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Writing Excuses 18.25: To Narrator or Not to Narrator
 
 
Key Points: Different audio formats use narrators differently. Narrator, telling, and no narrator, showing, changes the pacing. Immersion versus distance! Create space for the audience to imagine. Keep in mind what you can let the audience imagine, and what you need to specify to fit your story. Do think about narrator or not as craft, but also as a business decision.
 
[Season 18, Episode 25]
 
[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.
[DongWon] To Narrator or Not to Narrator.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[DongWon] I'm DongWon.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about narrators today. We had a moment in the last episode where I said that Forgotten doesn't have a narrator, and Mary Robinette said yes it does. We're going to talk a little bit about that difference. There are a lot of audio things, as audio becomes a much bigger part of the market, people are starting to play with the form a little, we're starting to see full cast audio a lot more than we used to, we're starting to see a lot of different things. So there are full audio dramas, radio dramas, and then there are dramatized audiobooks, and they use narrators differently.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So when you're thinking about an audiobook, an audiobook is something that was written for prose, for print, not necessarily prose but written for print, and then is read aloud. A dramatized book is something that, or a full cast… Let me step first… The full cast, where you have multiple voices, instead of a single narrator. Then you have dramatized audio which is usually full cast and then sound effects. Then you move over to radio plays, which come from the stage side into the audio realm. So in those cases, you are dispensing with all of the basic conventions that come out of novels, short stories, and you're starting with more stage and cinema conventions and moving I. There's some overlap in between. But those are… That's kind of your basic range.
[Dan] Yeah. These are not necessarily very clean-cut categories. There is a lot of play in between them. But, for example, if you go and listen to I Am Not a Serial Killer, that is a narrator reading the book. He will read everything, he will read the dialogue, he will read the narration. He will change his voice now and then when he's doing a different person's part. But it is one person reading it. Listen to Zero G, and it has full cast and sound effects, and it has a narrator to say the inner parts. To describe sometimes how the main character is feeling, what a location looks like. Which is similar to that audiobook, but changed a little bit. Then, something like Dark One: Forgotten, there is nobody just saying inner thoughts out loud, there is nobody describing the setting. It is all right there on the page, much more like a classic script would be for radio or TV.
[Erin] What's interesting with Dark One: Forgotten, though, is that because it is in the style of a podcast, the narrator… Like, the characters in the world are directly addressing the audience. There's a part where it's like, "Oh, I'm not going to put this part in," or "Let me let you know what I'm going to do right here," or "I'm interviewing this person," where there letting you know what's happening from moment to moment, almost like a narrator, but within the world. Which I find like a really interesting way of like mashing things up. One of the things that I do for Zombies Run is I've both written the script part where they're just like, "Runner! You need to go over here. Somebody's attacking you. A zombie's behind you." Which is, there's no narrator really, they're just talking to you like you're somebody that they're talking to over a headset. But I also write in-world radio for Zombies Run, where somebody is actually doing a radio show within the world, and similarly, they are addressing the audience, but it is a fake audience that we've fictionalized for the sake of the Zombies Run universe. It's fun. Each one is a slightly different technique.
 
[Dan] Yeah. That's so cool. So, one of the questions that I want to get to in this episode, and I'll just throw it at you, Erin, is what do those different styles do for you? Why would you choose one over the other, aside from the constraints of the medium that you're working in? When does having a narrator really help you, and when do you prefer to dispense with the narrator altogether?
[Erin] I can't remember if we said this in a podcast or just while talking, but at some point we were talking about showing versus telling and how that changes the pace. When you have a narrator, it's a more telling media. You're being told what's going on. So it is a little bit slightly different paced than when you're… Let me rephrase. When you're… When you have a narrator, it makes you feel, I think, more like you're listening to a story. So it feels like you're around a fireside, and, weirdly, unlike in prose, that actually slows down the pace, I believe. It feels like, okay, we're just gathered around and I'm going to tell you what I am doing. When you don't have a narrator, you're within the story yourself. You feel like you are a part of the story, I think, more. For that reason, it feels faster paced in the tension is higher.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think of it as immersion versus distance. So the more present a narrator is, usually the more distant you are, because you have someone who is describing the things to you, but you are not participating in the scene. Whereas when the action is happening around you, you are in fact participating in the scene, because you are at least directly hearing what is happening. So you are a direct witness in that case. So, in puppet theater, we use show, don't tell, for very different reasons, because you are literally doing a puppet show, not a puppet tell. There, what I'm thinking about, is that immersion. It's like, the example that I use is I could say, "There's a clock on the wall." Or, I could have someone say, "Oh, looks like it's 9:05 now." One of them has you deeper into the world. So, for me, I think about it in terms of immersion versus distance on whether or not I'm going to use an active narrator. The other thing is that sometimes that narrator is the most efficient way to change a scene.
[Dan] Yes. I really like that way of thinking about it, the immersion versus distance. I found several times adapting Zero G from the prose that I wrote into more of a script format that there were so many times when I was describing how Zero felt or what he was looking at and I realized, "Oh, I'm gonna have someone reading this. I can just make this dialogue instead." That happens so often. Really, that's what was going on. There were moments when it needed to be a narrator doing it, and there are moments when it felt so much better and so much more natural to have the character themselves say it.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I find when I'm writing for… Erin, I don't know if you find this too, but when I'm writing for… Knowing that there's going to be an actor on the other end, is that I can have my written dialogue be more ambiguous, because I can put a note to them and then trust them to do the thing. Like, having a character on the page say, "What!" Like, I can't do that without adding a lot of context around it, extreme numbers of punctuation marks, in order to get that "what!" As opposed to "what." Those are two different things. An actor, I can trust, usually, to do that. On the other hand, if there is a possible way to misinterpret a line, an actor will find it.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I think it was Margaret Dunlap, and I apologize if I've misremembered who it was. But she was telling me about a videogame that she had been writing dialogue for. For one particular dialogue tree, she had to come up with five or six options that were all different. Basically, she used the word what, then with some script notes to say, said in this tone of voice for all five.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Yeah. That was Margaret.
[Dan] That was Margaret. Which I thought was so brilliant.
[Howard] Got paid for writing the same words six times.
[Mary Robinette] Yep.
[DongWon] Amazing.
 
[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that I wanted to point out is that just from our episode title, to narrator or not to narrator, you may be thinking of white room stories, like They're Made of Meat is the classic example. Where there is no description, is just dialogue. We call it white room because you have no description of what's going on. All of your cues come from what is in the dialogue. If you take a white room story and move it into the audio realm, suddenly the fact that there are two different actors, two different voice actors doing the voices, gives you more information. If you add sound design in the background, the sound of a café or the sound of science-fiction space, which shouldn't make any noise, but for some reason always does, you can create something that makes it no longer white room, but the energy… And, for me, as a writer of comedic pithy tight dialogue, the energy remains there. You don't need the dialogue tags that you often have to resort to to say who's speaking. So I love what an audio drama affords you, which is the ability to do that fast banter and keep all those pieces there so that the energy doesn't get slowed down by a narrator explaining to you what they're doing.
[Erin] I will say, on the other hand, the challenges that physical description when you don't have a narrator means that you need to be sometimes coming up with reasons that, in dialogue, your characters will be saying where they are when they're both there and they know that they're there.
[Laughter]
[Erin] You know what I mean? Right. We all know we're in this room, but like, wow, this chair's comfortable. It's a little bit more of those like location aware…
[DongWon] Isn't this coffee shop so nice?
[Erin] Dialogue lines. Exactly. Like, "This coffee shop? I never liked that one." Whatever it is. Like… I think that that's really fun to figure out how to make it work. It's like the same challenge people have with info dumping in that you want to make it seem like really natural to the scene that your writing without fully disrupting what's happening between the characters.
[Mary Robinette] Yes. I want to talk about that more when we come back from the break.
 
[Mary Robinette] Everyone, we want to introduce you to our new producer, Emma Reynolds, and Emma is going to tell you about our thing of the week.
[Emma] The thing of the week is the Earbug Podcast Collective which is a weekly newsletter that is sent out. It is coordinated by one of my friends and mentors in the audio serial area whose amazing. But it is curated by a different person each week. It's just a great way to get your hands-on, or I suppose your ears-on all of the different audio content that is out there for inspiration for you.
 
[Dan] All right. So, we're back. I want to talk more about this white room concept. In particular, I… One thing I said at the beginning of this year, because I've been doing so much audio and now getting back into more traditional novels, is that I had initially kind of fallen off the wagon and forgotten how to write scene descriptions. So the first draft of the actual Dark One novel that I turned in was basically people talking to each other as if they were in an audio drama.
[Chuckles]
[Dan] No one was moving around doing actions, there was no description in between the lines of dialogue to break up what was happening. There was very little scenic description of where they were. That's because my brain had gotten so embedded into this audio space, where that kind of stuff wasn't a part of the script. That really kind of hit home for me the differences that arise when you start breaking these formats, when you start jumping from one to another. Because there are things you can do in one that work really well, but don't work at all when you do them in a different format.
[Mary Robinette] One of the things that I enjoy playing with is… That comes out of audio drama, is using this idea that Erin was talking about before hand, of the interaction with the world to describe what is going on through dialogue. So, in The Spare Man, I don't describe actually that much of what Gimlet, the little dog, does. Frequently, the way I am keeping her alive in the scene is through dialogue. That she's… Like… When someone is having a conversation, it's like, "Is this dog allowed to have people food?" That tells you everything that's going on. But part of what that does for me is that it creates space for the audience. I think any time that you have the narrator they're describing things in a linear way, that removes some of the audience space to imagine the world. One of the things that I think is fun is thinking about deliberately creating that space for the audience. When you're coming back to prose or when you're in the audio realm, is thinking where do I want to allow and encourage the audience to do some lift for me, because that is going to make the story more immediate for them, because it's going to be… They're going to be active participants in this story.
[DongWon] I really love that idea. Sort of pairing that with what Erin was talking about in terms of show, don't tell, one of the things about balancing the showing and the telling is about trust. Right? When you make space for the audience, what you're also doing is saying I'm trusting you to fill that space. I'm trusting you to meet me over there. Right? So making sure that that on-ramp is very easy for them, it's a very easy path for them to follow to meet you where you are, I think is really important and one of the key skills in that. So you can have that little moment of here's what Gimlet is doing and that's filled in, backfilled by us when we hear that, and we then fill in what the dog has been doing for the last like 30 seconds. It's such a delightful way for you as the creator to take a moment and say, "I see you, audience, and you are participating in this story too, and this is a thing we collaborate on." I think that's a beautiful thing that audio drama can do in a way that prose fiction can do, but it's not as natural of a fit. So I love hearing ways that you pull that in.
[Howard] There's a technical tool… Technical? A way of thinking about the absence of the narrator that I find it really useful. In the Dark One: Forgotten, when she says, "I'm recording this in my dorm room." We don't get much of a description, really, any description of the dorm room. It's assumed that all of us have in our head a picture of a dorm room. If, at any point in that story, there'd been action in the dorm room where Sophie and… The name of the main character is…
[Dan] Christina.
[Howard] Christina. Where Sophie and Christina decide to go out the back door… I've never been in a dorm that had a backdoor. But if that's a piece of blocking that you're planning on having in your story, you have to do a little more than just the shorthand when you give us that description. You have to do just a little bit more lifting so that the blocking that happens later works. I describe this as a technical tool. It's something that you have to keep in mind so that you know which pieces you can just let the audience imagine on their own and which pieces you have to specify.
[Dan] Yeah. I think it's important that we kind of draw a line on this. The title of this episode is To Narrator or Not to Narrator. I don't want you to think that that is… That that is a decision that has to be made from project to project. It can be made scene to scene, or even sentence to sentence. There are times within a completely normal traditional novel where you might decide to pull that narrator way back and let dialogue or action do the lifting rather than having the narrator. There are times even in an audio thing where you might want to have a narrator step in and do more.
[DongWon] One thing I do want to bring up, though. If you are making the decision of do I want to do this as a traditional prose project or single voice narrated audiobook versus a full cast production, from the business side, there's an important decision that you will be making there, which is that the right situation is very different for an audiobook versus a full cast production. When you start getting into the full production, you are now walking into dramatization territory, which is what film and TV producers will want if they're going to adapt your work. So, one thing to keep in mind is if somebody shows up and says, "We want to do a full cast production." That's a totally exciting cool thing to do. Be intentional about what you're doing and realizing that if you give up those rights, that may interfere with your ability to do a film or TV adaptation down the line. Now, I know, in a lot of cases, it still works, just doing the thing because the thing that's in front of you and it's exciting. But it's one of the things I want to make sure is clear as were talking about this, that these are different from audiobooks, not just in craft and practice, but in a business sense, you're making a different choice by participating in that or not. There's some blurry space in there. If you have like two or three narrators, I don't remember exactly the distinction, but there's sort of three categories in there. So there's some difference.
[Mary Robinette] It's…
[DongWon] You probably know this better than I do, actually.
[Mary Robinette] One of the big demarkers is whether or not you have changed it from the original form. So, you can have a full cast with almost… I'm not sure if there's a cap on the number of char… Of narrators that can be in there, as long as you don't change any of the words.
[DongWon] Okay.
[Dan] With Zero G, they did full cast audio, but we retained film rights. I don't know exactly how Sarah worked that out, but we worked that out.
[DongWon] It is possible to do it.
[Mary Robinette] You just have to…
 
