Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/18-21-the-empathy-gap-how-to-understand-what-your-publisher-is-telling-you

 

Key Points: Bridging the Empathy Gap, between what publishers are doing and thinking, and what the writer experiences. Home cook or professional chef? Inevitable injuries or toxic conditions? Different people need different levels of empathy. How much of your blood is on the wall? Read between the lines, feedback isn't always clear. Assume they are writing in good faith, and if it's upsetting, give yourself a break. Rejection letters! Set rejection goals, and rejection plans. Send the next one out! Don't read too much into any one rejection.

 

[Season 18, Episode 21]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] The Empathy Gap: How to Understand What Your Publisher is Telling You.

[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.

 

[DongWon] So, this is an interesting one. I wrote an essay some time ago called The Empathy Gap. It was really a meditation for me on kind of what I'm trying to do with the newsletter, what I'm trying to do as… In my role in the industry outside of just like doing my job. Right? One of the things I really want to do is help writers understand what publishers are doing and thinking, and encourage publishers to think about what the writer experiences. For everyone to like build a little bridge of empathy between those two audiences. Right? So the metaphor I use in the essay is about the difference between being a home cook and being a professional cook. Right? Accidents happen in the kitchen. You're going to cut yourself, you're going to burn yourself. Right? If you're a professional chef working in a kitchen, that happens every day. You have scars, you have burns, you're like, "Ah. I burned myself again." You will watch like professional chefs grab a hot pan out of the oven and not flinch, versus, like me, as a home chef, I'm like I need every mitt in my space to like touch anything vaguely warm.

[Laughter]

[DongWon] So, for me, sometimes as an industry person, I feel like that professional chef, and a writer will come to me and be like, "Oh, I burned myself." I'll be like, "Huh. That sucks. So, what are you doing next?" Right? Or like, "Get back, we got orders coming up."

[Howard] Oh, you still have nerves in your hand. That's cool for you.

[DongWon] Exactly. So there is this difference of… Me, I see dozens of careers, I see dozens of books come out. I've seen every iteration of things going wrong. Right? So when it goes wrong, sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a small way, my reaction is… My knee-jerk reaction is sometimes like, "Yeah. That sucks. Tough luck. Bad day. What's tomorrow?"

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Right? So, for me, it's forcing myself to take a step back and remember what is this person experiencing right now. This is the book that they've spent 10 years working on, this is their career. Things look dire, they don't have my experience and know that tomorrow will be okay. That there are more books to be written. That there is a future for their career. So how do we communicate that in a way that is more rooted in empathy for the other person, but still communicating the important information?

[Dan] I really love this metaphor because I think it is such a neat way for the aspiring writer to think about it, like, you love cooking, but do you really want to own a restaurant? That's the step up that you're talking about. Becoming a professional writer and suddenly putting your work in front of people, having to constantly be critiqued about it. So if you think about it in those terms, think, "Well, yes, I really do love this enough that I'm willing to burn off all my fingertips and cut myself on the knife every day," Then, yeah. Take that plunge and become the professional chef.

[DongWon] Absolutely.

 

[Mary Robinette] There's a difference between inevitable injuries… Like it's inevitable that if you are pulling out sheet pans often enough, that you're going to hit a rack at some point, versus toxic. Like, unsafe working conditions. Because there are also things that will happen in a professional kitchen that people are just like, "No. Of course. What you don't know that you have to step over the missing stair?" There are things that shouldn't be allowed, that OSHA would shut down, that people can get socialized into accepting as just like, "Oh, this is the way things are supposed to be, and I shouldn't try to do anything to fix it."

[DongWon] I've seen that a lot from both sides. I've been in work environments that were unsafe in certain ways, that had practices that we worked really hard to change over time. The industry has made a lot of progress. It's hard to see that sometimes, but the behavior that I saw coming up… I'm not going to call them out specifically, but stories that we would tell at drinks after work, there were some very intense things that people were experiencing that today it would be a huge scandal and the shock versus then, it was sort of everyday behavior. I remember we all went to go see The Devil Wears Pravda together…

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] As a little bit of like solidarity. We went, "What was she complaining about?"

[Laughter]

[DongWon] "None of that seems out of pocket to us." Right?

[Oh, dear] [garbled]

[DongWon] "What a baby." You know what I mean. I'm like, I think, that is something to keep in mind at… A lot of us are coming from these experiences of having been in toxic environments growing up… Or coming up in the industry, not my household growing up. But, like, in a professional way. So, figuring out how do we make things safer for people, how do we build things with more empathy, is one of the big challenges I think the industry is facing today, and one of the conflicts that we're seeing. Right? So, trying to find that balance for myself in how I communicate with people is an ongoing challenge.

