Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/19-07-nanowrimo-revision-with-ali-fisher-intention 

 

Key points: Editing for intention, focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. What effect do you want to have on the reader with the book? Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose. You read your favorite author because of what they do well. So lean into what you do well, and what you enjoy. Don't kill your darlings. Why is this here? Do consider where and how you are planning to publish. Don't write to the market, but you can edit to the market. Having someone tell you what they think the book is about can help. Focus on the question the novel is asking. What is the tone of the book? The vibe? What is your lodestone, your guiding light?

 

[Season 19, Episode 07]

 

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

 

[Season 19, Episode 07]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] A mini-series on revision with Ali Fisher, editing for intention.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Ali] And I'm Ali.

 

[Mary Robinette] We are delighted to have Ali Fisher back with us for this episode, where we are going to be talking about intention. This is, like, how you're approaching the editing when you're not thinking about the length, but thinking about really focusing to make the book more of the book that you want it to be. There's a thing that Edgar Allan Poe said that I referenced in our last episode about writing and editing for unity of effect. That is, in his view, what is the emotion that you want to leave the reader with. That's a… Something that I share as well, and I think I've certainly heard both of you talk about that quite a bit. Like, thinking about what effect you want to have on the reader with the book. So, what are some of the questions that you ask your authors when you're trying to get them to focus their book?

[DongWon] Absolutely. When I'm approaching a manuscript, so much of what I'm doing in the initial pass is trying to make sure I understand very clearly what the author was intending to accomplish. Right? What was the unity of effect that they were going for? Since everyone else has a quote on this topic, I also have one…

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Which is a Dolly Parton quote…

[Yes]

[DongWon] which is, "Figure out who you are, and then do it on purpose." So much, I think, of writing a book is a process of figuring out what is this book, who is this book, why did you write it? I think sometimes you'll have an idea going into it, and sometimes that idea isn't clear until you've finished it. Or, what you originally thought it was about turns out not to be what the book is about. Right? So, I think the process of writing it is often, no matter how much planning you do, discovery of what your intentions were, and are, and what you want them to be going forward. Right? So, that's so much of the thing that's going to be informing your editing process and your revision process as you dive back into it.

 

[Mary Robinette] I love that so much. That Dolly Parton quote makes me so happy. It also ties into something that... I just took a class with Tobias [Buckell?]. He was talking about finding your spark, but one of the things that he said just set off all sorts of fireworks and sparks in my head, was that you read your favorite author because of what they do well, not because of what they don't do well.

[Ali] Yes.

[Mary Robinette] So, like when you're reading Asimov, it's not because of his characterization.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Like, that's not why you read Asimov.

[Ali, DongWon chorus] Nope.

[DongWon] Truly not.

[Ali] She likes jewelry. End of character.

[Mary Robinette] Yep. That's all you need. Really. It goes with the diamonds. But, for me, it was like thinking about… Like, really leaning into what you do well, and the things that you enjoy as a representative audience member yourself, as a writer.

[Yeah]

[Mary Robinette] That's, for me, I think just an exciting way to think about it. It's, like, what do I love about this and how can I make it more of what I love.

[Ali] It's such a good reframe. Author Jo Walton had a series of posts. I don't know if they were critiques or love letters, but they got all published in a book by tour that was called What Makes This Book so Great. That was what the series was called. I just thought that was such a wonderful way to approach, like, the reading experience. But also a very helpful way to approach the revision period which is when you're expected and most likely will be extremely hard on yourself. We're not talking about the fallout trial process in this episode, but stay tuned until next week or 2 weeks from now…

[DongWon] Yes.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Next week.

[Ali] Stay tuned. But I will say one of the things that, when talking about revision and intention, I always do my best to try to remember to flag the things that, like, what's so awesome here, like, this made me cry, don't touch it. I want it, I want to get hurt. Let's talk about how to hurt me more. Or, like, what… This is so great. So, what else is like that? Or, like, what else can we do to sort of… Putting those flags down I think is just really helpful. Because it can be… It's a really hard time, it's a really hard time to be with the story and just remembering what all these good things is really helpful.

[DongWon] Yeah. I think 2nd only to show, don't tell, which is something I complained about last episode, one of the most common repeated refrains of writing advice that just drives me bonkers is kill your darlings.

