Michael Allen - A Writer's Guide To Everything Important - The Omnibus Edition Of Seven Essential Guides For Fiction Writers

The ambition of most writers is to do the job full-time, and to adopt the persona of a professional writer. You know the type of thing: appearing at literary festivals and making an appearance on the platform, saying a few fascinating words and then graciously answering questions from the eager beavers who are just desperate to follow in your footsteps.

That sort of a career seems so much more attractive than being a check-put girl in your local supermarket. Or a hairdresser (going anywhere nice this year?). It was my ambition to be a full-time writer too, once upon a time. And when it never happened I was disappointed. Not catastrophically, psychologically shattered, thank goodness, because I was always well aware that talent alone is not enough. You have to be in the right place at the right time, with the right book, and that isn’t something that you can arrange; there are too many factors outside your control.

However, in retrospect, I think that fate dealt me a fair hand. I am now quite pleased that I was never tempted to give up the day job. For one thing, serving nearly forty years in various educational jobs gave me a pension to fall back on. And I have lived long enough to have seen what happened to numerous writers who did appear, at one time, to have cracked the egg labeled success. They had one or two big hits, and they seemed to be set for life. But all too often it was an illusion.

I don’t think I’m going to name names here. Some of those people, who had very rickety lives, are still alive, and no doubt hitting the bottle pretty hard, because a failed career as a writer can do that to you.

No, I think I was much better off the way things turned out. I wrote for fun, in the evenings, as and when I had time to spare. I was under no contractual pressure to produce a big hit, or indeed any kind of book at all. Sometimes two or three years would go by, during which I was busy – a new job, a new baby, new house to get organised. It was not so much that I always made the right career choices: but in retrospect I think the publishing world made the right choices for me.

2.12 Changing horses

By now I think you will have got the point(s), but just for convenience, here’s a summary.

In any given year, many hundreds of thousands of people – some young, some old – find themselves possessed of the urge to write fiction.

An unknown percentage of these aspiring writers actually complete the text of a novel.

Having completed it, they decide to try to put it before readers, with the intention of becoming (a) famous, (b) rich, and (c) much admired by the literary establishment. Not everyone wants all three of these things, but most writers want a lot of at least one of them.

Until the year 2000, there was only one realistic way to present your book to the world, and that was to find a publisher who would take on the task of getting the book printed and shipped to bookshops, all at the firm’s expense.

With or without the aid of a literary agent, you would need to sign a contract with said publisher, setting out the terms on which you were doing business. (Nowadays you might well be required to sign a contract with your agent also.) The snag is that writers, even those who have agents, are in a very weak position when it comes to negotiating the terms of any publishing contract. Typically, those contracts are highly disadvantageous to all writers except those who have consistently been at the top of the bestseller lists for twenty years or so.

Even if you succeed in getting one or more books published via the traditional route, your future career path is likely to be very bumpy indeed. There is no sensible way in which you can ‘plan a career’ in this milieu. End of story. There are too many factors outside your control – or anyone else’s for that matter.

However… Round about the end of the twentieth century, the situation changed. And in Part 3 we shall examine that change and its implications for writers.

PART 3: The new way of finding readers

3.1 The dawn of the digital age

In my ebook A Writer’s Guide to Literary Agents , I write at some length about the impact that digital technology has had on the publishing industry. (Of course, other industries have been massively affected too: music, photography, television, movies.) In this book I am going to give you only a quick sketch of what has happened.

3.1.1 Print-on-demand (POD)

First, round about the year 2000, developments in digital technology meant that there were substantial changes in the way books could be printed.

Historically, printing a book was a laborious, expensive, and slow process. For the process to be economic, a publisher had to print, at the very least, several hundred copies of a book; normally the print run was measured in thousands.

By 2000, however, it had become possible to print books, especially paperbacks, quite cheaply, and if necessary one at a time.

In the old days, once the first printing had been sold out, a book would normally be declared ‘out of print’. But now a book need never go out of print, because the occasional order could be filled by printing one copy every month or so, on a digital machine.

There were two major implications of this development.

First, a publisher could hold on to the rights of a book pretty much for ever. In the twentieth century, a writer could normally reclaim her rights if a book went out of print and the publisher declined to reprint it. But now the publisher could reprint your book, one copy at a time, for as long as some slim demand existed. Or longer, if the publisher was feeling awkward. This was frequently disadvantageous to the writer.

Second, the invention of these print-on-demand machines meant that writers who had tried, and failed repeatedly, to find a traditional publisher, could now publish a book themselves; this would usually be done in paperback form, at minimal cost and, if necessary, one copy at a time. This meant that self-publishing was no longer a ruinously expensive process resulting in nothing but heartache.

As a spin-off from the print-on-demand machines, a whole new business opportunity opened up, and canny entrepreneurs were quick to exploit it. Most writers know nothing whatever about book design, choice of fonts, size of type, and a thousand other printing matters. But hundreds of small firms sprang up which offered to handle all these complicated details for those who wanted to self-publish – in return for a fee, of course.

There are some honest and reliable firms which provide self-publishing services, but there are many more which are adept in taking large sums of money from over-ambitious writers in return for doing nothing very much.

And perhaps this is the place to say it: if you are planning to self-publish a book, in the digital age, be careful who you deal with.

Start by scouring the pages on the Writer Beware web site, which is operated by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. What you will find is that self-publishing is a field in which scams are more or less standard operating procedure. I am sorry to say that some of these scams now shelter under the wings of publishing firms and literary agencies which were once regarded as honest and upright. (At least within the context of publishing, you understand.) Nowadays there are some surprisingly famous names involved in the business of parting inexperienced writers from hefty sums of money, mainly through the use of some hard-sell techniques by phone and email.

No one has any precise figures, but it seems that in any given year, there are many tens of thousands of self-published paperback books being launched on the market. Possibly hundreds of thousands. Many of these writers are being chiseled out of cash that they can ill afford.