 

[Erin] Makes me think… Different people need different levels of empathy. As an author, you might need like… You might need a lot of care, you might be like, "I'm hardened to this world and I need nothing." How do you figure out what you need and who's the best fit for you? Working with publishing to make sure that, like, that the gap is matching the amount that they're able to leap? So to speak.

[DongWon] Totally. I think that is an important thing for you to know about yourself, and it's a hard thing to figure out. I have an explicit conversation about it with my writers. Right? Like, when I send something out on sub, I actually ask the writer, "Hey, how much do you want to hear about this process? Do you want to know every rejection that comes through? Do you only want to know the good news? Do you only want the news at the end?" Right? Some people will say, "Why don't you just tell me the good stuff." I also worked with one writer who's always… Every time I give editorial feedback, I talk about the nice things and I talk about the negative things. When I start talking about the nice things, she's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get to the other stuff." You know what I mean? She doesn't want to hear the nice stuff on some level. She wants… She feels it's almost insincere, her not getting into the nitty-gritty. So, those explicit conversations, I've been encouraging her to listen to the nice stuff. I think it's important. But those conversations about what people need in terms of like that communication style is really important. Finding an agent who will work with you on that, finding editors who will work with you on that, is really important. For me, sometimes when I'm picking what editor to sub to for a writer, I will think about, that editor's kind of rough in how they communicate, or like… Which isn't necessarily bad, it's just they're very direct. Right? I'm like, that writer, that's a bad fit. That is not a relationship that's going to be productive versus sometimes I know, "Oh, this person is really good with somebody who like needs a little extra care, who needs a little bit more of that deep dive in the emotional work," and that produces better fiction at the end of the day. So that's a really good pairing. Right? Those are things that I'm thinking about very explicitly. I am trying to draw that out from the writers when I talked to them. But it also helps me when the writer shows up having a little bit of that sensibility. How do you figure that out for yourself? That's between you and your therapist, I think.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] I think that's a little bit of like what your experiences are, that's learning from interacting with the industry, interacting with other writers.

 

[Howard] I think… Honestly, I think of it as an episode of Dexter, where you want to know how thick-skinned you are? Analyze the splatter patterns after you're done talking to your editor.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] No, seriously. Analyze it. How much of your blood is on the wall? Oh, a lot. Okay, this didn't go well for you. Write that down. Describe how you feel about it, so that you have a metric for it as time goes on. So that you understand, "Oh, wait. I actually am pretty thick-skinned, it's just that editor has a very, very sharp knife." It's something you have to learn about yourself, whether or not you have a therapist.

[DongWon] Share that with your team. Right? Especially your agent. That is my job is to manage not just what conversations are happening, but how those conversations are happening. I've had to pull editors aside and be like, "Hey. You can't communicate to this writer that way. It's not producing great results." Or, if I felt it was inappropriate, I've said that, too. I've been like, "I don't like that that's how you talk to my writer." Right? There are other times where I've been like, "Hey, we're going a little soft here, and they need to be pushed a little bit more. I need you to be more direct about what's going on, because they're feeling confused right now." Right? So, I can't do that work in less I know what's going on. So, as always, my advice is always please tell your agent everything. They need to know this stuff. Because we can't do anything unless we know about it. Right? So do that analysis, but then don't forget to share it.

[Howard] After the break, I have a story about how to read between the lines.

[DongWon] Great. Let's take that break, and then we'll get back to that story.

 

[Mary Robinette] I want to tell you about Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen. So, this is a murder mystery set in 1950s San Francisco. It feels like something Dashiell Hammett wrote. It is also a coming-of-age story for an adult gay man. It is found family. It is glamour, it is steeped… Steeped with evocative descriptions. It's set in a soap family. Like, they built their empire with soap. So every page is just like laden with scent. It's so good. It manages to succeed on multiple levels. I loved it to bits. Highly recommend this whether you're looking for a heartwarming story about family, a story about someone who is finding themselves. He was a beat cop and they caught him in a raid, and he's now a private detective. Then there's a tightly plotted murder mystery. It is beautifully told. Highly recommended. The Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen.