[Howard] As an aside, this is one of those cases, fair listener, where having an agent…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Is very helpful. Because they can look up these exact questions for you so you don't have to.
[Dan] Solve the problems for you.
[DongWon] This is kind of an edge case. Right? You can tell from the way I'm talking about it I don't have this immediately to mind as… This is not something I've dealt with a bunch. It's a thing I've dealt with once or twice. So there's a conversation to be had in these gray areas. There's blurriness, there's ways to negotiate it.
[Mary Robinette] It's true, actually, that my definition on that may also be linked to whether or not it is narration versus acting.
[DongWon] Right.
[Mary Robinette] As far as the union is concerned.
[Dan] Yeah. That's a good [garbled distinction?]
[DongWon] Exactly.
[Dan] Too.
[DongWon] Right. Then the union starts to come in, that's a whole nother set of questions that need to be answered as you do it. So, anyways…
[Laughter]
[DongWon] Here's a few things that the decision of narrator or not to narrator is a craft one. It is also a business one. Make sure you're talking to your publishing team if you have one. Make sure you're being intentional about the choices that you're making, as you go into those choices.
[Erin] It can also be an experimental one. Which is to say that you can also just see what happens if you take something that you've written just as a regular narrator full prose, and what would happen if you took the narrator out or tried it in an audio format, and see what you learn. Because one thing that I think you learn a lot about in audio is which details you're going to want to have your narrator or your characters mention. Because, there, I think, is a limit, especially in a more fully acted production, to how much people want to listen to a narrator before they're like, "Get back to the drama."
[Chuckles]
[Erin] So you learn like maybe this longer passage that I might be able to put on the page is going to come off much differently, like, when I'm listening to it, especially if it's not in audiobook format listening, but more of a full cast.
[Dan] Yeah. One of the elements that gives me fits when I'm trying to write these pure audio dramas, for example, with the Moon Breaker videogame, is fight scenes. Doing those in something that has no narrator gets so hard. You can actually go and listen to the Moon Breaker episodes and see me doing these kinds of experiments that Erin's talking about, saying, "Well, what happens if I just do a straight fight scene and say, okay, Foley guy, lots of laser noises for like 20 seconds and then the story will keep going." Then other episodes are much more intentional, like, I'm going to block this entire thing out so that I know exactly what's happening, and the only things that are going to happen in the fight scene are ones that I think we can depict with clarity with pure audio and no narration. It is very hard to make a fight scene intelligible without a narrator describing what is happening and no visuals to let you see it.
[Howard] I'm just reminded of the time when Mike Magnola on a panel said, "Oh, yeah. I really trust this artist. In one of the scripts I said hell boy fights an army of skeletons for six pages."
[Laughter] [Oh, boy. Wow.]
[Erin] I think this comes back to why I think narrator or not is such a cool tool, because I was thinking about this fight scene. I'm like, if you want your audience member to feel like, oh my gosh, I'm in the middle of the battle, I don't know what is happening, attacks are coming from everywhere, then having no narrator is great because you're in that feeling of, like, I'm just hearing swords and screaming and dying. But if you want them to actually be able to figure out who stabbed who with the whatchamacallit, then maybe you need the narrator, because the point is for them to understand it, not to sort of just be absorbed by it.
[Dan] Yeah. Those are… That can become a really valuable tool if you think of it in those ways. Like, what am I gonna use this lack of narrator to produce a specific effect, rather than just, oh, boy, I don't have a narrator. This is going to suck.
[DongWon] You use that to great effect in Dark One: Forgotten. Right? So, at the end, when she is captured by the serial killer, we don't exactly know what happens to her. We know that she experiences some stuff that's pretty bad, and she has to go to the hospital afterwards. It's unclear what he has done to her, what injuries she has sustained. I think letting my brain fill that in is more horrifying then if you'd described, oh, he hit her. She fell down the stairs. Whatever it is. Right? It becomes a very upsetting sequence of events that was very tense and difficult to listen to, in a good way. I think by me having to fill in those details…
[Mary Robinette] Making space for the audience.
[Dan] I am very glad that it had that effect on you. When I wrote that scene, this was back when I was still on Twitter, and I got on and said, "I just wrote a scene so brutal, Brandon Sanderson will regret ever collaborating with me." It… We had to tone it down a little, but… Yeah. That…
[DongWon] That's how it came through. I was like, "I am in a horror movie right now." You know what I mean? But that's the intended effect, I think. That's what you were trying to produce. Forcing me to produce all the worst horror movies I've ever seen in my brain, I think, was a great shortcut for you to get the effect that you wanted.
[Erin] Almost makes you complicit in the violence itself.
[DongWon] Yes. Thanks for making me feel worse about it.
[Giggles]
[Howard] I think that Dan Wells being complicit is a note to end on. Almost.
[Laughter]
 
[Mary Robinette] So, now it's time for your homework. I want you to do something which is actually the way I started writing prose. I want you to take something that you've already written and I want you to adapt it for audio. When I started writing, I tried going straight to script and it was a disaster. So I started writing a short story, and then converting it into audio. Because I wanted to write audio. You, my friends, are going to take something you've already written. As Erin suggested, you're going to be stripping out narration, you're going to be figuring out what sound effects are. Try to convert it for audio.
 
[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we explore writing as an act of hospitality and reader agency. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.7: To Series, or Not to Series
 
 
Key Points: One-offs, when an editor rejects book one, you can send them a different one. But a series can become a blitz. Make your choice deliberately. In short fiction, you may want to put the stories about a world in different publications to get a larger audience interested. You may also want to think about themed collections instead of eclectic collections. Reflections from Schlock Mercenary: Point 2, don't assume people are going to read the whole series, write each book as if it will be their entry point. And make sure there is an ending you can live with. Think about whether you want to be a series person, or a one-off person. You might use the model where there is a common universe, with different stories and some continuing characters. When you are considering a series, trilogy, or whatever, think about what else you want to do with that universe or world, and whether or not that means you need to keep the status quo or not. Consider artistic versus business decisions. 
 
[Season 16, Episode 7]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, To Series, or Not to Series.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] I'm 20 books into a series I'm done with.
[Laughter]
[Erin] Yay, Howard.
[Dan] [garbled] Howard. Thank you for flexing on us.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about series. This is part of the ongoing business class that Brandon is running. So, we're talking about the business side of series. Brandon, what are those business considerations when you're thinking about whether something should be a standalone or a series?
[Brandon] So, there's a lot that plays into this. It is one of the early decisions are going to have to make, particularly if you're a novelist, but even in short fiction. Because… Let me share a story. I might have shared it before on the podcast. But when I was breaking in, one of the things that I learned early on, or I thought I learned, was that I shouldn't ever write a second book in a series. This is because I was submitting books, traditional publishing back in the day, and if an editor rejected the first book of a series, I couldn't very well send them the second book of the series. But I could send them a new book from a different series. What I was looking for and starting to get were these kind of nice rejections, where they're like, "You know, this isn't for me, but I kind of like some things about it. What else do you have?" I could send that person book 1 of something else. So I got very good at writing a different book with every… A different series with every book I was writing. Well, in the meantime, Naomi Novik was writing the Temeraire novels. We were breaking in right around the same time. She wrote four… Three or four books in this series unpublished and put all her eggs in this basket. The advice you should write something new with every book would have been bad advice for her because when she sold that book and the editor said, "What else do you have?" She was able to say, "Actually, I've got two more done and an outline for several more." That actually made the publisher go all in on Naomi's books. I remember the publishing blitz that they did when they released her books. It was amazing. I'd never seen anything like it before for a new author. Three books came out, one a month, in three different months. Everyone was like, "What? A new author? One book a month? This is insane." It was presaging what became one of the best ways to break in during the Indy era, which is to save up a few books and then blitz. So that your releasing very quickly, so that people can suddenly been. Naomi Novik went from nobody to one of the biggest established names in fantasy in the process of three months, because publishers just went all in on those books. So it isn't as easy a choice or a decision as I had assumed it was. There was a branching path here. The more I've published in the more I become part of the business, the more I realize that there are lots of different decisions you can make here, none of which are bad, but I do think you should be thinking about and maybe making deliberately.
[Dan] I… If I remember correctly, Naomi crushed you in the Campbell award the first year, right?
[Brandon] Yeah. Absolutely crushed me.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And deservedly so, right? Like, there was no… I would not have voted for me with her, because her books were great and there were three, and you knew she was going to be a major force in the industry. Who knew about me with my one wacky little book?
[Dan] Yeah. So, I love this question. One of the things that Erin brought up as we were preparing for this episode is that she thought at first maybe she wouldn't have much to contribute, and then she thought, well, actually I do have several stories that maybe could turn into series. Erin, what are the questions you ask yourself as you are looking at your own work and trying to decide should I continue this or try to turn it into a series?
[Erin] I think that, to be honest, it's not a completely business first decision in my case. A lot of it is about exploring the worlds that I'm really passionate about, and, because I tend toward short fiction, just as a natural tendency, there's not… There's only so much you can encompass. So you come up with all this world, and then, you're like, here is one moment in the world. Maybe I should have another moment? And a third moment! Where I do think about things, and this is more on the business side, is, okay, now I have a second thing. Do I go back to the person who published the first story in that world? Do I want to try to get a new audience interested in this world by putting it somewhere else? To try to bring in new people who might then go back and find my first thing? Unlike with novels, where you're probably going to find it at the bookstore no matter who is publishing it, stories depend a lot on who the publisher is. So one of the cool things in the short fiction world is you can try to plan out a little bit and say, like, "Okay. This particular version of this story has a more science fiction-y angle, so maybe that's a Clarkesworld. This one maybe is more of an F&SF." And get more people interested in the work that you're writing, which, part of a series is really trying to capture people's attention for the long-term.
[Brandon] I would think, though I could be wrong here, that a consideration here is also the inevitable collection that you're going to put together. Because if you have books on a… Or stories on a theme, a collection is going to work, I've found, somewhat better if you can release a themed collection rather than just a… This goes into branding. Your name should be the brand that's going to sell this collection, but I've released one collection of short fiction. It was all fantasy stories set in the same universe. Because of that, it did better than expected. Because the fans of that culture… I call it the Cosmere, that universe, were able to pick up an entire book knowing what was in there and it wasn't going to be just completely eclectic. However, there are times when I have bought a book, wanting it to be eclectic, because I want to have a different experience with every story. In that case, I go look for one that is just collections of an author's stories through a time., Knowing I'm going to get something with a lot of just diversity in story type. So I do think that this is a business consideration. It doesn't have to be the driving force behind what you write, but it certainly behind the scenes as you build your collection of stories, deciding how you're going to market them.
[Howard] I'm… Go ahead, Dan.
 
[Dan] I'm going to pause for the book of the week is what I'm going to do. Then I'm going to let Howard say the brilliant thing he was about to say. So, my very favorite book series, I have talked about this multiple times on the podcast before, is The Saxon Chronicles from Bernard Cornwell. I'm delighted to report that a few months ago, the 13th and final book in that series has come out. This is a series of historical fiction that charts kind of the creation of England as a united kingdom that covers the entire island, and how King Alfred the Great and his children and grandchildren kind of formed all the disparate little kingdoms into one single nation. It's wonderful. Bernard Cornwell is a fantastic storyteller and a great writer. This has been years coming. So it was just an absolute pleasure for me to have this final book to cap off my very favorite series. So if you never read it before, the very first one in the series is called The Last Kingdom. It's got a BBC series as well. But the one that just came out, the final book, is called The Warlord.
 
[Dan] Now, Howard, what were you going to tell us?
[Howard] Oh, I feel really bad because Dan said, "And then we'll go to the smart thing Howard was going to say."
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The thing Howard was going to say is I could spend an entire 45 minute Writing Excuses super episode talking about the decision process for how to create each new book of Schlock Mercenary. I'm going to try and distill that into a couple of key points. Point number one, the first book is terrible. The art is bad, it's full of dad jokes, and I had no idea how my intrinsic biases were negatively affecting the stories that I was trying to tell. I had no clue. So fairly… I say, fairly early on… About a decade ago, I stopped telling people, "Oh, you should start at the beginning." I said, "You know what, go ahead and start at book 3." The decision… That decision meant that every time I wrote a book, I checked all of my assumptions, if you will, at the door, and asked myself, "Who are the characters that I'm going to be using in this book? How can I introduce them anew to the reader, assuming that this becomes the book that a reader picks up first?" Because I will never make a living at this if everybody has to buy my first book before they get to number 13. The third piece, the third decision piece, was the realization that the larger this series gets, the less people want… The less willing people are to commit to consume it. Because it's huge. It's 20 years of daily, every day daily comic installments. It's ginormous. Yes, it's 20 years of my life, and so it's allowed to be big. But that's a lot to ask anybody to bite off. So, we decided about five years ago it had to come to the end, and whatever end that was, it needed to be an ending where whatever I do next, even if it's in the same universe, whatever I do next needs to be something that people can pick up with zero knowledge of the existing Schlock Mercenary universe. As I said, I could talk for hours about the individual decision points. But those three pieces, the first book was not fantastic, each book needed to be its own starting point, and it has to end satisfactorily and completely without destroying the universe because I still want to write Schlock Mercenary things, I just don't need you to know what Schlock Mercenary is before you pick them up.
[Erin] I would say, this is a little bit of a side note from that brilliance, but thinking back to what Brandon was saying about sort of short fiction and collections, eclectic collections versus sort of getting everything in one world, I think that's true of novels as well. I think, getting back to what we were talking about in our last episode about branding, I think you can also kind of brand yourself as like a series person, like, when you sit down to read so-and-so, like, you're going to get a lot, you're going to get like a 20 year, you're going to get a deep dive. Or, there are other authors who are like, "Everything I do is a one-off." Every time you're going to get the same style but a completely different type of world and a completely different type of narrative experience. I think that's something to think about, what you want for yourself for your career, do you want to be a series person, a one-off person, as opposed to kind of just letting it happen.
[Brandon] I think that this… This can… They both have advantages and disadvantages. One of the biggest boosts to my career is the fact that I set all of my fantasy novels in the same universe. This was during a time where that was not necessarily… I mean, people have done this all through the history of storytelling. But it was not a selling point, for the most part, through most people's careers. King… Steven King did it and different authors have done it. I happened to be doing this the same time that the MCU launched. Right? My first book came out in 2005, the MCU launched in 2007, I believe it was, and suddenly, the MCU was getting big, when I had basically the same sort of model in my epic fantasy, where I had a bunch of different stories that were all connected with some continuing characters moving between planets and worlds. What this did is it gave me the same sort of boost that the MCU got where the series that may be a little lesser-known or people are a little less likely to try out or things like that got the boost of everyone knowing, "Oh, but it's connected to the whole thing. If I like this other thing, some of the things I love are going to be in this lesser-known story." What it does is it really makes it a lot easier for me to launch a new book series by saying, "This is a Cosmere." It's going to focus on this and it's tied into this whole big thing that I'm doing. The core fan base starts… I've got like three levels of branding. There's branding on the series, there's branding on the name, and there's the branding on half of my work is this larger universe. It's been an enormous help in marketing.
 
