The 7 Secrets of the Prolific Writer's Block (31 page)

That Culver is
not
lazy, unfocused, inept, etc., is abundantly illustrated by “the short list of things I did with my life” during those 838 days, which includes:

I completed an MFA in creative writing, taught five semesters’ worth of college freshmen how to write, and, after 149 job applications, landed a full-time position with health insurance and a 401(k). I wrote a dozen more stories and the beginning of a novel. I sold reviews and articles to various markets. I actually
published the story in question in another magazine
.

The main lesson Culver appears to derive from her traumatic rejection is that she should learn acceptance. “This mantra of acceptance is everywhere. Acceptance of the difficulty of the writing task. Acceptance of the waiting. Acceptance of the greatly flawed and hugely problematic enterprise of mainstream publishing. Acceptance—grimly—of rejection itself.” But I don’t think she really believes that. For one thing, she lacks the subversive glee of Chris Offutt when he describes reframing his goal from acceptance to “a hundred rejections in a year” (Section 7.4). And she writes:

Low expectations are not a recipe for good self-care. You get sour; you drink too much wine; you stop reading because everything you read makes you even more sour; you go on diatribes against successful young writers in the kitchens at parties. You definitely are not working out. Eventually you wear a hole in one of the elbows of your bathrobe and instead of taking it off, you think, “That makes sense. It’s nice to have a little air circulating around. They should make all the bathrobes this way.”

What she’s describing actually sounds less like acceptance and more like learned helplessness, an almost inevitable result of systematic disempowerment. On some level, however, she seems to understand the unfairness of it all, since her anger peeps out at times. She notes at the start of her article that “I have too much personal integrity” to name the magazine that rejected her, only to add, “That was a joke; I don’t; I’m just scared of editorial blacklists.”

T
his entire book is about the costs, to writers, of disempowerment, and so I cannot in good conscience recommend that any writer get involved in a disempowering system—and that means I can’t recommend you go the traditional book publishing route, which typically consists of:

• Sending query letters to dozens of agents or editors; then spending months or years waiting and hoping you’ve engaged someone’s interest.

• If you do engage someone’s interest, submitting a book proposal and/or partial manuscript (first three chapters); and then waiting more weeks or months. (I suppose we should be grateful that the publishers finally relaxed their long-held iron-clad rule against “simultaneous submissions,” which meant that writers could only submit to one editor at a time and had to wait for months or even more than a year before they could even submit to another.)

• If the editor is interested, being asked to submit a full manuscript—and waiting yet more weeks or months.

• Having little or no say in important marketing and sales decisions. We saw how Tom Grimes’s book got miscategorized as a baseball book; another (pretty egregious) example are the many books by non-white authors, and with non-white protagonists, that somehow wind up with white people on the covers.
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• Having to shoulder nearly the entire burden of marketing and sales yourself. Most publishers will list your book in a catalog; send out review copies (but not strongly advocate for reviews); create a Web page on their site for you (perhaps with a “video trailer”); print up advertising postcards; and brief their sales teams, if they have one. They
might
even help organize—but often not pay for—a book tour, and they might pay for some ads, or give you or some bookstores “co-op” marketing dollars to promote your readings. Generally speaking, the better known you are, or the more salable your book is considered, the more support you’ll get—but even many successful writers get little support.

While publishers may say (and even believe) that the above represents 
an extraordinary commitment, it really isn’t—especially since they don’t hold themselves accountable for the result (see the Diamant story in Section 8.8). And it doesn’t even begin to match the effort you will be expected to make marketing and selling your book, which usually consists of spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each year on a website and other online promotion, and still more time and money traveling to give readings or appear at conferences.

• All of the above, usually for a minimal advance and a royalty payment of around $.50–$2 per book.

Oh, and:

• No loyalty. A couple of generations ago, some publishers prided themselves on not just finding and nurturing talent, but sticking with a productive writer through the (reasonable) highs and lows of her career. These days, however, conglomerate-owned publishers dump even reliably selling authors to make room in their catalogs for the latest celebrity tell-all or faddish bestseller.

Mind you, all of the above is when the publishing process goes
as planned
. Like everything else, however, it can go awry. Stories of agents and editors who are incompetent, uninvolved, overworked, or simply go AWOL are legion. I know one writer who politely inquired why her agent had missed an important meeting, only to be told, in essence, “I have thirty writers like you, so if you’re not happy with my work we don’t have to do business.”

I also know writers who have been stuck in “revision hell”: being asked by an agent or editor to revise their submission, then waiting months to hear back, and then being asked to revise and wait again. That’s months or years of excruciating extra work and suspense, with no guarantee of publication.

In
Be the Monkey
, an ebook on self-publishing co-written by Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath, Konrath notes:

My publishers have made a lot of mistakes. Some of them big. Some of them which cost me, are costing me, money. Talking to other writers, I know I’m not alone. Almost every writer I know has gotten screwed by their publisher, in one way or another. I know hundreds of writers, and I can count on one hand the number of my peers who have no publisher complaints. Bad covers, title changes, editing conflicts, slow payments, unclear royalty statements, orphaned books, bad launches. The list is so long that I have to wonder if we’re not being intentionally screwed.