 

[Howard] Okay. So it's early 2018, and I'm drawing Munchkin Star Finder cards for Steve Jackson games who is licensing the Star Finder intellectual property from Paizo. I had an art director, a game designer, and a Paizo IP editor all in the approval chain, but the only one who would talk to me was the art director. The art director kept coming back to me on this one illustration saying, "Uh, Matt says the wrench is too big." I do a redraw, Matt says the wrench is still too big. Matt's third time around, Matt says the wrench is still too big. Well, I was drawing a very small character with a cartoonishly large wrench. I realized it's not that the wrench is too big. It's that Matt doesn't like the idea of a cartoonishly large wrench in the hands of this small character. But Matt is not willing to tell me that he doesn't like the joke. He just doesn't like the… Maybe he doesn't know how to say it, maybe he doesn't want to say it. But I managed to read between the lines. I told this to the art director. "Shelley," I said. "Matt just doesn't like the joke altogether. He's wrecking the symmetry of the picture by changing the size of the wrench. So I'm going to replace the wrench with a flamethrower and fill the volume that the wrench was in with smoke. Ask Matt if that's okay. Then I will draw the picture one more time." What went through the approval chain was, "Oh, Matt loves that idea." The point here is that realizing that the feedback may be coming from a place that is not being accurately described to you is a critically important skill. Your editor may not always know how to tell you why something isn't working.

[DongWon] This is such a great point, because it's a reminder that the empathy gap goes both ways. We've talked a lot about how publishers or me can sometimes struggle to remember to be sensitive to the author's experience, but in the other direction, as well, I always appreciate it when I can feel that a writer has remembered that I'm just a person. Right? I'm not a single source of authority, I don't know everything, I'm not perfect. Shocking everyone, hearing now. But I think one thing that could have happened there was Matt may not have realized that that was the issue. He may have just been like, "Oh, I don't like this wrench." And not had the extra thought process of understanding why. So you putting yourself in Matt's shoes a little bit I think helped solve that problem. Writers can do that too. I think there is this idea that like, oh, publishers have all the authority, it's all flowing in my direction, I need to adapt to whatever they say. That's not true. It is a relationship between individuals. Right? You are interacting. They're representing this big organization. But you are a person, and the person you are talking to is a person. Sometimes you can like shortcut some of that by tapping into the humanity of the person that you're talking to.

[Mary Robinette] I find that when I'm reading something that's coming to me that it helps if I think, "Okay. Read this as if they are writing it in good faith." The second thing is that if I find myself getting angry about a lot of different points, that I will walk away from it, and then come back and reread. Because there's a fair chance that what's happened is that my defensiveness has just been triggered. Because it's hard to read people telling you unpleasant things. That I come back then, and then say, "Okay, now read it again as if it's written in good faith." Most of the time when I do that, it is something that I can then at least respond to in a way that's going to be productive as opposed to responding in a way that will be an angry escalation and a shutting down of conversation.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] Even if my… Even if I come back and I'm still mad.

[DongWon] You can still be mad. Right? Responding that way is a valid response. Sometimes what you need to do is have the conflict. Right? But as a first step, remembering this person is busy. This person is overworked and underpaid. They're very stressed out all the time. Now, in that mindset, they wrote this email. What does that mean? Right? Did they intend to say the thing that I'm taking away from it? Or did they mean to say something else? That doesn't mean you forgive them for doing the thing. But it might help you understand a little bit what's actually happening. Right? So much of what I do is translate publisher emails to my clients, of, like, they said this. Here's what that means. Right? So much of my job is like a little bit of mind-reading and interpretation between those two audiences. Right? I think it's why I see this gap so much is because I kind of live in it. 

 

[DongWon] I want to switch a little bit to something very specific and concrete. Especially for new writers, for people getting into the industry. Your main interaction in your early days is going to be rejection letters. So I want to talk a little bit about what it feels like to receive a rejection letter. And also what it feels like to send one. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Oh, rejectomancy.

[DongWon] I know. Exactly. So, it's a point of conflict. It's a point of friction. I guess I'm a little bit curious, like, what was you all's like first experience of receiving rejections in the industry? Were those like really blunt, awful things? Were people cruel to you? Is there anything that really stands out from those early days?

