Money Matters

I hate it when it’s time to get resourceful. For all my innovation in writing, my interest in the new and the different, I crave security at a very deep level. Frankly, it’s a joke that someone with my need for security should be in a profession where the money comes slow and irregularly when it comes at all.

Lately a series of very bad expenses – all new appliances except for the stove which is limping (and I do mean limping, unfortunately) along and might hold another year if we’re lucky, a series of car repairs, tuition for both kids an idiot cat who swallowed a bunch of thread and other sundry emergencies – have driven a knife deep into my bank account. This combines with the fact that payments that used to be almost instant in publishing are often now eight months late to bring us to a no good, very bad, rotten type of financial situation.

Of course the problem with this is that anxiety brings my writing to a grinding halt, and that in turn grinds the payments to an even slower schedule because I deliver late.

To put things bluntly, we need to make up the about 12k in unexpected expenses (yeah, the tuition was expected, but the rest wasn’t) that have buffeted us since around December or things are going to go south very fast and get extremely unpleasant to the point that writing time will become iffy (as in, if we need to move).

In this type of situation, normally, I get a day job. Except... I haven’t needed to do that in more than ten years, so my marketable skills are limited. Also I’m signed for six books due this year. This combination means in this market getting a job at all will be... uh... interesting and that if I get a job I won’t be able to write.

This leaves me two options, which – while both cut into my writing by making more writing – are actually doable and in several ways preferable.

One is a storyteller’s bowl. I set up a site and start putting up a novel, then set a value per chapter – since my chapters are short, probably a relatively low value – and once that value is reached in donations, I put up the next chapter. The only problem with this is finishing the novel before I put it up. I don’t think that would happen, which means people would essentially be donating for an e-arc – an unedited/unpolished novel. I was thinking – for those of you in the diner – of putting up my regency Witchfinder novel with the Scarlet Pimpernel character. It is outlined, and I know I can finish it, and well... I will write for money. (I could also do a science fiction, mind you...)

The other is a subscription. For – say – $10 a year, I commit to two short stories a month, 60% of those to be set in either the world (and probably past history) of DST and shifters. (Probably more than 60%, but I can promise 60%. ) There would be the occasional three short story month/novellete/story by a “guest author” as a bonus.

I am tempted to try both of them. They would take less time away from contracts than an honest job and if they bring in what I need, it would reduce anxiety enough to allow me to work.

What do you guys think the chances of either/both/neither of these succeeding are? I confess that they’re all too “risky” to my mind and that I hate having to get creative in this way. However, it seems that I DO have to try. Ideas? Suggestions? Rotten tomatoes?

Crossposted at According To Hoyt and Classical Values.

Pour L'Amour Ou Le Sport

As artists, we tend to look suspiciously at profit. In fact, most of the complaints about the current state of publishing hinge on the “bean counters” and what they’re doing to our lofty, artistic field.

This complaint is not necessarily wrong, though perhaps a better quibble would be that bean counters are counting the wrong beans. But never mind that.

The truth is that, when it comes to publishing, the lack of money – or at least the lack of the expectation for any money – is often the root of all evil.

I’ve been doing a series on the coming of ebooks on my blog. The post yesterday set up why ebooks are coming – why they’re getting a foothold in the field at all. (Ebooks have been around for decades. They’ve been a small part of the field. The will much less the financing for developing ebook readers couldn’t be mustered for a long time. Perhaps it’s worth looking into why it has been mustered now. And why ebooks are suddenly a force to reckon with.)

Part of the issue is that since I’ve been published in this field, I’ve been hearing that there is no money in publishing; that if you want to make money you should get a day job; that even editors and publishers don’t make much (and this last seems to be true.)

This mind-set is the root of much trouble: first, the expectation that there is no money in this brings in a certain type of aspiring writer. Now, I’m not going to say writers write better when they do it for money, but wishing to please the readers makes writers strive to be better and more intelligible. It also gets us out of our comfort zone which, us being artists, is rooted in many impulses and personality traits so personal as to be unintelligible to anyone else.

At least my experience is that if I’m working for someone else to read I produce prose I myself enjoy more, say, a year later. Writing for myself seems like a waste of time. I can just think the story.