[Dan] I want to take a slightly different direction for our final few words here. One of the choices that I make, one of the things I look at when I'm deciding if something needs to be a series or not, is deciding what else I'm going to do with that universe, with that world, and if that means I need to keep its status quo. What I mean by that is, for example, Mistborn is a great example of this. The story you were telling with that trilogy is the story of changing the world irrevocably. More so than a lot of dystopias. Dystopia does this, but Mistborn in particular. What that means is after you finished that trilogy, if you had wanted to… Well, and you did, want to continue dealing with that world, you couldn't use those same characters and you couldn't use that same kind of style and world and culture that you had established and the people fell in love with. You found other ways to do that with the follow-up series. But, for example, with the role-playing game tie-in, with the board game tie-in, those necessarily are not continuations of the story, they are kind of infixes to the story you already told.
[Brandon] So this is a good… We haven't talked a lot in this series about when you make artistic decisions versus business decisions. I've often said, Erin said in a previous episode something like this, that I think while you're writing the stories, artistic concerns should be primary. We're not talking about those in this series, but it should be in the back of your brain that it's all right to make bad business decisions for artistic reasons. Because we are storytellers who want to tell a specific story. When I came in with the pitch for the original Mistborn series which ended with an irrevocable change to the status quo, the publisher told me this was a bad idea and recommended I not do it. I did it anyway. They thought this was a terrible idea. This was Tom Doherty, this wasn't my editor. This is the head of the company, who said, "This is probably disastrous for your career. You should not do this. Because if this series takes off, you are limited to three books. You're going to have to completely rebrand the series for the next books in the series, and they are just not going to sell as well. They never do." I made artistic decisions that I wanted to do this. Then I leaned into them business-wise. I said, "One of the selling points of the Mistborn trilogy is that it is a complete trilogy, that you know you have an ending." I think artwork is stronger when there's an ending to it. I then tried to do the best with the business that I could, and I think it has certain advantages by having different eras of the series. But I made that as an artistic choice, not a business choice. Then I made the business adapt to it, rather than the other way around.
[Dan] That's, I think, a very smart way of handling that. Lots of different series… You look at my own, the Partials series, that is about the end of a status quo. Where is the Mirador series, I could write Mirador novels for the rest of time, because the status quo never changes. Extreme Makeover, which I think is my best book, will never have a sequel, because…
[Chuckles]
[Dan] I made that choice early on that that's how the world is going to end.
 
[Dan] Anyway. We have come to the end of our episode. We have a bit of homework that were going to get from Howard.
[Howard] Right. This is leaning a little into the art side of it. Hopefully, you, fair listener, have a favorite series. Something that you've read or watched or otherwise consumed that you are familiar with. Here is your homework. For each installment of that series, whether it's a book or an episode of TV or a movie, write down what questions were asked and what questions were answered. Do this so that over the course of the whole series you can see the question-and-answer dialogue that takes place between the creator and the consumer. You're doing this so that when you have to ask yourself, "Oh, no, am I holding back too many of my best ideas for later in the series?" you have an answer. Because some of those question-and-answer moments in the series that you love, some of those may be your favorite things and they didn't show up until six books in. So, there's your homework. Question-and-answer, documented over the course of a series that you love.
[Dan] Fantastic. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.03: Publishing Pitfalls
 
 
Key Points: There are people out there who see aspiring writers as someone to make money off of! $50 reading fees? Remember, money flows toward the author. Beware of people who see you as a mark. Talk to other writers. Check Writer Beware and similar sites. Pay attention to the groups you join, you may not fit there. You may need multiple groups for different reasons. Accountabilibuddies! In indie publishing, you need to make business decisions. Think of yourself as two different people, a writer self and a business self, and make sure you are using the right one for the situation.
 
[Season 16, Episode 3]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishing Pitfalls.
[Erin] 15 minutes long.
[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Erin] I'm Erin.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
[Howard] And I'm Howard.
 
[Dan] Welcome back to the third episode of our intensive course on the insider business of publishing. We're very excited to have with us Erin Roberts on the show. Erin, can you very quickly remind our listeners who you are?
[Erin] Sure. I am a short fiction writer primarily. Early in my career, so excited to share that part of the publishing world. I've had stories published in Clarkesworld, Asimov's, and a few other places here and there.
[Dan] Fantastic. Well, we're excited to have you on the show.
 
[Dan] We're going to talk about publishing pitfalls this time. Things that inexperienced and sometimes even experienced authors fall into, mistakes that we make. Brandon, what are some of the things you need to warn us about?
[Brandon] Well, the big overarching theme for this episode is going to be to teach you to realize and recognize the fact that a lot of people out there see you as someone to make money off of as an aspiring writer. Or as a new professional. I point to an example of this in my career. Before I knew what I was doing, and I thought the way to get an agent was just to buy a book of agents and start submitting to all of them, I submitted to an agent who wrote back… Or, no, I didn't… Yeah, I just went to the website and they said, "Send your book along with $50 to our agency and we will consider you." I just lost 50 bucks. Right? They had a reading fee, and I'm sure they made a nice bunch of money off of being in whatever list that I had read on agents who took science fiction and fantasy books. They cashed my check, and I only got taken for 50 bucks. It's not a big deal to get taken for 50 bucks. But I'll tell you, when I was later on at a convention and someone said, "Watch out, there's a lot of agents out there who will put on their thing send us 50 bucks and we'll consider your book, and they're making their money off of people sending them 50 bucks rather than actually selling books," I felt like a total loser. Because I'd just been taken in, hook, line, and sinker by these people.
[Dan] Yeah. Now, there are, and I'm sure that we'll get into this a little bit in the show, there are certainly people that are not out to get you. There are absolutely legitimate writing conferences and editors for hire and things like that who are doing valuable work for the money that they get from you.
[Brandon] Yes.
[Dan] We're talking more about the hucksters, who, like you said, they make all their money on jilting you out of yours.
[Brandon] Yeah. The phrase that was commonly used when I was breaking in was money flows toward the author, and that any time you are writing a check to someone, you need to stop, consider, and decide if this is someone you should be sending money to. Normally, early in my career, people would say, "just never, never write a check to anyone." That's not the case anymore, because as indie publishing has become a much more legitimate way to make a career as a writer, there are lots of good places that you should be spending your money if you are an indie author. Indeed, there are a lot of good conferences and conventions that you have to pay to get in. That's not a bad expense. So this episode is to talk to you about the mistakes that new authors often make specifically relating to shortcuts that you are offered towards publishing that often can just either waste your time or your money. The first one I want to talk about is people who see you as a mark. Now, this doesn't actually have to always be someone who has your worst interests at heart. It can also be someone who just doesn't know what they're doing, right? Looking at the agency I submitted to, years later, I went back and looked at them. They were out of business. I don't think this was someone who was there to look at authors as marks. I think this was someone who thought I'd be a pretty good agent. I spent years as, say, a real estate agent. I know how to interact with people. I know how I… I sell houses, I should be able to sell books to publishers. But how do I make any money? Well, I probably should charge these authors a little bit upfront because we're in this together. So I need to know if they're serious or not. So that's probably how they came about having is like that. But the problem there was not that I necessarily was taken in by a con artist, I was taken in by an agent who had no idea what they were doing, and, indeed, could not further my career at all.
[Howard] You know how you tell if an author is serious about something? If they hand you a book. If they've written a whole manuscript, this is someone who's serious about something. A real agent knows that.
[Brandon] The easiest way… I mean, agents are one of the easiest ones to determine if they're legit or not. Because if they're a legit agent, you should be able to go to the bookstore and find new books represented by that agent. Authors who are represented by that agent, who include new authors that the agent is actively discovering. Not just the states that the agent is representing. If you can't find… If that agent hasn't released in the last five years, if they don't have new authors that are releasing books with the publishers you want to publish with, then that's just not an agent to send to.
 
[Dan] Now, Erin, you have published in some pretty high profile short fiction markets which is the kind of thing that typically makes someone a mark or predatory agents or publishers. Have you experienced any of this? People coming after you because you're kind of starting your career?
[Erin] I have had some people reach out to me because, as you should do, like, I have a writer website with how to contact me because legit people will also contact you. So, things come in, and some of them are, "Oh, this is actually a really great opportunity," and other ones where it's like, "Oh, I did a little research and no one seems to have heard of you. You're an agent, like you said, that doesn't seem to have any clients or any clients who have published books." So a lot of it is doing research. I also say one thing I really like about the short fiction world is that there's a really great community there. Talking to other writers is a great way to know, like, if you're dealing with something that is legit. Not everyone knows everything, but a lot of times asking people, "Have you heard of this agent? Have you heard of this editor? Do you know any experiences with this person?" can be a way to try to weed out folks who maybe don't have your best interests at heart.
[Brandon] When I was a newer writer, one of the places, and I would assume it's still there but I can't say… I haven't been there in years, was Predators and Editors, the forum, where there was generally a thread about every small press, every legit press, and a lot of threads about non-legitimate presses and agents on those forums. I went there a lot during the early part of my career because I had no idea who was legit and who wasn't.
[Dan] Awesome. I just looked them up, it looks like Predators and Editors is kind of in transition right now.
[Brandon] Okay.
[Dan] But there are other sites like Writer Beware that are still doing very similar work. So there are places to do this research.
 
[Dan] Let's pause for our book of the week, which is actually not a book. It is a channel that Brandon loves and wants to tell us about.
[Brandon] Yeah. This isn't maybe the best topic to slot this in, but I wanted to give a shout out to a YouTube channel called Noah Cadwell-Gervais. Noah Cadwell-Gervais, he does long form essays about videogames. Really long form. The sort of stuff that is terrible click bait, that YouTube does not optimize for. He'll have a four hour YouTube video that he'll do on some in-depth look at a series. He recently did The Last of Us where… The thing about Noah is, he's just an excellent writer. I listen… Every episode when I listen to, I write down multiple phrases that he said that I think, "Man, I would love to have come up with that." He talked about writing in a recent episode where he said, "Writing is about editing, and it's super hard to walk into a room with your two favorite paragraphs and a bullet for one of them, knowing you're only going to walk out with one of those paragraphs."
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] I'm like, "Man, that is a metaphor." That is just a brilliant way to use words. He's really good at it. He writes these all out ahead of time, and then reads them and puts over footages, and even if you're not interested in the games themselves, he has a really interesting take on video games. So I wanted to give him a shout out. I think that his channel is doing fine, it has more subscribers by a little bit than mine does, but he certainly isn't as watched as he deserves. So give it a look. It's really fun to watch people writing in other mediums and in kind of new media ways. I learn a lot from the way he crafts his prose for his video essays.
[Howard] You know, if you walked into a room with two paragraphs and you've only got one bullet, you're not editing hard enough.
[Laughter]
[Dan] One bullet and a machete. So that the paragraph that survives is a lot smaller when it comes out.
 