[Erin] I think the thing that I remember the most was just collecting them in a cool way. Like, so one thing that I did with a group of friends really early on was we set rejection goals for ourselves, like, to get a certain number of rejections, and had a lovely little… Like, everyone picked a thing that they would do every time that they got a rejection. So, I will take a nice bath and collect my rejection and celebrate it with my peers. Then send the next thing, like, already have the next place maybe for a story that I want it to go. Basically, assume that rejection is a thing that will happen, that it's part of the process, and that it moves you closer to acceptance as opposed to that it is a thing telling you to stop, to leave, and to run away. So I remember sort of cheering on, like, with other people, "Oh, you went out and you sent it out." If you got 10 more rejections, that means you sent it 10 more places, and that's hard work. We will celebrate the work because that's what happened. So I remember that more than any particular rejection. I think it helped me to have something else to focus on. A piece of advice that I often give for dating, which is not what this podcast is about, is that when you go on a date, have a secondary objective. So, like I used to collect songs from people I went on dates with. So, if the date's bad, at least I learned about a new song, and that's interesting. It gives me a way to not live in like this date was a failure. But my song list went up, and that's a success. Similarly, in the writing world, by having, like, these rituals and these things that I work with other people, I can no longer remember any particular rejection, just the bath and the celebration with my friends.

[DongWon] I love that. I love that so much. One thing that's important is… We often fall into dating metaphors when talking about finding an agent, rejection, or placing a story or whatever it is, because you're always trying to find that exact right fit. The one thing that I want to point out that's really different from dating in the publishing process. There's many things that are different. But, when as an agent, I'm seeing hundreds of query letters. Right? There's an asymmetry to what's happening. When you're dating, it's like one to one. You're both hopefully seeing a number of people over time. Whatever. But, like, it's not one person submitting a thing amid hundreds of other things. I'm not spending two hours rejecting 200 dates. Right?

[Mary Robinette] The dating analogy still works, it's just that the slush pile is your Tinder profile.

[DongWon] Right. Exactly. So for you, I think submitting it feels really important, and that rejection letter feels so significant in that way. So I love taking the sting out of it a little bit by making a ritual around it and celebrating getting rejection which I think is also important. But, from my perspective, it's like I spend 100 of these in a row. Right? So I think understanding a little bit what that process looks like for us on our side will help frame a little bit what is actually in that letter. I see writers sometimes on Twitter being confused or pushing back on particular phrases that you see in rejection letters a lot of the time. Which is… Or, something along the lines of, like, "I'm sure you'll find a home for this elsewhere," or "I really love this, but it's not a good fit." Not a good fit is a thing I see a push back on a lot, when it's probably the most honest thing in the letter.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Actually. It's the thing that saying, "It's not that this is bad, it's just that it's not right for me." Often times I haven't even seen enough to know whether it's good or bad, but I have seen enough to know I'm not the audience for it, I'm not the agent for it. So I think understanding that a little bit, that this letter's coming from somebody who's in a position who's trying to accomplish specific goals can help quite a bit.

[Dan] Yeah. The it's not a good fit… I think one of the reasons that authors hate that one so much… I should say, aspiring authors hate that one so much is because there's really nothing they can do about it. Right? You get that and you realize it doesn't matter, all the work and the effort I put into writing this and to revising it into making it the best thing it could be, none of that mattered. Because this person just doesn't like it. Like…

[Mary Robinette] You can't revise it… [Garbled]

[Dan] Yeah. I can't revise it and solve this problem. The only solution to this problem is to keep doing the submission process, over and over again, which I'm sick of already and I hate. As an experienced writer, who's done this several times, I love getting that, because I know that I don't want my book to be with someone who doesn't love it.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[Dan] That is such a hard thing for the new writer still trying to break in to really get their head around. They think, "No. Please. Even if you don't love this, take it anyway. I'll do anything, I just want to be published." No, you don't. It is worth waiting for the right fit.

[Howard] We had, in 2006… I say we. Sandra and I, we shopped Schlock Mercenary with an agent to see if anybody in the sci-fi market would pick it up and publish it. After a few months, the agent came back to us and said, "Well, we got two kinds of responses. Response number one was oh, Schlock Mercenary. I love this comic strip, but we have no idea how we would publish it. The second response was I don't know what Schlock Mercenary is, but it looks like a comic strip. We have no idea how we would publish it. That was actually super useful feedback, because what it told me is there is a hole in the sci-fi publishing space that maybe I'll have to fill myself by printing our own books, and the sci-fi market is ready for Schlock Mercenary to be a thing that they love, because editors are already reading it and enjoying it.

[Erin] I think that's a gap that can exist in many different ways.

[Oh, yes]

[Erin] I think one of the reasons that it's not a good fit can have a sting to it is that sometimes it really just means, hey, it's not the right fit for me, and sometimes it's a surface level that can hide some deeper inequities, an inability to read marginalized folks in the way that they should be read, and to identify where an audience is for a book in the way that we wish the publishing industry did.

[Totally]

[Erin] So sometimes hearing that time and time again sounds like there isn't space for me at the table versus that I haven't found that seat at the table yet. It's hard to tell what the difference is when you're just reading these words on the page.