[Mary Robinette] Ugh. Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? There's this idea that… There are times when you do have to cut something you love. Right? We talked about this a little bit less time, about cutting a character or cutting a scene or an element that isn't tying… That is slowing your pacing down or isn't supporting the main action of the story or the main intention of the story. But that's different from this idea, that's like, oh, if you love this thing, then it shouldn't be in the book. You wrote this book, the reason we are here is because we like the things that you're doing well. I mean, this is exactly… Going back to Tobias's quote, I don't remember the exact wording, but it's this idea of, like, we're reading this for a reason, and that reason is probably the thing that you're most excited about. Because your energy and enthusiasm and interests are going to come through. Right? Now, don't overindulge in that. Right? Don't, like, luxuriate in that at the expense of all the other elements that a book has to have. But, don't kill your darlings. Love them. Find ways to support them and give them an environment that they can be best observed, appreciated, and so they can flourish for the reader.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. For me, it's that you have to be willing to kill them if they are pulling the book out of alignment. That's… Sometimes, if you've got a book that's got this really clean, spare, austere sense of language, and then you've got one sentence that has a lot of flourishes in it that you love, that sentence stands out, not because it's a bad sentence, not because you love it, but because it is in contrast to everything else that's happening in the book. It is not part of that unity of effect. There are times when you want to contrast, but you want to make sure that it's a contrast that is applied deliberately and for an effect itself.

[Ali] Right. Do you want that attention, because you're grabbing it. Is this the subject or the topic or the moment that needs that spotlight because it's got it.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So, for me, when I'm thinking about this editing for intention, the thing that I'm coming back to is always like why is this scene here, why is this moment here? If I'm trying to fix something, sometimes I'm looking at it like I can't get this sentence to work. Then realize it's because it does… It just… It doesn't fit. There's some part of me that knows that it doesn't belong there. If I query, like, what is my intention with this and what function is it serving in this scene, then I can usually either swap it out for something different that serves better or recognize that it doesn't have one and cut it. But it is always coming to the why is my starting point.

 

[Ali] Yeah. We've talked about sort of philosophical and essentially political, but, like the effect that the book is having and that intention. Do we also want to talk a little bit about the intention of like how to publish it and, like, whether or not you're planning on going to a major publisher or publishing yourself or making it into a zine, like printing your own booklet? I think knowing the expectation, or like excitement of the reader in different spaces, or, like, what is more exciting to people right now, like, they're [garbled]. We were talking about the [Oops La] battle novel in…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right.

[Ali] In our last episode. I feel like there are certain areas that that could potentially hit stronger. I think maybe knowing where you're going with the story or where you're hoping to take the story out is a good thing to keep in mind, because there will be expectations based on whatever that publishing process looks like.

[Mary Robinette] That's a really great point. There is the reason that you write is not the same reason that you publish.

 

[DongWon] I always really strongly encourage writers not to think about the market when their drafting or coming up with a book. Right? Like, don't write to the market. But what you can do is edit to the market. A little bit. Right? You don't want to overdo it. But there's ways in which once you have a drafted thing, and now you're sitting there figuring out, like, okay, here's the book I wrote. I love it. How do I get this in front of as many readers as I can? That's the point at which you can now start to consider, okay, what categories does this fit in? Is this for adults? Is this for teens? Is this for a middle grade audience? Is it genre? Is it literary? These are so where you can start to edit and start tweaking things to push it in one direction or another. Sometimes, it can be hard to completely do a 180 in terms of your direction once you have the draft, but you can move it 10° this way, 10° that way, and I think start to hit a really specific audience and a specific reader that you're aiming for.

[Ali] I mean, even within like traditional publishing and within my work, I've had a situation where cover art comes in before the book is finished and, like, we realize, like, oh, there's… Like, there's an expectation here, like, an even cozier… Even, like, whatever expectation… Let's put in more food, more delicious like moments, like more textures. Then, the sequel, like, oh, what if it's snowing, and there's a little cozy fire. Like, there are things that can be really surprising that can have an effect. This is obviously very down the line. But you might be surprised at some of the things that affect the revision by the end of the process.

[DongWon] Yeah. I've had situations where we wrote up the copy to pitch it to publishers, and in writing the copy, we both went, like, wait a minute. There's something that's not working. There's a huge piece of this that needs changed, because it just wasn't hitting, it wasn't… That intention wasn't coming through, both in terms of what the author was trying to get across, but also how we were trying to publish it and who we were trying to publish it for. So we really, like, took it back, broke it down, and like added a whole other… We added like 20,000 words, added a whole new character arc, and a new POV, based on trying to write the pitch for the book. Like, we were ready to go out with it, and then suddenly, like, 6 months later, we're like, okay, now we're ready to go out with it. Sometimes it really is that much of a process of figuring out how do we target it for who we're trying to get it to.

[Ali] I've absolutely been in the same situation, where I've been like…

[Chuckles]

[Ali] But, wait, I'm like working on addressing some copy and been like, I actually don't know what the stakes are, but I don't care. So what does that mean? You know, like… During the read, it didn't bother me, but now, like, is there space for that? Is it needed? That kind of thing.