[Dan] Now, one thing that we were talking about in preparation for this episode is the idea that there are many different kinds of writers that are looking for different things. Part of the pitfall can be misidentifying which group you're in, or really just kind of accidentally stumbling into a group rather than choosing that deliberately.
[Brandon] Yeah. When I was early in my career, a lot of people recommended several local writing groups that I go and try out, because I was looking at writing groups and things. I found that each writing group had its own kind of theme, and some were not necessarily themed the way that I wanted to do things. Like, I was very gung ho about writing novels and publishing in the novel field very soon. I was looking for a writing group of people who would read a lot and who were also very aggressive about their publishing careers. I found a lot of well-established groups that were support groups for friends, for people who were not necessarily as aggressive about publishing as I was. I found I was a really bad fit for those groups. I've heard of other people getting in some of these groups and kind of adopting the mindset of the group, which can be a bad thing for helping you achieve your goals as a writer.
[Erin] I would say that it's… A lot of it, you can have a lot of also different groups that you belong to that feed different parts of your writer's soul. Like, we contain multitudes. So, as long as you know what that is doing for you. So, like, I have a group of friends that is more of like a just how are we getting through the day, like, have we made it through 2020, type of like let's just all commiserate group. But I don't use that group as a way to push me forwards. That's more of a group that's a way to make me feel comforted and that I do the work. Then I have groups that are more about critique, group accountabilibuddies where I'm riding with someone and it's about getting the time into do the writing. As long as I know what each of those is, it completely works.
[Howard] Accountabilibuddy.
[Erin] Yes.
[Howard] Accountabilibuddy. I'm going to say that word a couple of times, and then maybe write it down in the liner notes. Accountabilibuddy.
[Erin] Everyone should have at least one in my opinion. But, yeah, as long as you know what the people are and you're not going to one group for something that they're not going to provide for you, I think it can work. But the problem is when you think one group maybe is going to do all things for you. Or you don't recognize that they're not in the same place as you are.
[Dan] Yeah. I… This isn't just about groups, either. This is how I divide up a lot of my alpha and beta readers when I send out a book. Because I need to be able to send it to someone who's going to give me a meaningful, useful critique, but I also need to be able to send my books to someone who is going to tell me that it's awesome and make me feel good about myself, even when it's terrible. One of the groups, we've kind of hinted at this, I want to be a little more explicit. There are absolutely writing groups out there that are not really treating writing as a professional career or as a professional outlet, it's more of a supportive community. I would wager that a big chunk of you wonderful listeners fall into that category. So I want to be clear that we're not trying to bag on that. If you are writing in a way that gives you joy, then you are doing it correctly. If your goal is to make money, then that's a different goal than just having some fun Friday nights with your writer buddy. So that's why it's so important to know which group you're in.
[Brandon] Yeah. Writing groups are this kind of their own special pitfall in that you can find one that matches your career goals, but the type of feedback you're getting is detrimental to your writing style and to your writing psychology. So, we have several other episodes on that. But just be aware, it's okay for a writing group to be a good writing group, but a bad fit for you.
[Dan] Now, that said, I bet a lot of our listeners maybe didn't realize that they were in the wrong group until we said it just now. So take this opportunity to take stock of yourself. Maybe one of the reasons that your aspiring career dreams are stalling is because you've slotted yourself into the wrong kind of community. Howard?
 
[Howard] Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the publishing pitfall for indie publishers. I say the publishing pitfall. There are a million of them. Because when you are an independent publisher, when you are indie publishing, you have become the publisher, and Amazon, for instance, really is the distributor. As the publisher, you are now being asked to make partnership decisions for who am I going to hire to copyedit my book. Who am I going to hire to do cover art for my book? Who am I going to work with to help me build a promotional campaign around my book? This is a fantastically fraught space, especially if you have never in the course of your career doing other things, never had the opportunity to, for instance, administer a job interview or say no to someone who wants money. These are life skills that if you haven't developed yet, indie publishing is a space where even if people aren't looking towards you as a mark, you are a mark. You are going to hemorrhage money and time until you figure out how to make the decisions correctly. When Sandra and I decided to do, and this was a decade or more ago, the Schlock Mercenary iPhone app for reading the comics via iPhone, we put together a very simple application which was, "Hey, if you'd like to build an iPhone app, show us an app that you've done and come to us with a business plan for how you'd make money with this app." We had dozens of people show us apps that they'd made, some of which were pretty shiny. Only one person came to us with a business plan. That was Gary Henson. We don't have an iPhone app anymore because reasons. But Gary is now running the Schlock Mercenary web service. Because I set up a threshold where I knew I'd only be doing business with somebody who understood that this was a business.
[Erin] Yeah. To that point, I think a piece of advice that I've always loved is the idea that you've got your writer writer self and your business of writing self, and to really think of those as sort of two different people inhabiting your body, and that sometimes you need to turn things over to the businessperson and sometimes you need to be focusing on the writer person. In the short fiction world, a lot of times that'll be like, "You can write as many lovely stories as you want," but your businessperson's going to have to be the one being like, "When do I need to submit them, and to whom? And, like, in what order?" I think that continues in indie publishing, your businessperson is a huge part of what you're doing.
 
[Dan] Absolutely. I wish we could talk about this all day, but we do need to be done. Brandon, you've got some homework for us?
[Brandon] Yeah. So. One of the best websites that was really helpful to me when I was breaking in, and it's still being maintained and supported by SFWA is Writer Beware. If there's a single best resource to watch, it is probably them. They explain a lot of these pitfalls in much more depth than we can cover. Particularly, indie publishing as it was becoming a thing, it was really hard, and still is kind of difficult, to determine who is a legit editor, freelance editor you should pay, and who is someone who is out there to try to feed you into this vanity press loop, where you pay for editing, they send you to a publisher, a publisher recommends another editor, who then you pay for editing. The publisher gets a kickback, and then you… You could end up in this loop forever, spending tons of money. Vanity publishing, which is different from indie publishing. Learning the difference will help you, if you go to Writer Beware. So our homework is spend some time familiarizing yourself with Writer Beware and other resources like it on the Internet that will help you see who is trying to take advantage of you and who is a legitimate editor that you may want to hire.
[Dan] Fantastic. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.02: Publishers Are Not Your Friends
 
 
Key Points: Publishers, the companies, are not your friends, even if editors and individuals may be your friends. The businesses have different incentives, which may not match your incentives as an author. Example: the corporation will try to take worldwide rights in all languages, but they probably won't exploit them well. Another example, when you want to change series or genres, the corporation wants to keep you in that well-worn slot, but you may want to change. Also, be aware that your agent and you may have different incentives. Remember, you are the person who cares about your career, so take care of it. Your relationship with the publisher and the agent is a business relationship.
 
[Season 16, Episode 2]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Publishers Are Not Your Friends.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] Because you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] And I'm Brandon.
 
[Dan] We are back for another episode of Brandon's intensive course on career planning and kind of the inside of publishing. This time we want to talk about publishers. Now, Brandon, you named this episode Publishers Are Not Your Friends.
[Brandon] Yep.
[Dan] That's not what I want to hear.
[Brandon] Well, yeah. It's not what I wanted to hear, either. Actually, I got told this by my agent early in my career. Working on, I think, my first contract. I'm like, "But, no. I want to have a really good relationship with my publisher." The thing is, when I say publishers in this, I'm not usually meaning the individual, the publisher, I am meaning the company, the publisher. My editor is, indeed, my friend. Right? Indeed, many people at the publisher are my friends. But the corporation that is publishing you, traditionally published, is not your friend. This can be expanded to, unfortunately, Amazon is not your friend. Indeed, to an extent, your agent is an individual might be your friend, but your agency might not always be your friend. What do I mean by this? I mean that everyone is, when you're looking at yourselves as businesspeople, everyone has different incentives working on books. Your incentives as an author do not always align with your publisher or your agent. Almost always, it's going to align with your agent's incentives. But there are a lot of times where the publisher's incentives and yours are very different. I've got a bunch of examples of this. We'll go through them. But the idea is that I want you to start thinking about this. Because the publisher as a corporation will pretend to be your friend. Indeed, you will have good relationships hopefully with the people at the corporation. But they will make the corporate decisions rather than the friend decisions when money is on the line.
[Howard] Several years ago, my friend, Dave Brady, wrote a piece on loyalty to a corporation and the madness that it is. I want to read a little bit of this text from my friend Dave because it's so amazing. "A corporation is not a living creature. It has no soul, it has no heart, it has no feelings. It can neither experience towards you nor enjoy from you even the concept of loyalty. It's a legal fiction and it exists for one purpose, to make profit. If you assist in this goal, your ongoing association with the organization is facilitated. If you distract from it, will be cut. Family is where they have to take you in, no matter what you've done. A corporation is the exact opposite of that."
 
[Brandon] Exactly. Again, none of us want to hear this. I didn't want to hear this. In fact, it took me years to understand what my agent was saying. I'm hoping that with some of my examples here, you will be able to understand. Like, let me talk about one of them that happened in my career. So, when you sell the rights to your book to a publisher, there are lots of different rights that you can sell. You can sell… What is normally sold to a US publisher is US or North American English rights. They will want to take worldwide rights in all languages. They will not be able to exploit those very well. But they'll want to take them. Well, why do they want them? Well, think about it this way. If they take all of those rights from you, and they make an extra $2000, then, they have come out ahead in that contract. Those rights are only worth maybe $2000 to them. To you, those rights may be worth $50,000. The corporation is not going to look and say, "Wow. If we let him have these, it's $50,000 to him. If we keep them, is $2000 to us and $2000 to him." They're not going to think that way. They're going to think, "$2000 of profit is $2000 of profit. We should not let go of these." But to you, those mean a ton. How did this work in my career? Tor fought to try to get world English rights out of me. They let go of all the other English rights… Or all the other language rights very easily, but they wanted to sell my books to their imprint in the UK, which was going to give them a couple thousand dollars for them. My world English rights, which is usually considered the UK, Ireland, Australia, and other places they export, like India. That was worth, when we finally sold it, somewhere around $50,000 on that same book. Tor would have been perfectly happy taking that $2000 and never launching me in these other countries. And really kind of ruining my career worldwide. They would have done that in a heartbeat. We took it to a publisher in the area who had unaligned incentive with me, that wanted to sell me really big in these countries. Tor would not have lost any sleep or even shed a tear if they had made an extra couple thousand dollars off of me by ruining my career worldwide.
[Dan] Let me give an alternative perspective on this. Because, first of all, that's absolutely true. I make a vast majority of my money outside of the US. So I am all aboard for international rights. On the other hand, some of my early deals with HarperCollins, they wanted to maintain international rights and we didn't let them. We kept them because I wanted to be able to sell to Germany and South America, which are my big markets. The result is that me as a person, my contract to them was actually worth less, because I was only making them money through one channel, instead of through multiple channels. We were able to work around that, and Partials was still a very big success. But it's definitely something to think about. I had to find other ways to make myself more valuable to the publisher.
[Brandon] Yeah. Part of this equation for us, and this goes back to last week, learning your business, was understanding that Tor had a poor business in the UK, and indeed, would not have been able to do for me, in the UK and world English markets, as well as going to a local publisher. It was worth such a small amount of money to them that we didn't think it would really add anything. But it is a consideration. There are times when you want to give up some or all of these rights for one reason or another.
[Mary Robinette] Just to add on to that. The… When I had the Glamorous History series, Tor also held the English language rights. They never sold the rights to Of Noble Family in the UK, which is book 5. There's a reason, in the UK, you can only get books one through four, book five wasn't sold. That is the one that took the longest to earn out. Because we only had one stream for that, which was the US.
 
[Dan] Yeah. Now, I want to pause here for our book of the week, which is actually a little bit about my story with HarperCollins. On my second series with them, the Mirador series, which is my cyberpunk YA, that series didn't fit well with them. In hindsight, it was not a good fit. My age… My publisher, my editor, I should say, my editor loved it. He was 100% behind the book. But, as Brandon was saying earlier, the publisher at large was not. We kind of had to convince them to take a risk on it. What that meant is that they didn't really understand the book, they didn't really understand how to sell it. So the series, every book in that series sold worse than the last one. By the time we got to the third book, they essentially just opened their window and threw a bunch of copies out and hoped people caught them. It got zero marketing, zero publishing. That one is called Active Memory. It's the best book in the trilogy, and I would love for you to all go read it. Because it's great. Even though the publisher did not know what to do with it, and therefore didn't support it.
 
[Brandon] Yeah. I mean, another place that this happens is when you are trying to change up your career. Starting a new series. Starting a new genre. Another thought experiment you can have, and of course, this… There are lots of different things that play into each of my examples here that could change around the numbers for you. But let's imagine that you are pretty good at writing fantasy novels. You make, say, $50,000 at fantasy with each of your new fantasy novels. But you, as a writer…
[Mary Robinette] I would love to imagine that.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] But you as a writer love the idea of writing different thing, because your artistic pursuits take you different directions. Indeed, let's say you could write science fiction books, and they make $40,000. Which to you is a good trade-off, because it lets you do something else. It lets you avoid burnout. It lets you just explore new areas and potentially get new fans and things like this. Publisher's not going to want you to do that. They would rather have you not be writing that $40,000 book, in fact, they would rather you just not release it. Because they would rather slot into that slot a science fiction writer earns 50,000 a year, rather than have you do $50,000 with a fantasy and the other side… And then your science fiction next year do $40,000. They would just rather have two $50,000 books and have you not publish a book that year. Now that obviously is a very different alignment in interests. I've known lots of writers who are like, "You know, I want to try a fantasy now." Publishers are like, "Oh, that's a bad idea. It's a bad idea for this reason and this reason and this reason. You shouldn't do this." Well, a big part of this is that, but even if they were making the same money, it is very… Much easier for a publisher to brand an author as "This is our fantasy person." The marketing people want to know this is our person who writes this style of book. They want to be able to have the sales force go into the bookstores and say, "You buy this sort of book from this author." That's just way easier for them, and it's actually way… They have strong incentives to have that kind of list. They don't want to have this person who does all these eclectic things that they have to explain to people. Where that may be where you want to take your career.
[Howard] I wanted to point out that in this situation, in this circumstance, it's really difficult for the individual author to wrap their head around the full list of things that the publisher is looking at when they're making those kinds of decisions. But the agent you may have partnered with may have a really good grasp of that. This is one of those cases where having a friend was also a business, who is an agent, can really help you deal with the publisher. Because you can talk to your agent and you can say, "Look. I want to write science fiction. That's what's going to keep me happy. What do you and I need to do, writer and agent, what do you and I need to do in order to find a way to make money with publishers for that?" The discussion after that point is going to take all kinds of shapes depending on you're publishing with.
[Mary Robinette] To that point, harkening back to the first thing in this, when we were talking about thinking of yourself as a business as well, be careful about branding yourself by whatever it is that the publisher initially slots you into. So, I was initially slotted into historical fantasy. Right now, I am writing science fiction, historical science fiction. But whatever. But the point is, I am doing much better… My sales numbers are much, much better with the science fiction. If I had branded myself solely as a historical fantasy author, if I had done that with my twitter handle, my website name, and all of those things, that would have locked me into something that did not represent everything that I could do. George RR Martin, his first books were about vampires on steamships. Like, you don't want to lock yourself into whatever that first book is, because something else may happen. The publisher, if they are paying attention to your numbers, which is what happened… The reason we moved over to Science Fiction was because they noticed… With me, they noticed that I kept winning awards with science fiction short stories. I was not winning awards with fantasy short stories. So, they're like, "Why don't you try a science fiction novel?"
 