[DongWon] So, I think the thing that will encourage people a lot is not to try and read too much into any one rejection letter. Right? I think one of the hardest… Listen, we're all storytellers. Right? We all want to build little stories about anything that we see. So, sometimes when you see that in a letter, as Dan was talking about, like, you want to do something about it, you want to say, "Oh. Then I can edit it this way. I can do that." When the reality is you've been given no data. That's fine. Right? I was having this conversation with a writer just the other day that, like, no, numbers were not exactly where we wanted them to be. They were talking about, like, "What can I do about that? I want to do something." And all this. I said, "There's nothing to be done at this time. We have a plan, we're going to continue with that plan, because we don't know enough yet to change." Right? I could really lay it out. Here are the buttons, here are the levers that we have to pull. These are our options. We're not ready to make a decision on any of these things yet. So what Howard's talking about is when you have the full set of rejections, when you've gone through a number of people, you're getting consistent feedback, that tells you something. What Erin is talking about in terms of like realizing that there isn't space in the market because of this reason, because publishing isn't making space for it, that's a different response. For an individual letter, though, I would really encourage people to be very careful about thinking that this form letter or this short rejection letter is telling me something very specific. If an editor has written you something longer, has given you very specific feedback, that's something you can respond to. But when it's something a little bit more general, I'd caution you to be careful of over indexing on it.

[Mary Robinette] There's a… I took a workshop with Kristine Kathryn Rusch. She told this story. Which is that she had… She keeps a meticulous log of where she sent stories, and for reasons, she doesn't do revisions after she starts sending them out. So, she sent it to a place, and then accidentally sometime… It got rejected. Accidentally, sometime later, she sent it to the same place. As she was reaching out to say, "Oh, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to send it to you a second time," they emailed her with an acceptance. The acceptance said, "I really loved the changes that you made to the story." To a story that she had not revised at all. What she learned from that was… The take away is not that you should keep submitting things to the same place. It's that when a story is rejected, it is not the right fit for that market and that editor on that day. That it's not the quality of the writing… Sometimes it is, to be clear. When you're early career, sometimes it is the quality of the writing. But it's not that, it's whether or not it is serving the need of them on that day and what mood that they're in even when they read it. So just be gentle with yourself.

[DongWon] One way in which I approach the empathy gap is making sure I'm hydrated, fed, and rested when I'm doing… When I'm looking at queries. Right? I don't want to be in a bad mood. I never… If I'm like… I am grumpy, this is not the time to be looking at queries. Because I won't be fair. Right? But something to remember on the other side of it is, and I know that hearing things are so random can be very difficult to hear. Again, I have empathy for that. I get it. It's frustrating. But the person on the other end of that, the person sending the rejection, whether it's a short story, whether it's an agent, whatever it is, they're going fast, they're doing this, they're doing their job. They're in a workflow of processing the pile of rejections that is… Or pile of submissions that is building up, then trying to get them out the door. Right? They're trying to get responses back to you in a timely way. That's the other thing is there's a lot of pressure on me to do it fast. In addition, people want responses. I'm very busy, I got a lot going on, I've got hundreds of these queries to get through. It takes me time to do it, because it's hard to find a block of time that I can sit down and do this. So, there's all of those like pressures on it that I would encourage writers to think about when they receive that letter. You feel that disappointment, but then remember, this may not mean anything. This isn't a critique of the story necessarily even or of me as a person. This is an interaction I had with an individual at a point in time. That's okay. Let's move on to the next one. Let's take that bath. Let's celebrate with my friends. Then, what's the next step? So, on that note, I would love to move to our homework.

 

[Erin] Perfect. Because, the homework is to put yourself on the other side of the empathy gap. Find a piece of fiction that you really, really enjoy. Then write a kind, personal rejection for it. Think about what you would be doing if this wasn't the right fit for you, despite the fact that this is something that you really, on a personal level, love as a story experience.

[Mary Robinette] In the next episode of Writing Excuses, we discussed the difference between mentorship and solidarity, and how to be a gate opener, not a gatekeeper. Until then, you're out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

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.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/28/16-9-crossing-the-revenue-streams/

 

Key Points: Successful artists have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets, earning money from many different revenue streams. First. look at other ways to write fiction besides just selling your stories. E.g., sometimes a publisher will pitch a series to you. Look for ways to avoid the pigeonhole, get new audiences, and work with new publishers. Watch for anthologies, and write to a theme! Tie-in fiction can help. Gaming companies need fiction, too. Balance new skills and audience versus money, money, money. Try to learn something, to grow your audience or as a writer, when you take on new projects. Second, consider ways to make money from writing you have already done. T-shirts, coins, merchandise. In-universe artifacts. How much work do you have to do to make money off it, and how much profit is there in it? Consider Kickstarter. Keep looking for other opportunities.

