New Interview on Writing
A college student reach out to me recently with a few questions about writing as a career path. I figured I would share those answers here, along with the specific questions for clarity’s sake…
1 How would you describe your field and how did you get into it?
I’ve been a storyteller for pretty much all my life. That led pretty naturally into writing short stories and eventually novels. I started writing my first novel while I was bored at work and in college. That eventually was published with the traditional press many many years ago. That publisher, like so many others, eventually went out of business (actually, it was bought by another publisher and eventually merged). I kept writing. I did a couple deals with some of the publishers and eventually moved into the independent world where I act as my own publisher and do all of that minutia in addition to the creative stuff. I found that, unless you’re with one of the major publishers (I’m actually in talks with one of the few publishers I want to work with on my newest series) independent authors can actually make more money and retain greater control over their works this way. Working through the hurdles and road bumps while constantly searching for ways to improve my business has led me to being one of the top-selling genre fiction authors in the upper Midwest (at least when it comes to physical editions).
2 How does one become an author?
The expected answers to write a book and then began speaking with publishers or pursue independent tools available through Amazon, Ingram, and others. But that’s the wrong answer. The first answers to read a ton of stuff and become familiar with the storytelling process. Writing is just one path to telling stories. Some people write screenplays and do film and theater, others write code and develop video games or even board-games. The traditional author path, which is how I started, is one fraught with gatekeepers. You have to have a story that’s complete and highly polished enough to be published right now. Then you decide what publishers you want to send that to and research each of them. Some of them, and all the biggest ones with the household name authors, will not accept submissions from authors; they only take query letters from authors’ agents which mean you need an agent before you can get published. Agents are much more selective than publishers since they work on commission. Before you can send that letter to them, you will want to hire an editor and invest a great deal of capital into things like your platform. Publishers don’t want good books. They want books they can sell, and that means they want authors who already have a built-in social media presence, email newsletter list, and some sort of direct angle they can spin to sell something… You may be seen memes with all the spines turned in solidarity with female writers? That meme is horse crap. Right now in the industry there’s nothing more untouchable than books by cis-gender white males. It’s all about having an angle in the sales market. For that reason, the independent market has taken the book world by storm, even forcing one of the biggest 5 publishers out of business, further revealing that the old guard bastions of publishing have no idea what readers really want. As the disconnect between publisher and reader widens, more and more authors are alienated, even more publishers are going to go out of business over the next 5 to 10 years. For that reason, I am a fierce advocate of the independent publishing world where people can focus on good stories without preaching their pseudo-intellectual morality on people. I’m not saying you can’t share your ideals—in fact, you absolutely should, but if you lead with either pandering or pushing an agenda, you will alienate anybody listening by subconsciously othering them rather than drying them into a viewpoint. If you lead with a good story, you can draw people into a viewpoint and have them live the story through that lens. That’s how you write fiction that changes the world, whatever the viewpoint (and you’ll notice I have advocated for nothing specific, just made observations).
3 What are some of your day-to-day activities?
I try to write every day. Most days I do. My typical output is about twice what someone writes at daily to beat NaNoWriMo. I keep a tight schedule in order to juggle all of my tasks. Today I wrote several thousand words, checked in on my sales stats, sent emails, worked on some audiobook production, it’s in graphic design, produced a few pages for a comic book, checked in with fans on my Ream fan community (it’s like Patreon.) I also drank a ton of coffee and went to the gym. Stephen King wrote about maintaining some physical mobility in his book, On Writing. He’s not alone. I’ve had several chances to hang out with the top-selling science fiction author in today’s market—we’ve done several events together (he writes Star Wars, the newer Dune books, etc.) and he lives in Colorado; he writes most of his books by dictating them while he’s walking through the mountains. When I write, I use a combination of voice to text software as well as typing words. I tend to jump back and forth which keeps me engaged and keeps the words flowing. Now the words are good when they come out initially, but that’s what editing is for.