[DongWon] Yep

[Mary Robinette] So, when we come back from our break, we're going to talk a little bit more about intentions and how to figure out what your intention is when you've finished a book, but actually don't know what it's about.

 

[Ali] So, DongWon assures me that they've already pitched you Scavengers Reign, an animated show, I assume you're all now watching. It is gorgeous, vivid, kind of psychedelic dark science fiction. A while back, I got to work with the cocreator of that show, Joe Bennett, on illustrating 2 books with us. One that he also cowrote with Dera White called I Will Not Die Alone about learning the end is nigh and basically just playing D&D with your friends. He also illustrated a book by comedian Joe Pera called A Bathroom Book for People Not Pooping or Peeing, But Using the Bathroom to Escape. Both are now available from Tor books, and you should check them out.

 

[Mary Robinette] So, we've been talking about different types of intention, but one of the things that I will hear early career writers say, and indeed have experienced myself, is I don't know what this book is about.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Nancy Kress, who is a phenomenal writer, said this thing to me that just… Like, I shivered in my very bones. That she writes a draft, and that that is what tells her what the book is about. Then she throws that draft away completely, and start writing again from scratch now that she knows what the book is about. I'm like, I cannot. Uh-uh. But I've also heard other people and myself say this, and then someone will say, like, one chance thing, and I'm like, "Oh! That's what my book is about." So, how do you help your writers understand what their book is about? Like, what are some of the questions that you ask? I'm hoping for pearls of wisdom that will help me.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Oh, great. How do we… No, I mean [garbled]

[Ali] One of the things that I do is I tell them what I think it's about. Then get to watch their face and find out if they're like, "Oh, no," or like, "Oh, yay," or "I hadn't seen that," or whatever. It's… I love to go in there with a very like, I'm often wrong, here's what I think attitude and just sort of see what that surfaces for somebody. But in terms of actually identifying it?

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, this is… I think people ask a lot… I have an undergraduate degree in English literature, and I think people ask a lot, if, like that's useful in what I do, and in most ways, it isn't. Right? It's not like I learned grammar from that or how to compose prose from that. But one thing it did give me was critical reading skills. Right? And how to think critically about the stuff that I am reading. Thematically, what there is in it. It's not even so much the formal instruction that helped me do that, it's just reading a ton of books. Right? I think this is one of the reasons why I so strongly encourage, if you want to be a writer, if you want to work in publishing, you have to like books, first and foremost, and you have to read books, first and foremost, and try and stay current with what's happening out there. Because when you're consuming enough media, when you're consuming those things, you start to understand why you like something, what it is about it that… Even if you don't know how to articulate it. When we say that we want you to understand what your book is about, I don't need you to be able to sum it up in a sentence. I don't need you to be able to tell me. In part, you wrote the book because you don't have a simpler way of explaining whatever it is that you were trying to get to with writing the book. Right? That's okay. That's great, actually. That's my job to figure out how to frame it up in a pithy few sentences so they can go on the back of a book or go to an editor or whatever it is. So, I think, for me, it really is putting those critical skills into place as I'm reading to figure out, okay, what is this project? What are they trying to accomplish here? What are the thematics of it? What are the things that are really jumping out at me that seem to resonate with the person behind this book? Now, that's me as a third party coming in, and again, what Ali was saying, I think is so true of sometimes it's about presenting that idea and watching it bounce off the person you talk to, and hopefully you're close…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] And sometimes it's like, oh, wow, I'm way off here. Then we can approach the edit with that sort of refocus on the intention.

 

[Mary Robinette] When you don't have access to an editor or an agent to do this for you, because I have absolutely had that happen… On the Spare Man, Claire looked at the book and said, "This is a story about a woman of privilege who wants to get her hands dirty." I was like, "Oh. Yeah." The… For me, the thing about that is that that is a declarative's statement. But when I go into the book, the thing that I have found most useful is to figure out what question I'm asking. This is a… I'm reframing something that Elizabeth Bear said, like, you know how you're having a casual dinner conversation and someone just says something brilliant? You're like, "Well, that is going to save everything I write from now on." She said that the difference between a story and a polemic is that a story asks questions and a polemic answers them. The thing for me about a novel, in particular, is that a novel can show so many different answers, so many different possible ways, and leave room for the reader to decide what their own answer to that question is. So, for me, one of the things that helps when I'm trying to focus a story is to think about what is the big question I'm asking. In… It's… It varies. Sometimes it's something like how do you handle it when your spouse is depressed. Sometimes it's a very straightforward one like that. Sometimes it's a big societal one, like how do you create community? Like, what does community mean to you? Like, what are the different ways that community expresses? Then, when I'm writing, I can evaluate against that question. It's like does this scene explore that question? If it doesn't, is there a way that I can add that? If there's not, what is this scene doing? Why is this scene in here? It's not that every scene has to be providing an exact answer to this. But it's… Even if it's just one moment in the scene where that is explored, it still helps me. It helped me with focusing and making decisions about what to include in that.