 

[16, 9]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Crossing Revenue Streams.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to need more than one stream.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So, one of the things that I think is common to every successful artist that I know of is that they have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets. They are earning money from a lot of different revenue streams. So we want to talk about that is the final class in Brandon's intensive course on career planning and business information. So, Brandon, take it away. What do people need to know about multiple revenue streams? Why is this an important part of an author's career?

[Brandon] So, you need to find a way to make money off of your writing. This is the… This is what you're going to have to do. This is what… If you want to go pro. You don't… You don't have to, but, if you're looking at this as a business, one of the things you should be looking at is, how can I make money at this? The obvious answer is sell a book. However, for at least most authors I know, once you sell a book, you want to go full-time, you probably should go full-time to make a living at your writing, but you probably can't earn enough off of that book to go full-time yet. Indeed, even if you're a newer aspiring writer who's selling short stories and things like that, or maybe you're… Maybe you're a longtime writer who selling short stories. You are going to need to find a way to make a living or at least you're going to want to find a way to make more money off of your stories. So, this is ways to make money with your writing that aren't necessarily the obvious ways of you write your book, you sell your book, you get money for it. We're going to talk about all sorts of other types of revenue streams you can have as a writer to keep yourself going during those maybe lean years.

[Dan] So, I told the story to Howard last week, but when I went years ago to my 20th high school reunion, they did the little games, like who has the most kids and who's done this and who traveled the farthest and all that kind of thing that you do at a reunion. The question who has held the most jobs since graduating high school, most people were on like four or five. Except for me, the professional author, and my friend who became a professional filmmaker. We both tied with 14. That's not even counting all the freelance work that I do. So artists really need to hustle to pay all those bills.

[Brandon] Yup. So one of the first things we want to talk about here is other ways to be writing stories that aren't maybe necessarily the write a book or you write a story, whatever you want to write, and sell it. There are job opportunities that are still writing fiction in the area you want to be in that you can get. I wanted to have Dan talk to us about it, because Dan had the experience of a series that was pitched by a publisher to him, right?

[Dan] Yeah. This is actually… Not a lot of people know this, but that's where Partials came from. The publisher came to me, two editors, Jordan Brown and [Ruta Remus] at HarperCollins. They had an idea for a really great kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia YA series, and were looking for an author who fitted. So they actually brought that idea to me. It was not something I had considered doing, because at the time, everything I had written was horror, but number one, I really welcomed the opportunity to jump into something very, very different as a way of making sure I didn't pigeonhole myself as the serial killer guy. For a number of reasons. That's not the identity I was looking for. But number two, this was a chance for me to build inroads to a brand-new audience I had not yet been reaching, to a brand-new publisher that I had never worked before, to do just a lot of new frontiers. I really saw it at the time as a brand-new revenue stream. Then, when that whole YA career kind of crumbled in let's say 2014, that's the same… I used that same strategy again, let's find a brand-new audience and build a brand-new revenue stream, which is how I got into middle grade.

[Brandon] This happens a lot with anthologies, also. People will ask you if you want to be a part of an anthology or it'll go around in the community that an anthology is being made on this topic and they're accepting proposals or submissions. Once you become part of the community, you can get… Watch some of these forums or these newsletters or these things like that. This comes into the networking that we talked about in a previous week. But anthologies can be a good way to make money off of your writing other than just I'm writing a story and submitting it, you can write to a theme.

[Dan] Yeah. Tie-in fiction has also been really helpful for me. My only Hugo nomination for prose… For a pros category has come from tie-in fiction. Now, this can be hard. I've got a friend who rights Star Trek novels, and I was kind of grilling him for how can I get into this, because I'm a huge Star Trek geek. He basically said you have to wait for one of the rest of us to die.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So these established properties can be hard to break into. But what I have done is I've made some pretty good contacts with gaming companies. I've written for Privateer Press, I've written for several others. The one that I've just finished is a Kickstarter for a board game called Cult of the Deep. They came to me and they said, "Hey, we're coming out with this thing. It's horror. We want to have some fiction built so that we can use it as part of the Kickstarter. Will you write it for us?" So always being open for and looking for these opportunities to write other stuff has been super helpful to me.

[Erin] I think that...

[Dan] Go ahead.

