It’s a marathon.

Own your work. The chances of a book blowing up are slim whichever way you go. I would say the chances are minimally the same, and the odds may not be tilting in favor of self-published works. If you blow up, do you want to own your rights or have someone else own them? Do you want to be making 12.5% or 70%? Remember, the chances are that you’ll never have a mega-hit. Traditional publishing will not increase those odds. With the 6-month window, I’d say the odds are 1/100th what your work might do in 50 years self-published.

You are the Publicist. The reason you won’t blow up just because you got a traditional contract is that nobody will promote you. The first thing your publisher will explain is the need to form an author platform (I’d be shocked if anyone still gets publishing deals without already having a robust one). Houses have too many authors to promote all of them. They choose a select handful based on the excitement around a debut manuscript (rare) or the perennial bestsellers (more likely, but still rare). If you want to earn a living as a writer, which I’m assuming the people asking for my advice are, you are going to have to be more than a writer. You will be an entrepreneur and a publicist. Or you won’t make it.

Know the industry. I know things about publishing that my publishers don’t. Not everything. And I don’t know more than them (I learn from them every day). But by being a self-published author, I come into traditional publishing armed with experience that they don’t have. I understand algorithms and Amazon categories. I understand the importance of metadata. While at Digital Book World in January, I listened to publishing execs and marketing specialists speak excitedly about what we’ve been posting on Kindle Boards for over a year. I know what media mentions drive sales and which ones are merely for show, partly because I have realtime data that publishers don’t have. Partly because I don’t have biases from a media age that has long passed by. You want to be a writer for the art of it? Forget the industry. You want to earn a living? Study it.

I’m not the story. I’ve been hammering this point over and over, and people are finally starting to listen. The outliers are not the self-publishing story. It’s the midlisters. I’m begging Amazon to release a different set of stats than the ones currently bandied about. They advertise how many bestsellers and blockbusters they have. I’m dying to know how many people are making $100 a month, $300 a month, $500 a month. I wager there are thousands and thousands of writers making $1,000 a month. That’s the real story, not me. Stay tuned.

Be a pro. The writers who take this seriously are the ones making money. They do all the things above, but they do something more. They approach this like a little more than a hobby. It’s a second job, one that you can love and work hard at the same time. Pros read up on grammar. They read books with an eye to what works and what doesn’t. They commune online at places like KindleBoard’s Writers’ Cafe. They set goals for how much they’ll publish in a year. Five years from now, these pros will have 10-20 works available. They only need to sell 250 – 500 books a month to earn a supplemental income. Ten books a day across twenty titles. That’s the longterm goal.

Network and be nice. I can’t stress this enough. Just being around other writers will inspire you to be a better writer. Join a writing group (in person is better. online if you must). Go to writing conferences. Go to writing camps. Take classes at your local university or community college. Join a forum or two. Participate in NaNoWriMo. And be nice to your fellow writer. This isn’t easy. The last thing we need to do is make it hard on each other.

You are a start-up. I just participated in SXSW Interactive in Austin, a place where everyone is looking to start up the next great business. The next great business is you. I laugh when people bemoan the idea of spending $2,000 to self-publish a book. Personally, I didn’t spend a penny until I was already earning enough to quit my day job. But I don’t recommend this for everyone. Invest in your book with editing and great cover art. There are two ways to think about these expenses, and both methods make the costs seem trivial. In one, you are engaging in a hobby far cheaper than just about any other. Your neighbor will buy a camera, parachute, gaming PC, scuba gear that costs more than your book. Will their hobby ever make them a penny? Yours will.

The other way to look at it is from a business perspective. Name me another business you can start up with a total cost of two grand that will guarantee at least some earnings (your mom’s gonna buy a copy, right?) You are creating a product that never rots, never rusts, never expires. It is distributed worldwide by the largest retailer in the mulitverse. You control the price. Shipping is free and immediate. You can market it forever. Your margin is 70%. You’ll never need to write it again or spend another penny on it. For Pete’s sake, can it get any better?

The stigma is gone. Self-publishing is the beginning. For many, it will be the end. The moment the stigma disappeared among traditional publishers (i.e. they began signing already-published books to major deals) it meant the top-down approach to publishing flipped upside down. Think about it. Self-publishing used to mean the death of a book. Now, traditional publishing is the more likely death of a book. This is possibly the most important thing I’ll ever explain. Follow along.

The vast majority of books traditionally published never earn out their advance. They go out of print. They are now dead. This never happens to a self-published work. It can only go up, either in sales or by being picked up in a deal that you choose. The top-down approach is one where you leave options open. Self-publishing leaves all options open (it didn’t used to). Traditional publishing leaves almost no options open (this hasn’t changed). The day self-published bestsellers were mined for traditional deals, everything changed. Don’t trust people with old information who tell you otherwise. Those with the most experience in this business often have the worst advice. That’s not always true, of course, but the two do not correlate. Beware those who think they do.

More obvious advantages. Self-publishing pays 70% royalties for the rest of your life. Traditional publishing pays 12.5% for six months (how long you’ll be shelved or weakly promoted). Self-publishing pays monthly. Traditional publishing pays twice a year and after quite a bit of initial delay. If you own your material, you can give it away, a huge advantage in building readership. Traditional publishers won’t do this for fear of competing with their other products (other authors). It’s also why they won’t promote you beyond that six month window. You are now their competition. You don’t want that.

Again, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t team up with a publisher if you choose. But do it from a postion of power. Give your work a chance (years and decades) to be discovered. Enjoy a trickle of earnings in the meantime (how many hobbies are free to engage in and buy you a coffee now and then?) Publishers aren’t the enemy; their contracts are. I don’t want publishers to go away. I don’t see them as the enemy. They do some wonderful things, and I love the people I’ve met in the industry. Love them. But their contracts suck because there has never been a reason for them not to suck. That reason has sprouted in the past two years. That’s how young all of this is, how new. We are winning small victories over non-compete clauses. Scalzi recently beat back a Random House imprint and made some change. Bella Andre got a print-only deal from Harlequin. Colleen Hoover got the same deal as me from S&S. Real change is happening, which will alter this debate once again. That’s a great thing.

To sum up: The key to making it as a writer is to write a lot, write great stories, publish them yourself, spend more time writing, study the industry, act like a pro, network, be nice, invest in yourself and your craft, and be patient. If you can do all of these things, you’ll earn some money. Maybe enough to pay a bill every month. Maybe enough to get out of debt. Maybe enough to quit your job. Thousands of writers are doing this, and we are welcoming all comers with open arms.

(This is a published rough draft of my advice. I’m writing this on very little sleep, without giving it a second glance, and while on an exhausting book tour. I’ll revisit it and update it over time. Please comment with suggestions or advice.)

Chicago Tonight!

Looking forward to a return to the Windy City. We had a great Meet-Up here in the summer. Tonight’s event is at The Book Cellar at 7:00. I’ll also be on the PBS affiliate at 7, so if you can’t be at the bookstore, tune in to “Chicago Tonight.” This bit of trickery will finally explain how I get so much writing done and still respond to your emails and FB posts. I have a twin!

(or tape delay)

If there’s a place for some good deep dish near The Book Cellar, I’ll probably grab a slice before the event and welcome all comers. My guess is I’ll be eating around 5:30. I’d also be up for some German food at Chicago Brauhaus next door. See you tonight!