[DongWon] But if your book isn't feeling like it has a clear purpose, that it has a clear direction, then I think that's a great way to go about it, is asking these questions of is this particular scene supporting the central question that I'm asking? If the answer is no, then does this scene need to be here and does this scene need to shift in its purpose to better support whatever that central thing is. Right? So, I think being able to have some clarity about what that question is, and also what your personal connection to that question is… I see a lot of times someone will come into a book and they'll be asking a big question about society or about how a certain relationship would work, but I can't feel why that question is important to the person in particular. Sometimes digging until you get that personal connection, where you can feel the author in the story, is the thing that really makes a book pop for me. That's when I get very excited, when I can suddenly be like, oh, I see you. You're here. This matters to you because X, Y, or Z. Sometimes it's something as simple as a shared identity, and sometimes it's very nuanced and complex in a way that could not be explained without 30 hours of conversation about the author's like life. But whatever that is, you should feel a connection to the questions that are being asked by your book and find a way to really focus on that and make sure you're really highlighting that in all the major pieces of your story.

[Mary Robinette] Absolutely. One of the other things that I've found along these lines is, again, that personal connection is thinking about the tone that I want the book to have. Because I'm measuring against a bunch of different things. In an ideal world, I'm just writing it and I'm feeling it and it's there. But when I'm revising it, and I'm having to make decisions, like, my first series, Jane Austen with magic, it's like how does this feel like Jane Austen with magic right now? Spare Man, Thin Man in Space. Does this feel… Does it have that feel? No. Okay. Fine. There needs to be more cocktails, obviously. Like, who's… Where is the small dog right now? So, I think that that's another question that you can ask yourself, is, like, what is the tone that I want? What's my vibe? Is this supporting it or is it a deliberate juxtaposition?

[Ali] Yeah. That's so helpful because I do feel like purpose can start to feel sort of like academic. It can feel a little like intellectualized in a way that I think rightfully a lot of people would bristle against. But it can be really basic. It can be like I want to give people a laugh. Or, like, I want… I want to show how cool explosions are. Like [garbled] probably.

[DongWon] [garbled] by the fire. Right?

[Ali] Yes. There probably is more there, if you wrote a whole novel, like, there's more there. But, also, like that is a very legitimate and exciting and cool sort of jumpoff point that needs to be honored in a very similar way, I think. Especially…

[DongWon] Again, it's not something you need to necessarily be even able to articulate. You just need to have like a feeling of what the vibe is. If you lock into that vibe, that's all you need. You just need a tone, or like an image, a thought, a question, any of these things can be your guiding light. I just encourage you to try and figure out what that sort of lodestone is for you that is going to pull you through it, and keep you consistent when you're asking questions about should this stay, should this change, whatever it happens to be.

[Ali] Find your vibe.

[Mary Robinette] I think that's a great… Yeah. I think that's a great segue to take us to our homework for the week. Ali, I think you have that.

 

[Ali] I do. Thank you for asking. Or telling or saying. Okay. Yes, I do. Your homework this week. Write down what you like best about your book. Find a spot in your book where you can incorporate that element where it isn't now. Godspeed.

 

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

[Mary Robinette] Hey, writer. Have you sold a short story or finished your first novel? Let us know. We love hearing about how you've applied the stuff we've been talking about to craft your own success stories. Use the hashtag WXsuccess on social media or drop us a line at success@writingexcuses.com.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-19-what-is-publishing-for-anyway/ 

 

Key points: Why publish? For the money? For the audience? For fame and glory? Because writing is a habit, and publishing helps pay for it? Because publishing let's you put your energy into your own ideas? Publishers want to make money. Publishing is market-driven. To engage with publishers, focus on the question of who's the audience, and how big is that audience.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] What is Publishing for, Anyway?

[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] I'm Howard.