[Erin] I think that's something… It's really interesting, because it's a trade-off. So I do a lot of freelance writing work, some game stuff, I've done some writing for, like, Paizo, and I write for Zombies, Run!, the running app. So, things here and there. But what's… The balance is figuring out what is adding to your skill as a writer or expanding your audience, and what is just like I like money, money is fun.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, whenever actually a project comes to me, I play Say No to This from Hamilton, and I… A picture of my freelance client is like the woman saying, "I should say no, but I will always say yes." But I've actually had to say no to projects, because they are far enough off from what I'm doing that I'm like, "I'm not going to learn anything, I'm not going to grow either my audience or as a writer," which, I think either one of those are a good reason to do extra stuff in addition to the money.

 

[Brandon] so, the second big thing I wanted to cover is ways to make money off of writing you've already done that isn't necessarily writing prose. The reason I want to talk about this is because Howard is a genius at this. He has had to make his whole career off of monetizing something that people aren't paying for. Howard, what can you tell us about how to monetize things that are free, or get extra money out of something that you're charging a little bit for?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm… Okay, I'm laughing because, on the one hand, yes, the comic is available for free and we have all kinds… I say the comic. Schlock Mercenary, available to be read by you, fair reader, at no charge at schlockmercenary.com. Yes, it's free, and we sell T-shirts and coins and whatever else, but most of the merchandise that… The most profitable merchandise we sell is book collections of the comic. So a lot of what I'm doing is getting enough people hooked on the book that they want to own it in print. But there are things that the comic created, there are things that it built, that lent themselves really well to being an independent revenue stream. So that even if you didn't want a print collection of the comic strip, maybe you wanted this other thing.

 

[Dan] Awesome. So, can you tell us about our book of the week, which happens, very cleverly, to tie right into this?

[Howard] Why, yes I can. We created The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which is a sort of coffee-table book of very, very bad advice. Malevolent canon. It's often referred to in-universe. I've been making fun of the Stephen Covey, the seven habits thing. Then, years and years and years ago, Stephen Covey started going after anybody who was saying the seven habits of anything. Basically saying, cease-and-desist, don't do that anymore. We went ahead and did a retcon in Schlock Mercenary and started referring to them as maxims, and there aren't seven of them, there are 70 of them. Then I realized, you know, I might be able to make stuff out of this. So we made some twelve-month calendars. Well, print calendars aren't as big a thing as they were 15 years ago. So, about five years ago, we released the Seventy Maxims book, which we created as an in-universe artifact in Schlock Mercenary, and we did it as part of the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game called Planet Mercenary, which is itself a whole nother thing that is not the comic. The Planet Mercenary role-playing game paid the bills all by itself for like two and a half years. That is the best thing we've ever made. I mean, except for the comic. Which makes this topical.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The fun thing about the Planet Mercenary book is that my whole approach to it from the word go was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could make money off of my world book notes that I have to refer to all the time. I still refer to the Planet Mercenary PDF all the time. But, the book of the week, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It is a lovely little coffee-table book that's great for starting conversations about things you should never ever do, please.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Now, one of the things that I love about this book, and specifically about the plan that caused its creation, is I've always compared your maxims to Star Trek's Rules of Acquisition for the Ferengi. You made a decision that they did not make, and maybe this ties back to our art versus business discussion. You were able, because you eventually ended that list and codified everything in it, you were able to publish it. Star Trek has never done that. They're missing out on a big chunk of change. They could have, at the height of DS 9, sold copies of the Rules of Acquisition, hand over fist. They decided not to, presumably because they liked the flexibility of not having codified the entire list. But these are the kind of decisions that, as creators, we need to make. Do I want to leave this open? Could I turn this into something that I can sell? It's a really smart tactic.

[Howard] Let me look at… Let me talk about Paramount's decision, there. Back in 2006, Robert Khoo, who was the business guy for Penny Arcade comics. He's the reason there's a Penny Arcade Expo. Robert Khoo said, "No single source should ever be more than 60% of the revenue that you take in." Now, he was talking to an audience of self-employed, self-publishing web cartoonists. He was talking about things like Google ads and books in print and T-shirts and whatever else. But the advice really stuck to me, stuck with me, and it was super salient three, four years ago, when Google ads cut me off, and I realized, "Oh, no. That's a big chunk of my revenue." That's… Well, it's about 10 or 15% of my overall revenue. That did not end my life. Because we had multiple revenue streams. So the operating principle here is don't have anything that you're just super dependent on. With Paramount, making a book of the Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, would have meant devoting a writer to the process of compiling that and making it special and wonderful. Ultimately, it never would have generated more than chump change, if you will, compared to the business that they were in, which is making a TV show. So they made a business decision to leave… I mean, what would have been for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to leave that on the table. But hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's… That gets like four episodes shot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] It's not very significant. So the decision about revenue streams hinges, for me, heavily in part on how much work do I need to do in order to make money off of this, and how much profit is there in the thing that I'm making. I love books, because they don't cost a lot to make, if I don't factor all of the time involved in writing them, but we can sell them… The profit margin is large on the physical merchandise. But for a print-on-demand T-shirt, the margin is very small. If my limited market of people is all busy buying print-on-demand T-shirts, I'm actually not making as much money as I would be if I could convince them all to buy copies of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.