[Brandon] It is much easier, and we'll have a whole episode on branding later on, but it is much easier for the publisher to brand you as a series. This is really common in YA. They lips us it's easier for their sales force to sell a series than an author. It's easier for the publisher to be like, "We have this series." You want to brand your name. They're going to want to brand the series. This is just very… Historically, what I've seen in almost every instance. The other thing I want to mention before we leave, even though I know were running a little low on time, is, there are a couple of places where you and your agent will have different incentives. Not nearly as many, but I do want to bring them up. It's happened in two cases, most often I've seen in the industry. One is that, particularly early in your career, a small amount of money to you might be life changing. Right? You may be able to pay your rent with an extra $500 from your book getting sold into a foreign market that does not pay a whole lot of money. Your agent will make 75 bucks off of that $500 sale. Their incentive, if you look at an hour to earnings ratio for them, it might take them three or four hours of work to get that sale to happen in that small country. They may look at it and be like, "This just isn't worth the money. I'm not going to spend the time there." Where that $500 coming to you could mean the difference between making rent and being able to be full-time and not. So you need to be in charge of your career and saying to the agent, "I really want you to go and spend this time." They... A good agent will recognize that selling you worldwide is going to help build the brand of the author in ways that are beyond that extra 500 bucks. But I've known a lot of agents who just don't do the extra work to sell those small markets.
[Howard] I was almost published by Steve Jackson games. The publisher is not your friend. Steve Jackson is my friend. The original contract that came out, I looked at it and realized if you're planning on selling a couple of thousand books and paying me 5%, I will run out of money before these hit print. Steve came to me, my friend Steve, not the publishing company friend, my friend Steve said, "The only way for you to eat is for you to self publish." Then he put me in touch with his spouse Monica who walked me through building self-publishing. Monica has since passed away and I love her and can point at that friend is one of a handful of people… A handful of people who made my career possible. But that handful of people does not include a company. It was somebody who was acting against the interests of their company in order to help me. I was very fortunate.
[Brandon] Yeah. Kind of pulling us to a close here. We'll talk about this later. But we'll keep coming back to this concept. Just get it in your head. You are the person who needs to care about your career the most. You are the person who needs to watch out for yourself and make sure you're not being taken advantage of. You can't expect an agent and a publisher to do this for you. Maybe at times they will. Maybe at times they'll help you out. But at the end of the day, you have to understand, you have business relationships with people in addition or alongside your friendships.
 
[Dan] Awesome. Now we do have one closing bit of homework, which is also from Brandon.
[Brandon] Yes. So, one thing that was related to this is that Dan and I when we were breaking in, one of the things we found very useful to do, and I've talked about this on the podcast before, but I want to give you the homework for it. Which is, make a little black book, so to speak, of publishers. This is write down all the publishers in traditional publishing who are releasing new books by new authors consistently into the bookstores where you shop and you can find them there. Write those names down, write those publisher names down, and start watching for the books that they release and the editors who work there. So that you start having a grasp on the industry and who are the players that are in the industry. Read all of the acknowledgments pages for those books. Find the names of the agents. Start actually treating yourself like a businessperson who is looking how to network and how to understand your business.
[Dan] Fantastic. So. Thank you for listening to Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 
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Writing Excuses 16.01: Your Career is Your Business
 
Key Points: Look at becoming a writer as a business. You are starting and running a small business. You have to manage your business, the publisher and the agent will not do it for you. They are partners, they will help, but it is your business. What do you want, what do you imagine it becoming? Think about a creative mission statement. Make sure your career is deliberate, not accidental. Ask yourself questions. How are you going to handle health insurance? How will you balance your time between writing and promotion? How are you going to handle email? You might silo the non-writing things into one day a week, or chunks of time spread through the week. How are you going to handle taxes? Hire an accountant or DIY? Think about placing a dollar amount on an hour of writing time, and use that to decide whether to pay someone else to do it or do it yourself. Try balancing money, audience, and shininess. Money, how much does it pay or cost. Audience, how many people will you connect with. Shiny, how much do you want to do it. Think of your writing as a career, a business, and make deliberate, informed choices.
 
[Season 16, Episode 1]
 
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Your Career is Your Business.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Howard] As you're in a hurry.
[Brandon] And we're not that smart.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary…
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Mary Robinette] Robinette.
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] We're all fine. I'm Mary Robinette, we've done this a lot.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Brandon] I'm Brandon.
 
[Dan] This, as you can tell, is the very first episode of 2021. We are excited to be here. We've got a cool thing that were going to do for the entire year, is, we have split this year into a series of what we are calling Master Classes, or intensive courses is maybe a better way of thinking about this. So each of us has come up with a topic and we'll spend eight or nine episodes diving really deep, kind of teaching the rest of the group about that specific topic. So we are going to start with this really cool kind of inside look at the publishing world class that Brandon has put together. Brandon, do you want to tell us a little bit about your course in general?
[Brandon] Yeah. So, the idea is to have a course that starts training writers to look at becoming a writer as a business. This is something that took me by surprise when I started into this. I was not aware that writing is a small business. I didn't know I was starting a business. In fact, I didn't incorporate for several years. That's very common. But not knowing that led me to make a large number of mistakes before I'd got my feet underneath me. Even still, I'm making some of these mistakes. But I thought, you know what, one of the things that I really wish I'd known when I began was that I was starting a small business. I wanted to give some tips to writers starting on this journey or who are in the middle of it who just may not have given enough thought to this aspect of it. We all want to be artists, that's why we become writers. This whole thing isn't to dissuade you from your artistic intents. But it is to start you this class and this mindset that just isn't often shared in writing courses. Because we all want to be artists, and sometimes it feels like talking about the business side of things is crass, and we don't want to monetize our artistic intentions, but when you start on this path, you are starting a business.
[Howard] Speaking briefly as the parent of four hungry adult children, who still don't all have their own jobs, I very much want to monetize every last little bit of my everything that I do.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Crass or not crass, I want to eat.
[Dan] Yeah. So, I am very fortunate in that one of my best friends got published about a year and 1/2 before I did. So when I did get my contract, Brandon, the very first thing he said to me was, "You need to think about this. Think of yourself as a small business owner," and gave me some really great advice. So what are some of the bits of advice you want to give us, Brandon, about starting to think of ourselves as business owners?
[Brandon] Right. Well, the first idea is just this mindset change. Which was the biggest hurdle I think I had to overcome. That's why I named this first episode Your Career Is Your Business. A lot of writers, myself included, when we begin, we have in our head that once we get published, the publisher and the agent are going to be in charge of the business. We're going to have people managing all of the business side. We will be able to spend our days in artistic pursuits. This just isn't true. An agent is not a business manager. An agent will certainly help. An agent is, if you're going traditionally published, an agent is the number one resource you will have for these sorts of things. So certainly it's nice to have them. But it's your business that you're starting. It's not their business. They have a lot of different clients they'll be working for. You're going to be expected to care about your career.
[Howard] One of the things that I like to… I developed this mindset when I was in the corporate world. My career in the corporate space really was defined by the people I was working with, but my career as a person who makes things, a person who imagines things, a person who wants to be paid to operate the oven that bakes the cookies that only come out of my brain, that is not a career path that can be managed by somebody else. That is a career path that has to be managed by me. So a literary agent is a business partner. A publisher is a business partner. I already had, when I started doing comics, I already had a big framework in my head for what business partnerships look like and what they don't look like. So that gave me a quick leg up, and it made a lot of things easier early on. But Brandon, you're absolutely right about this mindset. You have to start from that point, believing that what you are doing is your business and, it is, to layer the meaning, a little bit, it's your business, it's not anybody else's business. They're going to try and get all up in your business from time to time, but it's really all about… It's all about what you want and what you imagine it becoming.
[Mary Robinette] So, I'm really glad Howard mentioned what you want, which I'm sure Brandon is going to get into. But I come into this from theater, and being a freelancer for my entire adult life. So, for me, the small business was transforming the small business that I already had. Which was puppeteer, audiobook narrator, and then writer. One of the things that I find helpful when thinking about this small business is to actually have a mission statement. You can think of it as your creative mission statement. But it's going to change over the course of your career. So, initially the mission statement that I had was fairly simple. It was to be able to turn down the gigs I didn't want to do. I've gotten to the point in my career now only gigs I've got are the gigs that I want to do. So now I have to figure out actually what kind of work do I want to be doing and who do I want to be and be presenting myself as. Because I have to start figuring out how to turn down the gigs I do want to do in order to focus on really refining who I am, and this thing that Brandon is talking about and Howard about monetizing. Because it's not… It's not always a straightforward path.
 
[Dan] Let's pause really quick. Do our book of the week. Which is coming to us this week from Howard.
[Howard] Well, I wish I could take more credit for this one. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I read it years and years and many years ago, and absolutely loved it. It has one of my very favorite uses of footnotes. It's widely regarded now as a classic space in which it sits, and recently was made into a TV miniseries available on Amazon Prime. I have really enjoyed and benefited personally from comparing the two. I'll circle back around to that later at homework time.
[Dan] Awesome. So that is Good Omens from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.
 
[Dan] Now, I loved what Mary Robinette said about mission statement, which ties into what I've heard Brandon talk about a lot in the past, is making sure that your career is deliberate rather than accidental. Brandon, what do you have to tell us about that, and how to do it?
[Brandon] So, there are all kinds of questions I feel like you should be asking yourself during your unpublished years and during your early parts of your career that you have answers to for when the need arises. For instance, a good one if you live in the US, unfortunately, is going to be how are you going to approach health insurance? This is a big question that you need to think about. I never thought about it a single time in the early part of my career. You would think that that would have come up, but it wasn't until I was married and publishing my first books and realizing, wait a minute. In America, for some stupid reason, health insurance is attached to your job. I'm just not going to have that. How do I get that? Talk to other people, who are self-employed, and figure out how you're going to approach this. Other questions are how are you going to balance your time as an author? How much time are you going to spend on doing the actual writing, how much time are you going to spend on promotion? We'll talk about promotion in a later week in this master class, but right now, the question is when are you going to put these things in? When are you going to do email? I wasn't expecting how much more email would come in…
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] And how much of it would involve publishers' panic… Panicking about little things. I had to set aside specific times. What I've done in my life right now is I have taken all of the things that are not writing, and I've tried to silo them into one day a week. Thursdays. This is when I'm going to do all of these things, the longer emails. The short emails that can get a quick answer, I'll do at the beginning of my workday. But if there's something that is going to take a long, in-depth thing, I'll say, "Hey, I'm going to respond to you on Thursday." If there's an interview that I need to do for promotion, I always schedule them on Thursdays. If there are company meetings, I put them on Thursdays. This allows me to take off my writer hat for a day and approach being a business person for a day. With me, this helps keep me from being frustrated. If I have good siloing of these sorts of things, I'll stop being resentful of the time that I have to spend not writing.
[Mary Robinette] I'm going to chime in here, because I'd heard Brandon talk about this before, so I also tried siloing my non-writing things to one day a week. It turns out that doesn't work for me, because my brain is wired differently. That wound up causing me to have more fatigue. But I did have to block out time. So I have blocked out specific chunks of time, but spread them through the week. This… I just want to point out that, much like when we talk about writing, there's no one process that will work for you, but the principle behind the process, which is to be deliberate about it and make space for it, is going to be consistent. You just have to figure out which form it takes for you.
[Dan] I'm going to give a third perspective on this for the very, very early career writers. This is one of the very first bits of advice I got from Brandon when I got my very first publishing contract. I said, "This is happening. It's real. What do I do next?" He said, "What you do now is you sit down and you write as much as you possibly can, because this is the last time you'll have all of that free time to write." That did help me a lot. I was able to finish, I think, a full book and a half of new stuff before all of the revisions and the emails and the editing process in the proofing and all of that business side crashed down on me. So, just for the very early aspiring writer, that is, I think, a fantastic piece of advice.
[Brandon] I do have more time to right now than I did when I was working a job while trying to write. But, one of the most shocking things to me was that by going full-time, I didn't gain nearly as much free time as I thought I would. Because all of these other things crept in. Doing my own taxes. My first few years… I was used to doing my own taxes. Indeed, again, in the US, we have to do our own taxes, for some stupid reason. So… But then publishing made it infinitely more complicated. Because suddenly I was getting a 1099 instead of a W-2. Suddenly, I had sales overseas. Understanding that you're either going to have to hire an accountant or you're going to have to learn how to input sales from other countries and money coming in from other countries and all of this stuff with 1099s instead of W-2s. That's a huge time sink once a year for US writers that I had just not even understood was going to come along and steal a week of my time.
[Dan] We've got an episode coming up about networking, but this tax idea, the finances of being a writer, is a really good reason to rely on other people. My agent, before she became an acquiring agent on her own, worked as a tax person for an agency house. So she was able to help me a lot, which was fantastic. Brandon and I and several other local writers all use the same accountant because the accounting process for professional writers is very different from a lot of other careers. So, using these networking opportunities to find out hey, how do you handle this, is a good way to help you figure it out.
 