The situation is better, in some ways, with the small presses, but still far from ideal. Small presses often care more about your work, and so they often do a better job at editing and production. They may even give you more say in the marketing and sales process. But most won’t give you an advance, and they’ll still expect a major investment from you in terms of marketing and sales while offering little support or recompense in exchange.

Of course, there are many good people in publishing—people who care deeply about books. However, there’s only so much that even they can do in the throes of a fundamentally disempowering system.

It doesn’t have to be that way, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

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See, for instance, Kate Harding, “Publisher whitens another heroine of color,” Salon (website), January 19, 2010 (http://www.salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2010/01/19/cover_whitewashing/index.html)

C
ontrast our examples of disempowered writers with these:

Brunonia Barry self-published 2,500 copies of her novel
The Lace Reader,
sold them via an aggressive marketing campaign, and then signed a $2 million deal with William Morrow/HarperCollins.

Neuroscientist Lisa Genova self-published
Still Alice
, her novel about a woman afflicted with early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease, after spending nearly a year unsuccessfully trying to interest agents and editors in it. She promoted it aggressively via a website that became an online hub for information about Alzheimer’s, and also via a blog on the Alzheimer’s Association website. She eventually sold it to Simon & Schuster for more than $500,000.

Julia Fox Garrison never considered approaching agents or publishers with her memoir
P.S. Julia
. “Instead of wasting my energies trying to appeal to agents and publishers, I was able to put all my time into my vision of how I wanted my story presented. It was like giving birth, and I was very protective of my baby.”
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Instead, she self-published it and marketed it aggressively; it was eventually purchased by HarperCollins, which released it under the title
Don’t Leave Me This Way
.

Christopher Paolini wrote his first novel,
Eragon
, when he was fifteen. His family’s company published it, and Paolini promoted it by giving readings at more than a hundred libraries, bookstores, and schools across the United States. Eventually writer Carl Hiaasen saw the book and introduced Paolini to his editor at Alfred A. Knopf, under whose imprint it later became a bestseller.

My friend Ann Herendeen spent six months seeking an agent or publisher for her genre-busting first novel,
Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander
, a bisexual Regency romance, then decided to self-publish. It attracted a devoted cult following and was eventually bought by an editor at HarperCollins, which has also published her second book
Pride/Prejudice
, a bisexual version of you-know-what.

By self-publishing, these authors opted out of the disempowering system I’ve been describing, at least until they were able to enter it more on more equal terms. It’s not incidental that at least two of them had business experience (Paolini and also Barry, who co-owned a games development company with her husband): this accounts not just for their marketing prowess, but, I’m guessing, their unwillingness to submit to a disempowering system. Businesspeople learn early on that unequal, disempowering relationships are a dead end (see next section).

The rationale for self-publishing only intensifies with ebooks, where “publishing” amounts to creating a digital file, and “distribution” to sending that file over the Internet. The current ebook self-publishing star is young-adult fiction author Amanda Hocking, who, after enduring “countless rejections from book agents,”
2
sold hundreds of thousands of her ebooks on Amazon, and then landed a $2 million contract with St. Martin’s Press.

Hocking is a spectacular example, but hardly unique:

Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying without success to persuade a New York publisher to print one of her books. In July, the 49-year-old mother of three decided to publish it herself, online. Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer. In August, Amazon will publish a paperback version of her first novel, “A Scattered Life,” about a friendship triangle among three women in small-town Wisconsin.”... “All of this time I have been trying to get traditionally published, I was sending my manuscript to the wrong coast,” says Ms. McQuestion.
3

It’s perhaps not surprising that savvy novices are turning to self-publishing and e-publishing. What is more surprising—and even more damning of traditional publishing—is that successful writers are also embracing it, an example being
Be the Monkey
co-author Barry Eisler, who opted out of a $500,000 deal with St. Martin’s Press:

I’m confident I can do better financially over the long term on my own ... But it’s not just the destination that matters to me; it’s also important that I enjoy the trip. And ceding creative control over packaging, not to mention control over key decisions like pricing and timing, has never been comfortable for me. It might be okay if I thought my publishers were making all the right decisions, but when your publisher is doing something you think is stupid and that’s costing you money—something like, say, saddling your book with a closeup of an olive green garage door, or writing a bio that treats your date and place of birth as a key selling point ... or otherwise blowing the book’s packaging—it can be pretty maddening.
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Other successful writers who are also turning to self-publishing include science fiction writer F. Paul Wilson, who anticipates making “as much as $5,000 to $10,000” a month e-publishing his out-of-print books, and
Be the Monkey
’s Konrath, who “says he’s already earning more from self-published Kindle books that New York publishers rejected than from his print books.”
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And literally the day I was writing this (June 23, 2011), J.K. Rowling announced that she would be self-publishing ebooks of the entire
Harry Potter
series. 

Lest there be any doubt about my viewpoint, I’ll state it plainly:
self-publishing is the only way to go
. Maybe you’ll do it as your primary career strategy, or maybe you’ll do it to build your audience so you can win a more equitable deal with a traditional publisher. Or maybe you’ll combine self-publishing and traditional publishing throughout your career. But it’s hard to envision an empowered writing career that doesn’t involve at least some strong element of self-publishing.