 

[DongWon] So, this is a big topic. I think this kind of comes out of one of the newsletters I wrote that I called The Publishing Question. It was me trying to encapsulate a little bit what I think the fundamental question of publishing is, which kind of led me to further questions of why do this. Right? You write books, you tell stories. What is the purpose of engaging in publishing as an industry, as an enterprise? Why go through all of this complication and frustration to get your book out in the world? I mean, the short and obvious answer is, well, then you get paid for it, and you can make a living doing it.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[DongWon] There's a certain appeal to that. But one thing I want us to think about a little bit is understanding what the publishing industry does, how it does it, and why it does it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I think that this is a question that I asked students a lot, is, like, why do you want to publish? Which is different than why do you want to write. I think that you have to know that it's like if you want it for audience, if you're doing it for money. If you're doing it for fame and glory? Why do you want to publish? Because there's a lot of different paths to publishing. If you want to be somebody who regularly hits the New York Times bestseller, then you're not somebody who writes a book every 10 years. Usually. With a couple of notable exceptions.

[Chuckles coughing]

[Mary Robinette] So, like, why are… What career path do you want that publishing to look like. It's a lot of why in that.

[Howard] Many years ago, my friend David Kellett, talking about cartooning, said, "None of us get into cartooning to be rich. We get into it because we'd be drawing the comics anyway, and this is a nice way to be able to do it all the time." I love that spin on it, and it totally applies to being a full-time author. We attach ourselves to the publishing industry because it is a way to pay for our habit.

[Laughter]

[Dan] Well, as someone who has done a lot of freelance and write-for-hire… I've written in virtually every medium that you can name. I keep coming back to the publishing industry itself because I have so much more hands-on control of what stories I am telling. I've written for TV, I've written for games, I've written for movies, I've written for all this other stuff. Most of that is putting my energy into somebody else's ideas. Publishing is the one where I really get to sink my energy into my own ideas. Which is just really fun.

 

[DongWon] Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny, that's actually kind of… My first job out of college was working in television production for a news program, actually. What brought me to working in books was… It was a smaller team. It was three people, four people. So I could get closer to the art, I could get closer to the process and work with the creator very directly. I think that is one of the appealing things about the process. It's important to remember that publishing… I will talk about publishing in a way that will sound almost cynical. Right? Because publishing is a business. It's a capitalist enterprise. It's a corporation. It's important to remember that the only reason a publisher exists, under that logic, is to make money. Right? That profit is what drives them. There are a few exceptions. There are a few nonprofit presses out there that do incredible work. There's a few academic presses. They are subject to some money demands, but not in the same way that a big five publisher is. But, [garbled] big five publishing, Indy presses, most of those things, money is king, unfortunately. Because that's the world we live in. When art and capitalism collide, it can be an awkward fit. There can be a lot of churn in that. So I think that figuring out what publishing is trying to accomplish, and what it's building for, and what its tools are for, are important to building a sustainable career for yourself and figuring out what it is you want to get out of this. Right? So, in Howard's case, that is very much a I want to be able to keep doing this. Right? I want to be able to spend all of my time creating the art that I love. Publishing is a way to do that. Right? I think comics, in particular, led to a very direct audience self-publishing model through web comics in a particular era. When you're looking at traditional book publishers, that gets a little bit more attenuated because of the time involved.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Although I will say that if you are wanting to do this simply so that you have more time to write the things that you want to write, getting an extremely high paying job where you only have to work one day of the week, and then publishing to AO3 is actually going to give you more time to write.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In a lot of ways. Because much of what the career in publishing is, is all of the other stuff which we've been talking about, like newsletters and conference appearances and all of that. But I think everybody who goes into publishing, like, even the editors… The editors who seem all high-powered and fancy… They don't make a lot of money. People go into this because we love stories and we love connecting to people.

 

[DongWon] Yeah. Passion driven industries are tricky, because they are driven by the fact that I love books, I love stories, I love the books that I work on. I also need to pay rent and pay for groceries and do all of those things. As an agent, my income is very directly tied to book sales and to my authors success. Right? So, I need to be publishing and representing authors who are selling enough books that they could make a living, and I could make a living. Right? Those are just things that are the base requirements of what I do. If you are an editor, you can't just acquire what you love, you also have to acquire things that have commercial potential of success. Now. Figuring out what has commercial potential of success is its own sort of very complicated game to do, but it's a thing to keep in mind, that even on the other side of the line, from the industry side, even though we are driven by our love for this and our passion for this, we're also facing certain realities of the market. Right? Of sales that need to be answered to in one way or the other.

[Howard] When I was in the software industry, we called one aspect of that job inbound marketing. Which was the process of looking at what the market is consuming right now, and then going back to our team and saying, "Can we build that?" When authors do it, and we often counsel against this… "Oh, you're just chasing the market. By the time you write that, it won't be ready." But as I understand it, editors do this all the time. Where their market research people come to them and say, "You know what? We need to get books that look like this. Can you go get books that look like this?" As an author, I have no idea how I would get inside that loop so that I give them the book that they're exactly looking for.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] But that's a thing to be aware of. It's a thing that happens.