 

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Dan] [inaudible… Should all…]

[Brandon] That's interesting here to talk about is this idea that there are, once you are lucky enough to be getting fans and keeping them, there are people among them who want to give you more money then… They want to support your work. I remember when this first began with me. I actually got an email from someone who said, "Hey, can I just send you a bunch of money? I happen to just be very well-off and I want to just send you a tip." I'm like, "Really? You just are offering to send me money?" People like to support artists. So, having some of these extra products that you can sell is a good way to go. It does require time. Dan was the first writer I knew personally who made T-shirts. I know that T-shirts are… T-shirts are one of the harder things to do because you have to carry them in multiple sizes and they are just a… There's a saturated market of cool nerd T-shirts out there. So making a dent and being… Selling those is hard. But they are a nice… Like, one thing that we need that Paramount… Paramount needs it on a different scale. We need multiple revenue streams, in that if something collapses, we aren't destroyed by. When Borders went out of business, this was a big deal. Right? It's possible that other sources like that will just banish. So, even if T-shirts are a small amount of your business, knowing that you have that extra revenue stream can be very comforting. About three years ago, maybe, Howard came to me and I was talking about the leatherbounds that we do. The leatherbounds are one of the things I wanted to bring up here. I am in a privileged position in that I have a big enough audience to support a luxury product like this. I was talking about it, and Howard said, "Brandon, you need to do a Kickstarter on these." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Oh, Kickstarter has a lot more tools you can use. You can generate a lot more interest by offering rewards to people. Trust me, do a Kickstarter." I had never done one before. I went to my team and said, "Howard says we should do a Kickstarter, and Howard is the smartest person I know about this sort of stuff. So let's do a Kickstarter." Last summer we made almost $8 million on a Kickstarter.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] I got a free book.

[Brandon] And Howard got a free book. This… It was true. It was bigger than the money we made… The peace of mind knowing that we could now self-publishing any of my books if the publishing industry went belly up or something happened at Tor. That piece of mind is enormous, knowing that I have another way to reach my fans. Now, granted, it's through someone else's platform. That is scary. The fact that if Kickstarter went away, I can't sell them on my website as effectively as I can through Kickstarter. But it gives me someone other than Amazon, because the rest of my life is controlled by Amazon. 80% of my books are sold through this one store that if Jeff Bezos decides he doesn't like me and says, "Pull Brandon's books," then my career collapses. Well, not anymore, because I have learned how to sell my books through Kickstarter if I need to because of Howard.

[Dan] Fantastic. Good job, Howard. Yeah. So, this has been a really good discussion. I hope that what our audience takes away from this more than anything else is that you need to be looking for these other opportunities. Regardless of what those might be, and regardless of how big they are. I could never in my wildest dreams make $8 million self-publishing something the way Brandon does, but I do have lots of other work that I do, and lots of other little streams of revenue. So, even the little stuff helps and is valuable. You need to look for opportunities to do that. So, thank you very much for listening to this episode.

 

[Dan] Let's have our final piece of homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. I want you to look at… Identify the places where you are getting money. They may be checks from a publisher, they may be checks from Amazon, they might be… I don't know where you are getting money from. But identify each of those as a revenue stream. Then identify… Write it down… What is the activity that you are performing that is generating that revenue. If it's ad revenue on your website, then the activity is not necessarily writing, it's publishing things to the web. So, establish a framework for where the money is currently coming from. Now, start looking at the ideas, the concepts, the conceits, the whatever that are in your work that could be turned into other things that might make you money. Maybe it's a T-shirt, maybe it's a commemorative Christmas ornament. Maybe it's a… Maybe it's a flag that goes on the back of a pickup truck. I don't know. But make a list of the possible places that the ideas, the concepts, the conceits in your work could be turned into other merchandise.

[Dan] Fantastic. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/01/10/16-02-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.