[Brandon] One other thing that I would recommend that you think about… This doesn't work for all writers. In fact, this is one of these things I've noticed that can be debilitating for some writers. But it is something that I do that is very handy for me, is, I find out what the dollar amount of an hour of my writing time is worth. Now, you can't be writing 16 hours a day. But, once you become self-employed, as Howard so elegantly put it in an early episode, you… It's great being self-employed, you get to work half days and you decide which 12 hours it is.
[Chuckles]
[Brandon] Meaning, there is a danger here in that you can work all the time that you want which would lead to burnout. So be careful about that. But I keep a dollar amount assigned to an hour of actual writing time to me. Then, that dollar amount of an hour of writing time allows me to understand what things I can pay for to gain an hour of writing time. If doing my taxes is going to cost me three hours of writing time, and indeed, I will make more money writing that I would hiring someone to do that, it just gives me an opportunity cost method of determining what I should hire out and what I should do myself.
[Howard] When we started putting Schlock Mercenary books into print, we quickly realized that between cover work and bonus story and whatever else, it took a block of time to put a book out, and putting a book out generated several tens of thousands of dollars of money all at once. I could look at that and say, "Well, I have books that are not yet in print, because I've got this archive online." Going to Comic Con saws three weeks out of my life. There's the week of prep, there's the week at the event, and there's a week of recovery. It's miserably stressful. I did the math and realized that unless I was bringing home $15,000 from Comic Con, it didn't even begin to be worthwhile. We looked at it and said, "Well, gosh, instead of doing Comic Con, if I really want to sell T-shirts, I can just spend that week making a T-shirt and selling it and make more money." Now, we've never done that because I don't love making T-shirts. But that was what I had to balance it against. Without knowing how much your time is worth, without establishing a benchmark over time, you will make lots and lots of very, very bad decisions about your time and not realize what you're doing until you wake up one morning and realize that you're stressed and broke and hating the things that you're doing.
[Dan] This kind of deliberate financial thought is how I knew when it was time for me to hire an assistant. Because I hit the point where I realized, oh, giving me an assistant will allow me to write one extra book per year, which will more than pay for the assistant. So that made it a very easy choice to make. We need to wrap up soon, but I know Mary Robinette has something else she wants to say.
[Mary Robinette] Right. Which is, when you're super early career, the idea of assigning a specific number value to your writing work, especially when you haven't actually sold anything yet, that's difficult. So let me give you another metric which you've probably heard me talk about when I've talked about how to decide where to send a story to. A short story. Which is that you're balancing three thing. Money, audience, and shininess. So money is literally how much is this going to pay me. Or, how much is this going to cost me. Audience is how many people will this connect me to. Then, shiny is just like how much do you want to do it. So, like, going to NASA, it cost money, does not actually connect me to audience, but it's so shiny. So that's a choice that I make. I also know that it's something that I can use, and then will, later, down the line, have the potential to bring me audience and money. But depending on where you are in your career, you're going to value those differently. Like, when you are very, very early career, you may say, "Hey, it's totally worth it for me to go to a convention, because it is… Spending that money will allow me to connect with my peers, and audience, and that networking, the audience layer of it, is totally worth it, and the shininess aspect of it is totally worth it." So it's going to be this constant balancing act, and it will again shift over the course of your career.
[Dan] Exactly. Ultimately, this idea of thinking of it as a career, as a business, and making all of these choices deliberate and informed is what's really going to help. So, thank you everybody. This is a wonderful start to our new year.
 
[Dan] We have homework from Howard.
[Howard] Okay. In 2003, at Comic Con, my friend Jim met Neil Gaiman, and Neil introduced himself, saying, "Hi, my name is Neil. I write comics." Okay. That's a fun story. Neil Gaiman rights way more than just comics. He wrote the adaptation that took Good Omens from being a wonderful novel to being a really amazing television series. You don't know, or maybe you do, the path that your career is going to take the number of different things you might write. I posit that it will be extremely valuable to you to take something like Good Omens, your book of the week, and the TV show. Consume them both and make notes. What kinds of writing decisions were made between the two that you would have made differently? What kind of writing decisions were made that just blow your mind? The adaptation between mediums may, at some future point, be something that you get to do. As an added bonus, I think this homework will be fun for you.
[Dan] Awesome. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode. You are out of excuses. Now go write.
 

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Writing Excuses 15.31: The Agent in the Room
 
Key Points: How do you become an agent? Lots of different answers. Often, start as an intern or apprentice, and work your way up. It takes time to build an income stream. Start out by networking. You can be both an author and an agent. How does an agent and an author work together, especially between "send me more" and signing with an agent? Read the manuscript. Get a feeling for the person. It's a long-term relationship. When do you talk about "the sticky stuff"? When we start talking about working together, we need to talk about communications style, morals, ethics, financial issues. Agents are business partners, not used car salesmen. Remember that when an agent offers to represent you, it is now your decision, you are hiring that agent.  
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 15, Episode 31.
[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, The Agent in the Room.
[Dongwon] 15 minutes long.
[Piper] Because you're in a hurry.
[Howard] And we're not that smart.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
[Piper] I'm Piper.
[Howard] And I'm not the agent in the room.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] No, that's me.
[Howard] Yes, it is.
 
[Dan] Yeah. We have an agent in the room, and before we allow him to leave, we're going to make him answer a bunch of questions. First one…
[Howard] Which you asked, fear listener.
[Dan] Yes. We have… This question showed up quite a bit when we did our little survey of listeners. We tend to think that most of you listen because you want to be writers. But there's apparently more than a couple that listen because they potentially want to work in other aspects of the industry, as editors or agents or whatever. So, first question for Dongwon, if somebody wants to be an agent, how do they go about that?
[Dongwon] Terrible mistake.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] It's funny…
[Dan] See, you say that, but you were something else and then decided to become an agent instead, so…
[Dongwon] Well, actually, I was an agent first. So my first job in publishing was at an agency. Then I decided I didn't like selling books, I wanted to buy them instead. So I became an editor. Then e-books were a thing. So I started working at an e-book startup, before I came back to being an agent, I wanted to work with writers more closely. It's a nonlinear kind of circuitous story. Part of the challenge in answering this question is if you ask five agents how they became an agent, they all usually have a very different answer. If there is a track, it's basically that you get an internship at an agency, and then get hired as an assistant, either at that agency or another agency, and then, over time, grow until the point at which you can start taking on your own clients. Where this gets very tricky in the part that people don't talk about a lot is that each agency has a very different structure of how agents get paid. Right? So there's a thing that's called a draw, so sometimes, the agency will give you a certain amount of money, and then you earn that back out of the commissions that you're earning for the agency. How much of a percentage is counted towards that depends on your deal with each agency. So that can be anywhere from like 25% on the very, very low end to 60 to 70% on the high end. So, figuring all these kinds of elements out is really important, and the biggest challenge to being an agent in the early years is that it takes a while for that income stream to build up. Because you're not earning a salary, often, right out of the gate, and then it's hard to get those first few deals going while you're looking for clients. Then, once you do sell your first books and… $100,000 sounds like a really great deal. It is a really great deal, but your commission of that… So whatever percentage you get to keep out of that 50% that goes to the agency, that's parceled out, usually over two, three, even five years. So it takes time for that income stream to build up. Usually, about year five or six is when you're starting to get something that looks like a more livable wage. So, getting into being an agent is a very difficult process in a lot of ways. I think it sounds very attractive and easy from the outside. But the financial side of it actually can be quite tricky. One of the things that we need to look at as an industry is making that a little bit easier for people to get into the business, because, I think, we're keeping a lot of interesting voices out of the industry and out of being agents representing writers from a wider range of backgrounds. Because the type of person who comes in tends to be relatively limited.
 
[Dan] So, if somebody wants to do this, what angle of approach do they come in? Are there people they have to talk to, is it all about networking? What do those first steps look like?
[Dongwon] I think networking is the most important one, right? So, unfortunately, almost all of these jobs are in New York. They're starting to spread out a little bit more, especially on the agency side. But what you want to do is go to events where you can meet agents, meet editors, meet writers even who can help you be introduced to some of the decision-makers who might be hiring. That's how you hear about new jobs, that's how you hear about opportunities. So networking really is number one for what you need here. There are a couple paid programs, like, the Columbia program and NYU, that are sort of paths into publishing. Those can be ways to meet people. They can be quite expensive. I'm not sure that they're always effective or necessary. But those can help if you're willing to go that path.
[Piper] I think one of the things I want to jump on and say is that you don't have to choose to be an agent or a writer. I know several of the agents that I've run into overtime are both authors and agents. In fact, I've had several editors asked me if I ever wanted to become an agent. So I happened to ask this exact question to my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan of how does one normally become an agent. She basically said exactly what you said. Generally speaking, there's an apprenticeship or an internship depending on the agency. Agencies are structured in a different way. I think the only thing that differs, and I'd be really interested in getting your opinion on that, is that she actually did spend some time in publishing first, in fact, in the contracts department, prior to starting to pursue an agent career. I personally have benefited from that because she's excellent with my contracts. But what do you think about people who potentially are getting experience with the publishing houses first, or other experiences?
[Dongwon] For me, having a wide range of experiences in the industry has been really, really helpful, right? Understanding what things look like from the editor's side, how the internal conversations at publishers work. All agents understand that to some extent, because you deal with it a lot, but having been in the room is a very different vibe from somebody explaining it to you, right? So I think having a wide range of experience can help a lot. But the thing about agents, especially, is we all have different strengths and weaknesses, which are more varied than you see in most industries, I think. How agent A versus agent B does their job can be really night and day. What skill sets they bring to the table is really defined by their background and their experience. So coming from a contracts background, your agent probably has a slightly different perspective on how some of those arguments happen in-house, whereas to me, I'm good with contracts, I know what I'm doing there, but I don't always understand when a contracts person comes back to me and says, "We can't do X or Y," like, why they're coming to that decision. It's a little bit of a black box to me sometimes. I would love it if I knew more about that process. That said, we all have different areas that we come from and different expertises, and part of the process is really figuring out what you need from an agent and how they can best support you in your career and picking someone who has that skill set, that is congruent with yours.
 
[Dan] Cool. I want to pause here for the book of the week. Which, this week, is one of mine. My book, Extreme Makeover, which I chose specifically because it was one that my agent had a ton of input into. More so than any of my other books. The initial manuscript for this was well over 200,000 words. Then she helped me trim it down to 180, and then, of course, the final version after it got edited was like 120.
[Howard] Is 200 the one that I read? Before it had been agented?
[Dan] No. You read the 180.
[Howard] Okay.
[Dan] So, the agent had helped clean it up and helped really guide…
[Howard] So what I read had been cleaned up?
[Dan] Yes! Yes, it had.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] [garbled] old friend. What I read had been cleaned up. No, I liked it. I really liked that book, and I was reading the version that is longer and unnecessarily so.
[Dan] Yeah.
[Howard] The one that you, fair listener, can read…
[Dan] The final version… The initial version, the first draft, was a big, giant mess. I have always used my agent primarily for business stuff, and this was the first time that I went to her and said, "Hey, this is a mess." She's like, "Yeah." "Help me clean it up." With… Working with her, we wrangled that into a very good story that was kind of un-publishably long. So we got that down to 180. Then turned it in, and Whitney Ross at Tor Books trimmed it down again. But that agent relationship is really valuable, and people get different things out of agents. I typically don't use them for editorial, but in this case I did. So, that's my book, Extreme Makeover. You should go listen to it. Or buy it. Because it's awesome.
 