[Mary Robinette] Time machine.

[DongWon] Exactly. Time machine. That's how you do it.

[Dan] You're not using a time machine, Howard?

[Howard] I've been using… No, I've been using it wrong. I've just been using it… I've been using it to make sure the eggs are fresh. That was silly.

[Dan] Well. There you go.

[Dongwon] If you use all your time machine time to go look at dinosaurs, you can't expect to get a bestseller.

 

[Dan] Okay. So, DongWon, I want to ask this. I want to turn this back to you. Because you asked this question of what is publishing for, and we kind of gave our answers. You're coming at this from a completely different perspective than us. You're not the one who is writing the stories, you're not the one who is putting your own vision out there. What is publishing for from your perspective? Why are you as passionate about it is we are?

[Dongwon] I… There's sort of two answers to that. I mean, one is it is my career. Right? It has been my entire adult life. So I'm trying to make a living and I would like to be rich and successful, etc., etc. I mean, the other side of it is, I do think telling stories is very important. I do think it is sort of how we change the world over time, is we make a better world by imagining better futures. Right? So if we can tell the right kind of stories, then, I think, we can really have an influence over, at a generational scale, the world. Now figuring out a way to make those two things dovetail is the real challenge. I heard a quote recently that was from a podcast, Brendan Lee Mulligan said something like, "Maybe that's what peace is, is when you realize that the thing you have to do in the thing that you love to do are the same thing." I think, for me, working in publishing is very much that. So I'm both greedy and want all the bucks and all the big bestsellers, but I'm also very mission driven in addition to passion driven. Right? All these things kind of dovetail for me into one thing that has a cohesive core. Yeah. So I think that is kind of the thing that really is the engine that keeps me doing this, keeps me pushing through a lot of the heartbreak that this business involves. I want to get a little bit more into some of the nitty-gritty's of what that means on a day-to-day basis, but before we do that, let's take a break.

 

[DongWon] So, the thing of the week this week is another newsletter. A newsletter that is from a very dear friend of mine and a colleague of mine, Kate McKean. She is also a literary agent at the same agency that I'm at, the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency. Kate and I started our newsletters the same week, the first week of 2019. We had not talked to each other. We did not coordinate this. We just both started sending newsletters out about what we were doing, coincidentally. It was such a delight to… For both of us to take our own perspectives, our own different methods, and start building an audience. Kate's newsletter is truly wonderful. Unlike me, she publishes on a very regular schedule, twice a week. Has much more grounded and practical advice, and really thoughtful perspectives that comes from her many, many years in the business as well. I cannot recommend Kate's newsletter highly enough. You can find it at katemckean.substack.com. It is called Agents and Books. Or you can just follow her on Twitter. Again, that's Kate McKean's Agents and Books.

 

[DongWon] So, one thing I also want to talk about, in addition to sort of like my passions in the industry… The reason I love working in publishing as a business… You won't find a lot of people who say that they love publishing as a business model. But I genuinely do. I love it because it's kind of stupid.

[Ha ha]

[DongWon] What I mean by that is it's a business model that has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years. What you do is you print a book and you hope that that cost less money to do than the revenue you make from selling it to people. Right? We make physical objects. We ship them around the world. Then we collect revenue from people who want those. Most profit in publishing still comes from selling physical books in stores. Publishing is as much a manufacturing and distribution business as it is a content business. Right? That's why publishing has been so resistant to startups, to disruptors, to all these different things. Because it's kind of too stupid to mess with on some level. That gives me so much joy and so much hope for a future for publishing. Which I know sounds backwards. What I am saying is that the future for publishing is kind of backward looking. I think it's truly a wonderful thing that I find a lot of interest and joy in figuring out how to survive in that.

[Howard] I think during season one of Writing Excuses, and it took me a few minutes to look this up during our break, Mike Stackpole described publishing… The whole point of publishing was to make money by shipping cheap bundles of paper all over the world and tricking people into buying it by getting people's stories printed in it and only paying those people tiny little amounts of royalties to ensure that you're being paid as much as possible for shipping this paper around. It was such an incredibly cynical point of view. Then I read David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague talking about the birth of comics and learned…

[DongWon] Low-grade books.

[Howard] That the comics page existed because it was a way to sell surplus paper. They had surplus paper and a way to print color on it and they wanted to make money. So they got kids to draw… I say kids. The guys who created Superman were like 20 years old. So, at that very cynical vein, publishing exists and has existed for 100 years or more in order to sell paper by putting your story on it.

