To Whom It May Concern

One of the common themes of literary debate is the question of whether a writer should write purely for the love of their art or for commercial reasons. "Do you write for yourself or your readers?" one forum thread asks. "Should I self-publish or hold out for acceptance?" asks another. There seems to be almost a feeling of guilt at the idea that an author could - shock, horror - be interested in earning money for what you might imagine is the baring of their soul.

In my own little corner, I have drawn a distinction between what I call literarists and monetarists - people who love to write and people who love the idea of being a bestseller. Add to this a new definition - the purist. The purist is the writer who recoils from the very idea of making money. These can be people who write for the love of "their art" - which generally means to be able to show off to their friends, or simply those who are afraid of being regarded as monetarists. The debates will mostly be framed by the latter - people who harbour urges to be literary successes but who aren't sure whether this is somehow unclean.

For my own part, I am not a purist. I take the view that there's nothing wrong with an author wanting to make money by doing something they enjoy. After all, if they can do well enough to become a full-time writer it will liberate them from wage-slavery and give them time to write even more. That's when you can write those books you know you'd never dream of releasing: sequels to the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Shakespearean tragedies about the decline of Tony Blair - you know the kind of thing. This is wildly different from a monetarist, someone whose only interest in writing is as a path to fame and fortune. As with all things it's not a black and white issue: there is a whole spectrum of literary mindset from those who write for cathartic reasons with no interest in publication right through to those who pay someone else to ghost-write so that nobody will think they are illiterate (a hopeless ploy that depends on people being stupid enough to believe they wrote their own work). I believe that the motivation is all important: things written to strut as art will lack soul as much as things written purely for monetary gain.

So where is the line drawn? How do you write a book that preserves your integrity and passion, but which won't be rejected as self-indulgent?

First off, of course is "the idea". Non-writers often view this as the only difficult thing, which is why some authors will talk of people offering them a great idea in return for half the proceeds of the resultant bestseller. The truth, of course, is that ideas are easy: we all have mad little thoughts (or at least I hope we do), but anyone who has been writing a while will have tuned their brains to recognise them when they have book potential. Sometimes you will even read someone else's book and see a different and interesting angle in something they say. The key is that a monetarist will see a successful book as a template or an indication of a market: Harry Potter was a success, ergo books about wizards are a way to make money; children's books are nice and short, so that's an easy way to retire quickly. The literarist, by contrast, may - for example - see a character, say Harry's werewolf godfather, and think "what's it like to be an outcast like that? That would be an interesting story." A purist, of course, will eschew anything that smacks of something that has gone before, which means they will deliberately seek out ideas which nobody wants to pursue: what if instead of a werewolf it was a child troubled by a fear of cucumbers in a world whose whole zeitgeist was based on phallic salad vegetables?

Once you have the idea comes the question with which I started - do you write for yourself or your readers? A monetarist will think of this in terms of ticking boxes: the audience for this book are into angst-ridden teenage vampires, so we'll make sure there's a few of those. Mentioning celebrities will get tick another box - particularly if they write something sensational enough to get newspaper coverage. The purist takes the apposite approach - deliberately trying to ignore any concern for who might read the book, maybe even trying to "defy convention", considering a limited audience as evidence of artistic merit.

Our pragmatic literarist, meanwhile, can't afford to think like either. You have to have some idea of who might read your books, because you can't start by writing a book to appeal to fans of Enid Blyton and then include a sex scene or writing a book which would appeal to housewives and then having a pastiche of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the third chapter. But equally, simply ticking boxes means you end up writing things in which you have no emotional involvement. Knowing who your audience are allows you to filter your content, both in terms of defining boundaries of taste and in terms of pitching metaphors, cultural references and language. Your passions should define what you write, your audience should define what you don't.