[Dan] But that leads us into the second half of our podcast, which is, how does an agent and an author, how do they work together? I want to guide this talk a little more specifically. What is the process… At what point… We talk a lot about submitting to an agent, and the agent saying, "Okay, this looks good. Please send me more of it." From that point on, until the point where you actually sign with an agent, what does that period of time look like?
[Dongwon] In my case, unfortunately, it often looks like a very long delay while I'm finding the time to…
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] Read the book that I'm excited to read. But I think a lot of things go into that. The first is reading that manuscript and saying how you feel about it. Then, sort of looking into the person a little bit. I'll often Google them, take a look at their social media profile, and… There, I'm not looking for do you have a big following. I'm just trying to get a sense of who this person is. Right? A thing I talk about a lot is that I like to work… I work with people, I don't work with projects, right? I sign a client, not a book. So what I'm looking for is are we going to get along well as people and as business partners. Are you someone that I feel like I can communicate with? Are we going to be having fun together? Honestly. Like, you want that relationship to be one that has a certain energy to it, and a certain excitement to it. Especially at the beginning, when you're just figuring all that stuff out. So a lot of times, I'm looking into who that person is. Do I feel like they have a lot to bring to the table in addition to just the words? Right? Are they ambitious, do they have career plans, do they give off an air of competence and confidence in the world?
[Piper] I can say Courtney Miller-Callihan, who is my agent, was also aware of me on social media prior to our connecting. In fact, I had tweeted… Retweeted a blog post about… Just addressing when authors want agents versus not, and had lightly given my opinion that I personally would be looking for an agent when I had a manuscript to do so. She tweeted back at me and said, "Hey, drop me an email when you're ready to talk about that." Of course, the assumption was I would know her email. Which, she was correct, I did.
[Chuckles]
[Piper] So I sent her an email. Before I had… I tried to stay really, really obvious. I did not have a manuscript ready yet. But she got on the phone with me anyway. She had a conversation with me anyway. She was already familiar with my work. Because of that, and our conversation… She knew that there were a couple of other agents who were interested in working with me, but they were waiting for me to have a manuscript to send. She kind of maybe took advantage of that situation a little bit. No, I'm kidding. But she did offer me representation without a manuscript. She kind of placed a bet on a dark course.
[Dongwon] I've kind of done that a lot, actually.
[Howard] She was… You say she was familiar with your work.
[Piper] Yes. She was familiar with my work.
[Howard] That's… That's not… That's not the unknown quantity that you make it sound like.
[Piper] True.
[Howard] If an agent knows that you have written things, Indy or with another agent or whatever, they have a really strong sampling of what they can get from you when your next manuscript arrives.
[Piper] True. She was familiar with my voice that way. I will say that one of the things that she does look for in all of her clients is a sort of quirky sort of voice. So it's not nailed down by genre per se so much as she's looking for certain quirks that match her taste and her personality. She says that a lot of times, when it comes to selling books, she knows which editors have similar taste to hers, and so they are things that are marketable. Eminently so. But also quirky. They hit a… They strike a chord that unique and individual while still being [garbled]
[Dongwon] The thing is, I'm looking for that thing, that spark of energy and uniqueness and point of view. So I often will take a bet on someone who hasn't written a novel yet. I'm happy for that to be a very long-term bet, right? Five, seven years before that is going to be a book that we have out in the world. But I know, from talking to this person and seeing this person and seeing either short stories they've written or awards they've won or even podcasts they've done that they're going to do something interesting. I'm going to help them get there. If I get in early, then I can really help shape those early steps and hopefully get to where they want to go in a more exciting way than if I hadn't been involved.
 
[Dan] Cool. So, this leads into the next question, and I love the way one of our listeners phrased this. At what point in this relationship do you talk about the quote sticky stuff. This is all a lot of business, this is a lot of projects, but at what point do you start talking about personal beliefs, morals, politics, religion, the things that make that author who they are and how that will be reflected in their career? At what point do you bring that up in an agent relationship?
[Dongwon] So, whenever I'm looking at signing somebody and bringing them on board, I make sure that we have a phone conversation. There's… At a minimum, you want to have at least one conversation. There are times when I have three to four to five to… Sometimes months long that we're talking. Or even years in a couple cases. When you have that in person conversation, when I call to start talking about it, like, are we going to work together, that's the point at which you want to start asking those questions, right? What I love more than anything to see is when a writer challenges me in those conversations, and really asks me the difficult questions about communication style, about morals and ethics, about financial issues. What happens if this thing goes bad, what happens if that thing goes bad? What happens if some random event or you get in trouble on Twitter or what are your views on this? How do you feel about these things? Those are interesting conversations to have, and they're really important conversations to have. Because, ideally, an agent is a business partner you're going to have for decades. Right? So, why wouldn't you want to know more about those scenarios, before you get into it?
[Dan] Yeah. That's something that… At one point, I was at a con talking about agents and how to find agents, and somebody in the audience kind of pulled out the Freakonomics anecdote about the real estate agent, right? Like, it's in their financial interest to give you the best deal early because then they get their money quick and they're not in it for the long haul. He's like, "Aren't agents the same?" No. Not in the least tiny bit. I can think of very few people, including the Writing Excuses team, that are as closely partnered and invested in my career as my agent. We work together very closely, and it's a very long-term thing.
[Howard] Yeah. The difference there is that the agent… I mean, if Dongwon were to begin representing me… I don't have a manuscript for him, I wish I did. This conversation would be much more entertaining…
[Laughter]
[Howard] Dongwon and I would be having conversations about where he's planning on shopping it, what maybe I need to do to refine it, what plans do I have after this manuscript, because if/when it sells, that is going to open some new doors, it's going to close every door that it didn't sell to for sequels, potentially. That conversation is all about repeat business. Okay. I say repeat business. It's not repeat business when I have partnered with someone. It is a partnership. Your real estate agent is not a business partner. Your real estate agent is a used-car salesman with something that doesn't have wheels.
[Dongwon] Yeah. I mean, we are real estate agents if your real estate agent was also helping you renovate your house. Was also helping you design what your lawn is. Was also considering like how do we rebuild the neighborhood around you to be more suitable for your… Like, what would you do…
[Howard] And you're going to be buying a new house every 18 months.
[Dongwon] Exactly. Exactly. So, that conversation is really, really important. Finding those elements in that conversation that can really make you stand out, and, for me, as an agent, help me stand out as well. I had a case this last summer, where I was talking to a potential client. She was in the very enviable position of having 16 agents offering representation all at once.
[Piper] Yay!
[Dongwon] She wrote in a category that I had never represented. So it was a really interesting set of conversations that we had about why me. Why should I be in this race at all, much less the person who ended up winning it? All that came down to the conversations that we had. Right? All that came down to my strategic vision, my vision for the book, and what was coming down the road for her in five years and 10 years. We just really hit it off and had a really wonderful conversation about all the potential things that we could be doing. It's an opportunity for me, as much as it is an opportunity for the writer. The thing to remember, if there's one thing you take away from this particular podcast, is to remember that as soon as an agent offers representation, the power dynamic completely inverts. The power is now in your hands. It's now your decision. Right? Up until then, you're trying to get an agent's attention, but always remember, it's your work, it's your career, and you are effectively hiring an agent. I work for my writers, not the other way around. They pay me, quite literally, for what I do. So when you're having that conversation, think about that. It's like that old saying about when you go in for a job interview, you're interviewing them as much as they're interviewing you. That's true in that case, too. So think of the hard questions. Think of the things you really want to know about how this partnership is going to work over the long term.
 
[Dan] Yeah. In fact, that's something we want you to start thinking about right now, even if you're not at the point where you need an agent. So that your homework today, and Dongwon is going to tell you about that.
[Dongwon] Yeah. So, what I would like you to do is start making that list of questions, right? Start making a list of the strategic questions you want answers to, the moral and ethical things, the communication style elements. Make a list of 5 to 10 questions. What's important to you? What are the things that matter in your career? What are you afraid of in terms of your relation with your agent? Don't be afraid of asking difficult questions. Because if you ask a potential agent a hard question or an uncomfortable question and they react badly, then what happens when that situation actually arises? How can you trust them to have your back in that moment? So, feel free to go hard and go big.
[Dan] Awesome. Great advice, and we hope that you've learned some good stuff about how to work with agents and potentially how to be one. So, you are now out of excuses, now go write.
 

mbarker: (Fireworks Delight)
[personal profile] mbarker
Writing Excuses 14.25: Choosing Your Agent
 
 
Key points: Your agent works for you. You have a choice, make it a good one. Think about who you want to work with, who is going to be the right business partner in the long run. Someone who can help you run your business. Who do you want as part of your brand? Make sure they can do a good job. Look at online resources, talk to your network. Ask the agent to talk to their other authors. You may need to change agents as your career changes, or their career changes. Keep the lines of communication open, talk about goals, figure out what you both need. To find an agent, look for authors who have a similar communication style, and talk to them about their agents! Think about someone who can fill in your weak spots. Check which genres the agent works in, and what level of editorial involvement you want. What communications style, how frequent do you want contact? Remember, charisma is not a dump stat. Consider the Kowal relationship axes, mind, manners, money, morals… Murder! Or the Marx Brothers.
 
[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 25.
[Howard] This is Writing Excuses, Choosing Your Agent.
[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.
[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.
[Dongwon] And we're not that smart.
[Howard] I'm Howard.
[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.
[Dan] I'm Dan.
[Dongwon] I'm Dongwon.
 
[Howard] Dongwon is joining us again. This is his third episode with us. Dongwon, I understand that you have spent some time working as an agent.
[Chuckles]
[Dongwon] I have. I actually started my career as an agent, and then wandered off for many years doing other tasks in the industry, and have come back to being an agent in the past 3 and a 1/2 years now.
[Howard] Well, this morning, we had the opportunity to hear you talk about the publishing business. One of the parts that was most interesting to me was that opening salvo of choosing your agent and what that relationship ends up looking like.
[Dongwon] One thing I like to talk about a lot is making it really clear to writers that your agent works for you. If you're in the query trenches right now, the power dynamic feels very weighted towards the agent's side. You're trying to get their attention, you're trying to get someone to pay attention to you and make an offer of representation. But one of the things I like to really drive home is once that offer of representation has been made, the power dynamic completely inverts. Now, what the agent wants is for you to choose them. One of the reasons that we chose this phrasing for the episode title is the idea that you have a choice in this relationship is a really important one. It's one that I think a lot of writers lose sight of, because they're just so focused on getting an agent, any agent. Instead, what I'd like people to do is start thinking very carefully about who they want to work with. Who's going to be the right business partner to them over the course of their career? Ideally, an author-agent relationship will go on for years, and hopefully decades. Optimally, it's the course of both of your careers. You need to think carefully about who you're going to be working with over that period of time, and who you want to be helping you run your business.
[Mary Robinette] This is… I want to say, something that I stumbled on, you've heard me talk about on previous episodes, where my first… My very first agent was not a good agent. We often people say, "A bad agent is worse than no agent." The concrete thing that I had happened was that my first agent… I was… I had warning flags that went off. But it was an agent, and they were excited about my work. I had heard so much about how difficult it was to get an agent. So, even though I had some warning flags that this person might be flaky, I went ahead and signed. What happened was they sat on my novel for a year without sending it out. That was a year in which it was ready. So this was a… actively holding me back. The other thing that can happen with a bad agent, or with an agent who's… This is… These are people who are just like not good at their job, is that if they try to sell your work incompetently to a publishing house, and then you leave them and you come back, it's going to be very difficult to sell that same title later.
[Howard] That's the… There's a principle here that… It's a broader business principle, harkening back to, Dongwon, what you said earlier about you're choosing a business partner. This business partner is carrying your authorial brand as the flag when they march into the office. If they misbehave, if they do a bad job with the pitch, if they happen to be somebody that's for whatever reason, that editorial team, publishing team, just really doesn't like having in the room…
[Mary Robinette] That one actually is less of an issue, because, as long as they've got good taste…
[Howard] As long as they've got good taste. But you just know that whoever you are picking, a portion of who they are ends up as part of your brand, at least to the editors and publishers.
[Dongwon] A lot of the industry's interaction with you will be filtered through your agent. So if your agent has a certain reputation, has a certain way of operating, that is going to influence how people see you. It's not entire. You will have your own brand, and, I know, many writers have the opposite reputation of their agents. But Howard is absolutely right, that in those initial contacts, those initial meetings, that would definitely color it. So, sort of… The first step in choosing an agent is don't choose someone who's bad at their job. This last year, there were… Have been a couple sort of highly publicized incidents of agents who turned out to be acting against their own writers' interests. That's been a very challenging moment. My heart goes out to all of those writers. It can be hard to spot that person. There's some online resources that you can use to check out, like query tracker or query shark, but really, your best defense is having a good network. Talking to your friends, making friends with other writers, and asking around about somebody's reputation before you make a decision to go forward with them.
[Dan] You're also well within your rights to ask that agent if you can talk to some of their other authors. I get a lot of requests from my agent, "Hey, could you talk to this person? I would like to acquire their book." I'm always happy to recommend my agent. If you get an agent whose authors are not happy to recommend her, maybe stay away.
[Howard] Are you still with the agent you were with a year ago?
[Dan] Yes. Sarah Crowe. She's amazing.
 
[Mary Robinette] So I just… I actually just changed agents in the last year. The reason I did that was not because I had a bad agent. My agent was very good. But my career trajectory was such that I needed a different type of agent than I did at the beginning of my career. So the thing that was happening with my career trajectory was… The reason that I felt like I needed someone who was a little more aggressive, was that I was in the downward spiral. This happens to a number of writers in the course of their career, that there's what they call the death… The series' death spiral. So I'd had that happen. Then I had a novel that came out, and my book tour began on election day in 2016, which was a fraud year regardless of where you were. Book sales generally were declining. But when people are looking at your numbers, they don't look at the current events that are going on around it. They just look at the numbers. So I needed someone who was more aggressive. It was a difficult choice, because it would have been easier if my agent was doing things that were actively wrong. That wasn't the case. It was just I needed a different style. This is one of the things that I think you have to… While it's ideal to have an agent that stays with you over the course of your career, it's also important to know kind of what you need going into it.
[Howard] That is… And again, coming back to the general principle of business partners, there is this point of diminishing returns between what I need out of a new agent, what I lose if I don't switch, and the cost of switching. It's easy for us… in crossing that chasm, it's easy for us to overestimate the size of the peril, and just, out of fear of changing, stay in the same place.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
[Howard] It's difficult.
[Dongwon] Many, many writers will have multiple agents over the course of their careers. There's nothing… There's no inherent problem to that. Like any long-term relationship, what you need out of it will change over time. It's also important to remember that your agent is also not a fixed point. They're evolving in their career as well, and how they operate, what circumstances they're in, what agency they're at, all those things can shift and change over time. Those changes will impact, and impact how the business operates. So it's very important to keep that line of communication open, and be talking about your goals, and are they being met in this relationship or not, and then figure out what you need out of that.
[Mary Robinette] That was very much the case with my agent, my previous agent, was that they had had a promotion at work, and were suddenly handling more things than they had been. So the attention that they were able to give to individual authors was shifting. Like, none of us were being neglected, it was just the communication style had changed. The aggression, I think, had shifted, or at least my perception of it. So that was one thing that was also going on there, was that a change in my agent's life as well.
 