[DongWon] After three years of the paper shortage, boy, do I wish we had that surplus stock now.

[Chuckles]

 

[Mary Robinette] So, I have this series of thoughts that is colliding in my head. The first of those is we have been talking about novels.

[DongWon] Yup.

[Mary Robinette] There is also the whole short story publishing industry. That has moved almost exclusively online. There's very few… Like, most of the short fiction is electronic these days. Except for the things that come out as novellas, as beautiful artifacts. The whole idea of the cheap bundle of paper… I think that is a fundamental shift that we've seen, is that now people really want the artifact, that you are seeing the cheap versions… That these are being replaced by other things. I'm curious about what your thoughts are about how that's shifting.

[DongWon] Stackpole was talking about a different era of publishing.

[Howard] Yup.

[DongWon] That was the mass-market era of publishing. That era died, unfortunately, in like the early… In the 2000s, the oughts. That was sort of my start in publishing, was watching the mass-market, which is the thing I grew up on and deeply loved and will miss every day, get phased out of existence. Basically. By the way, I'm making lots of big broad generalizing statements…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I fully recognize that. Please don't ask me on Twitter about all…

[Howard] These are the broadbrush. We're getting paint everywhere.

[DongWon] These are broad brushed. I did state my publishing is stupid thing somewhat provocatively. Obviously, I'm aware of these things. Caveat there. But basically, so I think we moved away from the cheap bundles of paper to expensive bundles of paper.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[DongWon] I think the goal… I mean, we've seen the individual cost of books go up two fold, threefold, fourfold over the course of my career in publishing. Right? Most of our money's now coming from hardcovers. We aren't shipping 100,000 mass-market's of a debut novel anymore. We're shipping 10,000, 15,000 hardcovers. Right? Profit is still going up. Publishers are making more money. Publishers are quite healthy, financially. In general, when they're not losing lots of money trying to buy other publishers. In general, though, the business has been doing quite well, and that business is doing well primarily on the back of print. That has really been focused on high quality, beautifully editions. We've seen all these special editions that Barnes & Noble is doing, Waterstone's is doing. All the book crates. People are investing very deeply in books as objects. Which is very delightful to me in many ways because I love a beautiful book. But there is also the part of me that has seen the readership contract because of that. As the price points go up, you have fewer readers. There are some concerns I have about that as well. So it's a balancing act. When I say the business hasn't changed, I mean, fundamentally, we're still printing books and making money from selling physical goods. But how we sell it, who we sell it to, what genres we emphasize, those do evolve and shift over time. We are kind of going to an older model, pre-pulp fiction, pre-penny dreadful, sort of into this more like elevated bigger book kind of mode. I think we can see that in the kind of books that are succeeding. Even what's winning awards, what's on bestseller lists. There's been a subtle shift. Not that commercial fiction isn't still incredibly viable. It obviously is. But I think undeniably, especially in SF F space, there's been a little bit of a shift in what traditional publishers are looking for and finding a success in.

 

[Erin] This leads me to a question, which is perhaps a very silly one, but, if I am a writer, how much should I care about that part of the business? Like, how much should I be watching these shifts and trying to catch them, as we were talking about earlier? How much should I, like, is it good to know publishing is a business for my own peace of mind, so that when, like, they reject my book…

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I can be like, "Well, it's just a business decision." How much should I care about it and try to work with that business?

[Howard] Did I go into anything for peace of mind? No.

[Laughter]

[Howard] No, I went for the roller coaster.

[DongWon] Absolutely. I think it's a fantastic question. Right? Sometimes I talk about this stuff and I'm like, "Is this helping anybody?" I think that is kind of the core of that question, is what do I want writers to do with that information. A little bit of it is peace of mind. A little bit of it is understanding that when your publisher is making a decision, it might look insane to you. There are reasons why it's happening. Right? There are logic behind it. It may be bad logic. You may not like that logic. It may be bad for you in particular. But, one thing I want to emphasize is that publishers are rational creatures. Given certain definitions of insanity which is capitalism. Right? But they are making their choices based on a certain kind of logic. I often don't like the logic. Right? I think that helps, as a baseline of understanding. I think the more practical thing is understanding that publishing is really trying to answer one single question, which is how many copies of this book can we sell? And who can we sell it to? Right? The way they answer the question of how many can we sell is by saying this is the audience. Right? This is why comp titles are so important, because this is the language in which publishers use to talk about how big the audience is. But, anytime they're acquiring a book, putting marketing dollars behind a book, printing a book, publicity decisions, all these things derive from the fundamental question of we think this book will sell N copies. Right? A success is when it sells a multiple of N. A failure is when it sells less than N. Right? That's… The whole business can be boiled down to that. Right? So, for you, as you're approaching the industry, the thing that I think you need to start thinking about as a writer is who's my audience, really, and how big is that audience. I don't think that's something you should think of when you're deciding what novel to write or when you're writing your first draft. But once that novel exists and you're getting ready to pitch it to publishers, I think taking a step back and really thinking about who is my audience, how big is that audience. Right? Is it five people who like this one very tiny subgenre? Or is it applicable to the biggest audience in whatever genre you're in? I think those are questions you want to think about and make sure you have good answers for them, and a way to frame your book as you're, like, pitching it to publishers, to agents, so that it looks like it's going to hit the biggest audience as possible.