Another element of writing in which having a conceptual audience matters is the sequel. I've already written about whether series are in themselves good or bad, but one thing is certain - if you wrote the first book for a particular audience, the second needs to be written for the same people. There is a form of angst amongst writers who fear being hemmed into a corner with their writing (another reason some write purely for pleasure). It is easy to feel that if you have a successful book, you are now bound to write all future works for the same audience. This is not necessarily true: whilst there will be a demand to write more for a receptive audience it doesn't follow that books outside that series (or oeuvre if the relationship is looser) have to be for the same people. As long as the "brands" are clearly distinguished, whether by different cover art styles, labelling or even a different author name, there's no reason an author shouldn't write different books for different people. Publishers may buck, but there's always another publisher if one isn't interested.

And that brings us to the last part of the debate about writing for cash - getting the book out there. Some authors see the sometimes soul-destroying process of trying to secure agents and publishers as a bridge too far. This, they say, is the point at which art dies. The compromises required to get a book past the gatekeepers of industry are the final act of an author selling out.
But it doesn't need to be like that: agents and publishers are human and can allow personal tastes to cloud their judgement, but they also have valuable experience you'd be a fool not to take into consideration. The important thing is to be able to tell the two apart: so, if they suggest your bisexual lisping vampire shouldn't be bisexual to avoid alienating readers, that might be something on which you stand your ground. If they say the lisping makes the dialogue hard to read, however, that's something that might be worth thinking about. And if they say his continual references to his Armani sealskin coat is likely to lead to a lawsuit, that's something you should just accept. You use your own judgement in filtering theirs - you needn't accept everything that is said. Where it is difficult is when rejection is without reason - or at least without a given reason: the dreaded rejection slip has driven many to despair. Here the author has literally no clue as to why they have been turned down, and it is this that leads many to consider alternatives.

There is self-publishing, of course, and the advent of eBooks has led to a shift in attitudes toward going it alone. Many authors who would have eschewed vanity publishing in the age of print see its digital equivalent as a liberation - an escape from big business, rather than an admission of defeat. In the past it was only the purists who thought self-publishing was noble in itself - a way to put their books in the hands of their circle without exposing it to the wider world - but these days it's sometimes a fall-back for an author who is tired of rejection, sometimes a first choice for an author who fears rejection or simply wants to play the game their own way.

However, it could be argued that, far from avoiding monetarism, self-publishing is embracing it. To be determined to put a book out there, convinced of its ability to find an audience and become a bestseller, certain that the industry doesn't know a good thing when it sees it, that is the attitude of someone who is determined to seek literary success without necessarily having literary talent. How often, as a writer, do you find people who assume what you do is easy? Who say they'll probably put a book out themselves when they get round to it? Most of them will never even write a book, but those who do are frequently those who end up self-publishing out of sheer determination to make money. The literarist is frequently far less bullish, far more likely to give up with the book that has been rejected and turn to the next one, hoping this will be the one which will break through. Publishers can be wrong, but that doesn't mean authors are always right. If you're a purist, of course, you don't care; if you're a monetarist you should listen very carefully. And it shouldn't be forgotten that if you do see the option to go it alone as an easy way to avoid rejection you're fooling nobody but yourself. Because going it alone means doing all the marketing work, all the distribution and all the publicity yourself. You can just pop the book on Amazon and do no promotion at all, but don't be surprised if the sales figures reflect the lack of effort. Books rarely find their audience without help.

Our outlook as writers is always going to shape the way we write, publish and promote our books. What's important is that we are honest about our intentions - not to other people, but to ourselves. A writer who pretends to noble aspirations because they don't like the idea they're writing for money will make decisions that make it less likely they'll ever earn any. If, like most authors, you see writing as a dream job, you need to keep an audience in mind - they are the people who will be paying your salary. If you're not interested in writing, but want the money... well, there's little advice to be offered. You might be lucky and write a book that captures a mood, or one so bad people buy it out of curiosity, but it's more likely you'll write something mediocre that people ignore in droves. Taking a job for the wrong reasons is rarely the path to happiness any more than writing to prove how clever you are is a path to goodhood.