4 What are some values that are held by workers in your field and how are they viewed by ones in your field and others?
I’m not really sure how to answer this question. If you’re referring to values based on a morality said, this would span the gamut since there is practically an infinite number of viewpoints represented along the spectrum are writers. Most of us, however, at least those of us who are successful in the field as independence, treat this as a creative business. Some people overly compartmentalize the idea of “creative business.” I’ve worked with many authors, most of whom have failed, who start out saying they don’t care if they make any money at all and this is purely a form of art and they need to get it out into the world with the misguided belief that their art will be so pure and perfect that they will naturally be discovered. On the flip-side, there are people who are simply in this to make money. A lot of those guys pirate work, employ things like click farms to steal money from the KDP authors’ pool by “hacking” the ebook subscription service, write tons of small “junk books” and target keywords on book buying systems meant to harvest micro buys with nonfiction books (most of the content is pirated on these as well—often being copied and pasted directly from Reddit threads.) Of course, this is also where a lot of AI authors are coming into play as it’s allowing them entry into the fiction fields. I’ve read a lot of AI generated stuff. I’m not terribly scared by it. Not only can I tell when something is written by AI, is just so… Bad. People who are successful in this field understand the need to run it like a business which would involve things like scaling up, having a marketing plan, staying on top of what’s current in trending by reading lots of nonfiction books, attending conferences, networking with other professionals, paying your taxes, and having a marketing plan. The trick is to balance that with the creative also be reading and creating on a regular basis. Nothing sells your current books like a new book in those same series. Being able to understand the trends and position yourself in the market to capitalize best off of things like long series runs and page reads in KDP or capitalizing on series buy-through, or even writing content to market are all things successful authors are aware of before they launch a book.
5 What would you say are two major issues in your field?
Right now, there is a major uproar in the industry over the usage of artificial intelligence. Recently, I was at the largest professional conference for independent authors. People wanted to talk about it, and moderators kept trying to dispel that as it looked like battle lines were forming up in the community. Over the next two years, we are likely to see both some legislative regulation as well as certain levels of comfort or lines being drawn in the sand on the part of creatives over what is acceptable and what is not. It’s the single biggest hot button issue right now in the community. The second issue that’s major and ongoing is the idea of direct sales. The reason Amazon has had such a stranglehold on the bookselling community for so long as they have forced people into exclusivity agreements. Because the control so much of the market share, most folks don’t realize there are viable alternatives, especially when it comes to digital books—this is in large part because they have controlled the hardware, Kindle, which most people are familiar with reading on. They’ve also enforced almost abusive policies on authors trying to move into the audiobook market. The entire issue is one of buyer’s comfort level (when Amazon first began, most folks were mildly uncomfortable with purchasing things on the Internet as it was relatively new at that time) and also one of distribution. Amazon shaped the battlefield so that they could stand the best chance of winning this war, but tools have developed over the last several years which have allowed people to sell products direct. I’ve been doing this for years selling paperbacks at conventions and live appearances and very recently launched a new sales portal which completely bypasses the Amazon system. You can still read anything you buy from it on Kindle and I much prefer there audiobook software versus Amazon’s. The Amazon system continually tries to upsell you and harvester data to plug into an algorithm and squeeze that cash cow for all it’s worth. Not only do I resent that, but I think buyers (because my buyers are readers) are too smart to stay beholden to the almighty Daddy Bezos, and so I’ve invested significantly into that new system which launched around Christmastime and just recently began producing sales.
6 Is there anything else you would think would be relevant for me to know?
I coach and mentor other authors in a few different areas of their career. Because I talked to so many writers at the events that I do (whether teaching panels or live sales events) I have a couple of massive pieces of information that I tell people to focus on before they even begin trying to publish. The first is to write short stories. Mentees I work with on a publishing track often get homework for me, the first of which being to write five short stories between 5000 and 10,000 words. Following that, I have them write five more 500 to 1000 words. That allows writers to shift away from their magnum opus (everyone wants to write their life’s work straight out of the gate, but that’s simply wrong from a strategic viewpoint.) The second one is to develop their platform before they even launch the first book. The short stories actually factor into that and allows them to share those stories to hook new readers, connecting those people to the author so they can build a newsletter, engage with readers, and develop enthusiasm for the later body of work. My website is https://www.authorchristopherdschmitz.com/ and clicking the Books tab will take you to the sales portal I referenced.