 

[Erin] Follow-up to that, like, what do you do if you feel like publishing doesn't value the audience that you think you'll reach the way that you do?

[DongWon] Oo, you're asking the big questions.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] That's where it gets really tough. Right? I publish a kind of fiction that I believe that audience exists, and is an underserved, underutilized audience in publishing's mind. By that I mean, mostly, like marginalized audiences. So convincing publishers that that audience exists and we know how to get to them is the real challenge. Right? Sometimes, if it… Publishers want to follow existing success because that's where the safe money is. Even though that means that there is potential for more audience if we go in a different direction. Right? So it's a balancing act. Right? It's how do you find a way to make your thing look enough like another thing while still getting to the new thing. I don't think that was a very clear way to do that, but…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It's… You almost need to like disguise what your book is, like hiding a pill in cheese for a dog, in some ways.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. This is a thing that we had to do with… So, puppet theater, we run into this all the time, that everyone… You say puppet theater and people think it's for kids. When you're doing serious adult drama with puppets, and you say I'm doing adult puppetry, everyone's minds go someplace that is not where you actually are. So what we learn to do was to pair it with someone. It is… I'm doing a retelling of Hamlet incorporating puppets, Disney, and stage theater. You say I'm incorporating things, and then… It's the strange and the familiar.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] You package it with something that they are familiar with, so that they're like, "Oh, I like this. Oo, and you've got this other spicy thing."

[Howard] The other thing to look at, and this is as difficult as finding the right piece of cheese to put that pill in so that the dog will eat it. But, I like this one more. Find allies who share your vision, and who are in a position to connect you with more people who share that vision. Because ultimately, if there's a demographic that's not being served by publishing, you're unlikely to solve the problem without someone in publishing deliberately pivoting and aiming at that demographic.

[DongWon] Exactly. So building a cohort is a great way to do that.

[Howard] Building a cohort.

[DongWon] Finding a group of writers who do kind of the same thing that you do. That's a way to convince publishers. Publishers are very easy. This is why it's important to understand the publisher business and they have this logic. Is, once you understand the fundamental logic of what they're looking for, then you can start… I don't know, manipulating them. Right? Like…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] But this is where the short story market comes in. Because it's an opportunity for… That we were seeing that happen a lot with short fiction, that the stories that were winning in short fiction were shifting the demographic. Then people were like, "Oh. Let's give that person a platform with their book." There is a… It is not the fast movement we'd like to see, but that's one of the places where we will see people starting to experiment.

[DongWon] Exactly. So I think finding those experimental markets, and then using that to build into the more traditional markets… It's why change is so slow in publishing. It takes a long time to publish a book, it takes a long time to move publishers off of a certain logic. Change does happen, but it is incremental and it is painfully slow sometimes.

[Dan] This is reminding me so much of the conversation around energy and renewable resources. People realized decades ago you can't convince an energy company to switch everything from coal towards solar purely out of the goodness of their hearts. Because, like we've been saying about publishing, they're a business. They're in this to make money. So the goal then became we're going to make it so cheap that it just makes more business sense to use solar. We've already seen that in Europe. They passed that point this year or last year, where it is literally cheaper to produce solar power than through any other means right now in Europe. So that kind of goal of greener energy, renewable energy, has been accomplished through business means. It just takes a long time and you have to approach it with that right mindset.

 

[DongWon] Exactly. So, with that in mind, I have a little bit of homework for all of you. I want you to start thinking about… Take a look at your work in progress and think about who your audience is. Think about what comp titles there are. Think about how you want to… If you had to sit down with an agent, with an editor, with a publisher to try and convince them that there's a market for your book, how would you start doing that? So make a list of your 3 to 5 titles that your book is like, and here's the audience for that book. Then, you'll be set up at least to start thinking about how to turn your book into a commercial success.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we help you figure out if working in publishing is right for you, and, Erin explains why you should take a bath after you receive a rejection letter. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.