PART 1. GETTING THERE
Lesson 1: Got expectations? Lower them
Feel free to write the most beautiful,
thought-provoking words in the English language. The public will feel equally
free to ignore them.
Here’s the sad truth: most people who write a book will never get it
published, half the writers who are published won’t see a second book in print,
and most books published are never reprinted. What’s more, half the titles in
any given bookshop won’t sell a single copy there, and most published writers
won’t earn anything from their book apart from the advance.
Ah, but now I can do them myself as eBooks, I hear you say, and keep all
the profit. Well, yes you can, but so can everyone else. Ten years ago, the
total number of titles published per year in the US, in all categories (fiction
and non-fiction), was around 250,000. In 2010, according to http://www.bowkerinfo.com/ the number of
titles is estimated at 3.1 million.
Nearly ten times as many titles, yet the size of the reading market isn’t changing,
therefore most of those titles have to be selling approximately zilch. And in a
few years time, with a frenzy of self-publishing, it could be 6 million titles, or 10
million. The arithmetic of declining sales per title is relentless.
So don’t expect
anything from your writing apart from the personal fulfilment of having learned
your craft and created a work that didn’t exist before. By all means hope to get published, or publish
yourself if there’s no other choice, and dream
of having a bestseller or even a long string of them – people do, after all.
But writing talent isn’t nearly enough; thousands of people have it.
To
succeed, you have to write the best story you possibly can, for the genre
you’re writing in, and be professional in every other way. It’s the writers who
work hardest at every aspect of their craft, and never give up, that get there. And when you do, enjoy the adventure
while it lasts, but don’t expect it to last forever. It probably won’t, because
only a handful of writers have careers lasting more than a decade or two.
A rare few will ignore all this and succeed, but
they’re the lottery winners. Everyone else has to work at it. Just don’t expect success or you’re bound to be
disappointed. If you write books that sell, your publisher will love you. If
you don’t, it’s goodbye, no matter how much your editor loves your writing.
Tomorrow's post –
Lesson 2: Anyone can do it, ha!
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- My blog about the novels I write, and the writing life: http://ian-irvine.blogspot.com/
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