[Howard] Let's take a quick break and talk about a book. Dongwon?
[Dongwon] Yeah. This week, I want to talk about Sarah Gailey's Magic for Liars. This is Sarah Gailey's debut novel, coming out from Tor Books. It should have just come out on June Fourth. It is a murderer-mystery set at a magical school for teenagers. It is not a young adult novel. It is a very adult novel about a woman who is called in to investigate a murder of a faculty member at this school. The protagonist's twin sister also is a teacher at this school. As you would have it, that sister is magic and she is not. She needs to figure out what happened and unpack this really gruesome murder and figure out why teenagers are so goddamned terrifying.
[Laughter]
[Dongwon] Especially when they have magic powers.
[Howard] Okay. As the father of two current teenagers, I would love to know the answer to that question.
[Laughter]
[Howard] Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey. I'm a big fan of Sarah's. Their cowboy hippopotamus books.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] Loved those so much.
 
[Howard] Okay. I want to talk about your toolbox as an author. I'm big on the toolbox metaphor. What are the tools that authors have at their disposal to start searching for agents who meet their criteria?
[Mary Robinette] We've talked about a couple of them on previous podcasts. The advice that I'm often given… Had been given and often give is to pay attention to what authors are happy with their agents. Specifically, looking for authors… There's… We always are told to look at the authors whose work is similar. But I actually think you should also try to look at the author… Authors whose process is similar. Because that's going to be people with whom you have a similar communication style. I'm going to continue using myself as a useful representative example. When I left my previous agent and moved on, because of where I am in my career and I am… I do have multiple Hugos. I am marketable. I had the good fortune of having a couple of choices. I was doing due diligence, and I went into it expecting that at the end of having done due diligence that I would be signing with Dongwon. I was just like, "But I'm going to check with some other people just in case."
[Howard] Oh, she went there.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] I cleared it… I cleared this with him before, before we got into it. It was a really hard choice. Because, like the authors that he represents are people that I like, there people that I have a lot in common with. I think he's wicked smart, and there were all these different things. When it finally came down to, Dongwon and Seth Fishman, who is my agent now, was I realized that what I needed was someone who filled my weaknesses. The difference between their agenting styles, in a lot of ways, they're both very good with developmental stuff and things like that, but Dongwon is about building relationships, and Seth is a shark.
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] And…
[Dongwon] I'm a nice shar… No.
[Mary Robinette] I know. Well, that's the thing. It's like you're the nursemaid shark. He's… There is nothing…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] But it was basically, I was, like I'm good at relationships. That's not the spot that I need bolstering. So both of them would have been a good choice, but it was really about learning what I needed. It's quite possible that that is what I needed early in my career as well, but I didn't know myself as well, as an author and what my process and how I was going to fit into the industry was. So when you're looking at the toolbox, it's important, yes, to be able to find the agent, but just knowing a list of agent's names is not as useful as knowing what it is you need out of the agents. So, Absolute Write is a good source for checking to make sure that the agent isn't shady. I also find that if you type in the agent's name and scam afterwards…
[Dan] And hope there's no hits.
[Mary Robinette] Hope there's no hits, yes. Harassment after that. These are… Scandal. These are good words to just kind of…
[Howard] Good things to not be attached to.
[Mary Robinette] Then, looking at Publisher's Weekly, Locus. Looking at who made sales, and…
 
[Howard] In 2006, I, we played with the idea of having Schlock Mercenary represented, agented, shipped out to a publisher, because self-pubbing actual paper books that weigh actual tons of actual mass is hard work. My friend Rodney had written a technical manual a few years earlier, and had an agent… His experience with the agent was funny. He said, "Yeah, I've already sold the book. I can't mess with… There's nothing you can do." She said, "I tell you what. Let me represent you. I know the contract's been signed, but let me represent you." She went in. She got him a 50% raise on the book. Her 15% came out of that, and Rodney was like, "Oh. Oh, I do need an agent." Rodney introduced me to that agency, which was the Barbara Bova agency, which does a lot of science fiction. So I came into this from outside the industry, through a contact to was just somebody I knew in the tech world. Part of the toolbox is talking to people and listening to their experiences. That experience of Rodney's… Like, I want that to happen to me. That agency… The results were the best possible results. Which were… Everybody we talked to said, "We love this, but it's not what we do." Or, "I mean, we already read it, but it's not what we do." And, "Wow, this sounds awesome, but it's not what we do." The agent went out and determined that the market I wanted at the time didn't exist. The relationship's over now, because the agent's not going to make any money. But that is… I consider that a success story.
[Dongwon] It really is.
[Howard] Because I found an agent who, in the space of six months, told me that the business plan that I already had was the right one.
 
[Dan] So, let's expand this toolbox a little bit more. When you're talking to people, when you're talking to other authors, what are some of the questions you can ask them to find out how they work with their agent? Two of the big ones for me. First of all, is what genres does your agent work in? Because I got the… I started with Sarah because I had written a horror novel, but I knew that I wanted to write more than that. One of the reasons that she and I work so well together is that she covers horror, but also science-fiction and also YA and middle grade, which kind of covers all of the playgrounds that I wanted to play in. Not every agent does. So finding someone who's willing to go with you when you start hopping genres is valuable, if that's what you want to do. One of the other ones is what level of editorial involvement do you want your agent to have. Because different agents do it differently, different authors want different things. So if you want an agent who will be very hands-on or very hands-off, ask their authors what that relationship is like.
[Dongwon] That's one that you should also ask the agent directly. Going back to Mary's example, we had a series of very long conversations. I mean, we probably spent upwards of seven or eight hours on the phone over the course of a few weeks talking a lot of this through. When… I get nervous when I'm signing a new client if they're not asking me questions, then I start to have a little bit of a hesitation in my mind, actually. Just because I'm worried that they're not putting the work in to make sure that this relationship is going to work out, and that I'm going to be right for them. Really, at the core of this, is communication style is really one of the most important things. Do you want someone who's very formal in their communications? Do you want a letter that's laid out? Do you want something that's very casual? Do you want to be… Talk to your agent once a week, once a month, once every six months? I have certain clients I talk to almost daily, and there certain clients I talk to about every three or four months. It depends on what it is. I am very informal in how I relate to a lot of my clients. I think, for certain people, that would drive them nuts, right? There's certain people who really appreciate that, and sort of need that ability to check in periodically and be like, "Hey, is everything okay? Am I on the right track? Is this going well? What's happening with this?"
[Howard] At risk of going over-general again, this is the… Your reminder that charisma is not a dump stat.
[Chuckles]
[Howard] The ability to have a conversation with someone in which the two of you connect and determine what you expect out of this kind of relationship… You can build that skill set without talking to agents. Learning that skill set when your feet are in the fire is frightening.
 
[Mary Robinette] So you remember in a previous episode, I talked about the Kowal relationship axes, which my mother-in-law came up with as a way to describe someone that you're dating. That you want to be roughly aligned on intelligence, you want to be roughly aligned on where you feel money is important, morals… Actually, you want your… You want a moral agent. Towards you!
[Chuckles]
[Mary Robinette] But manners, similar communications style. These apply to your agent as well as to a character. There's a really good agent that is someone that I could have gotten because they are… They're the agent of a friend, they're very successful. I would have run a fire poker through them within two minutes of conversation. Because our communication styles are wildly out of alignment. At the same time, you're not looking for a best friend. Right? It is a business partner. It's good if you can be friends. But that's not… You need someone who is good at their job first, and then someone you can communicate with second.
[Howard] Mind, manners, money, morals, murder…
[Laughter]
[Mary Robinette] Marx Brothers. We try to be more positive about it.
[Howard] All right…
[Dongwon] I will say, I often try to avoid the romantic relationship analogy when talking about finding your agent, but it is inevitable that it comes up at some point, because I think there are a lot of similarities and parallels.
[Mary Robinette] Yeah.
 
[Howard] There definitely are. On those notes, Dongwon, do you have homework you can assign to our listeners?
[Dongwon] Yeah. So, your homework assignment is going to be a little bit of self-examination. I want you to think about your career and what's important to you and how you like to operate. Think about times you've been in a business setting, at a job, in a meeting, and think about the things that you found very frustrating, and what you would find your dating to work with over a long period of time with somebody who is working with some of the most important work to you. Make a list of those attributes. What are you looking for in an agent? What kind of communication style? Do you want someone who edits you, do you want someone who doesn't? How would you like them to pursue a deal? Do you want them to go all out all the time, or do you want them to build relationships and be very targeted? Those are questions you should ask yourself, and start making that list of the attributes that are important to you.
[Howard] Make the list. You gotta write this down, because this is Writing Excuses, and you're out of excuses. Now, go write.
 
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.33: Crossover Fiction, with Victoria Schwab

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/08/14/11-33-crossover-fiction-with-victoria-schwab/

Key points: Crossover fiction is fiction that has a primary audience and a much larger appeal. E.g. young adult fiction being read by adults, or vice versa. Crossover authors often write multiple genres. Write for a specific person, perhaps in a border zone. Include things that will work for multiple audiences. Some breaks are larger than others, e.g. between middle grade and YA. Part of it is what the reader is interested in. What's different? How much context or explanation is needed. What do the readers resonate with, usually emotional? Levels of reading intelligence and levels of subject material are independent. You can use different pen names for different genres. Diversify for safety. Try lots of different things. Watch for pivot points where you can move into a different arena.

Where's the bridge? )

[Howard] Is this a time travel writing prompt?
[Mary] I think it is now.
[Brandon] All right. I guess that's our writing prompt. You gotta write a story about a book that can't be read until you are dead.
[Wow… That's bleak… Garbled]
[Brandon] Someone just did… Wrote a book to not be read until they die. I'm trying to remember. There… It was something in the news item.
[Mary] Well, Mark Twain's memoirs. He… They couldn't be read until 100 years after.
[Brandon] So either it's a story that you're going to write that someone can't read until a certain date or you can write about somebody who's dealing with that, if that's too morbid for you.
[Mary] I thought you meant that they couldn't read it… That the reader could not read it until the reader was dead.
[Howard] See, that's what I was thinking. The reader cannot read this book until they have died.
[Dan] That's how I interpreted it.
[Brandon] Okay. All right. All right.
[Mary] So what do you want to do, audience?
[Brandon] Whatever you want. We've got like seven in there for you. Thank you, Phoenix ComicCon audience.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 11.11: Self-Publishing in 2016, with Michaelbrent Collings

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2016/03/13/11-11-self-publishing-in-2016-with-michaelbrent-collings/

Key points: Self-publishing. Indie. Kicked in the door, shot a bunch of people, and is casually sipping its whiskey at the bar over the dead bodies. But... It's a lot of work. The question is not "Can you get published?" The question now is, "Can you get noticed, read, and reread?" The secret to authors making a living is having other people sell their books. Also, your first book sucks. Be aware of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You are a business. Be objective about it. Kindle Select or diversify? Promotional lists? Investment? It depends. The big thing is volume -- once they read one great book, make sure they can find more! Best online resource to learn about self-publishing? Google. Lots of options, from small press, to farming it out, to DIY all the way.

Do It Yourself? )[Brandon] All right. So we're going to stop here for our homework. Actually, Michael's going to give us his favorite writing exercise.
[Michaelbrent] Okay. So take a first line of any book and turn it into a scary line. Take the scary line and create two separate short stories based on that scary line.
[Brandon] Oooh. That's cool. Thank you to our audience here, at Life, The Universe, and Everything.
[Whoo! Applause]
[Brandon] Thank you to Michael for being on the podcast with us.
[Michaelbrent] You're welcome.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're all out of excuses, now go write.
[Mary] Writing Excuses is a Dragonsteel Production, jointly hosted by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, and Howard Taylor. This episode was mastered by Alex Jackson.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses 6.8: What Does an Agent Really Do?

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2011/07/24/writing-excuses-6-8-what-an-agent-does/

Key points: What do agents do? Everything! "All the stuff that I don't want to do, so that I can write what she does all the business stuff." Revisions, target submission list, submissions, auctions, negotiations, contracts...
a handshake and a prayer? )
[Dan] Howard, give us a writing prompt.
[Howard] Okay. Writing prompt. Your agent is actually a warlock, using magic to make your books sell. This has worked in numerous cases for numerous other clients. Unfortunately, something about your book means that this process is going to go horribly, horribly wrong.
[Dan] You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses Season Three Episode 25: The Business of Writing Comics

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2009/11/15/writing-excuses-season-3-episode-25-the-business-of-writing-comics/

Key points: Professional relationships and keep plugging. Don't be afraid to try other things, you need a portfolio more than a specialty. Make your deadlines and be easy to work with. And work hard -- it takes passion and love to break into the comics industry.
Under the covers )
[Howard] I have a writing prompt.
[Dan] Writing prompt? Let's hear it.
[Howard] Our superhero gained his superpowers by writing technical articles for Wired.
[Dan] Excellent. You're out of excuses, now go write.
[identity profile] mbarker.livejournal.com
Writing Excuses #11: The Business of Writing

from http://www.writingexcuses.com/

There will be several podcasts about the business of writing, this one is an introduction to being a business person as a writer.
The details . . .  )
Final Words: What advice do you have for someone going from artist to pro?
  1. Talk it over with your spouse or significant other.
  2. Chase your passion.
  3. Learn the business. It is not just an art.
And that's #11. Next up, a real live editor joins the panel!

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