Beyond all that, it makes writers think of themselves not as professionals but as supplicants – as people with a need, for which they must go – on bended knee – before other people, while they themselves have to work to feed this need. If this doesn’t seem absurd to you as a reader, think of it for the big writers: think “Good thing for Stephen King that his publisher allowed him to publish” or think “Boy, J. K. Rowling sure was lucky that her publisher indulged her fancy.” Or put it another way – suppose your carpenter or your plumber loves his job (as we hope everyone does.) He might do it for the pride of a job well done and because he loves it, but would you say “you should get a full time job to support your plumbing habit”?

So, carpentry and plumbing are not technically artistic fields. (Technically. I had relatives in both fields, and trust me, there’s a lot of art in it.) So... Chefs. Cooking at that level is an art. Surely they must have real jobs to support their cooking art. No? Architects, then. No?

Now, imagine if cooking or architecture were run that way. There would be a chef who does nothing, but cabbage dishes. And his restaurant, which of course doesn’t expect to make money because “there is no money in food service” encourages him to do that. After all, the man does amazing things with cabbage leaf-stuffed cabbage leaf. The restaurant does the best it can for him and tries to guilt, shame and otherwise convince people this is what they should be eating.

If they deploy enough cash, it might succeed to an extent. He might develop a following, as might his fellow who works only in humming bird wings and his other colleague, who is a virtuoso with feta cheese stuffed caviar. However, if these are the only restaurants available, surely the percentage of families who eat out will be MUCH smaller. And what about the family who just wants a quick meal out after a hard day? They’ll be reduced to packing sandwiches. In fact, the field will be wide open for a competitor who gives people what they want. Or perhaps for a family who sells sandwiches out of their living room.

Now, I’m not suggesting that publishing houses or writers are that outre. But I am suggesting that the fact no one even aims for a profit – except aforementioned bean counters – has led to the production becoming unhinged from the demand.

Examples of this are things that become inexplicable editorial fiat – not just the sudden promotion of a type of writing, but the sudden pronouncements from above. In my time I’ve heard it pronounced from above that space opera and cozy mysteries were not things worth writing and should be discouraged. Also, every time I shopped for an agent (far more often than I wish I had) I found the prospects fascinated by my more literary writing. Why? Because I can do it. In fact, it’s fairly easy to me – the hard part was learning to write in an accessible way.

I have it on good and sufficient authority that literary spec fic doesn’t sell. Or at least, it sells no more than a particle of more popular endeavors.

So, what could the problem possibly be? Well... people don’t expect to make money from publishing. So they turn to other rewards – like prestige. Which means, of course, the market and the suppliers become yet more divorced from each other.

I said in my post yesterday that the houses don’t care for 90% of the books they publish. This is not PRECISELY true. At least it’s not precisely true of editors and publishers. It might be true of houses insofar as houses (most of them. Baen, for instance, is an exception. Note that the publisher IS the house and is invested in the house, both emotionally and financially) are large conglomerates with their own goals. Most editors and publishers care PASSIONATELY for the books they work with. But they don’t expect those books to sell – not really. So they don’t care whether they sell. They might not hold it against the writer for not selling (though the marketing department, and definitely the bookstores do) but they also don’t aim to sell from the beginning.

Some of the evils of this are: promoting bestsellers only – because bestsellers are viewed as a freakish occurrence, and if they hit once, think how much more money we could make from them; keeping the book in print only long enough to earn back advance – they don’t understand the effects of the long tail. They accomplished their labor of love, getting the book out and of course “there’s no money in publishing”; encouraging writers to write things that have little chance of attracting the public; not realizing that a book is not just the author’s name and the book doesn’t rise and fall by virtue of who wrote it alone, but that to be marketed a book must have an appealing cover and a modicum of distribution (why bother, when there’s no money in publishing?)

We, writers, aren’t exempt from this either. Since “there’s no money in publishing” we spend a lot of time treating our books like homework. This is particularly visible among beginner writers who tend to treat rejection as a grade. “I did the homework just like they wanted me to, and he gave me an F. The system is mean.” If you think of publishing as a business, you might still wish to write books with little or no market (I have written a couple) but you DO NOT think you’re somehow entitled to publication because you “have done it well enough”. Also, things like the requirement to self promote might STILL make you grind your teeth and groan, but you will be more likely to do it, if you think money will come from it.

There are even bigger issues – like a tendency to treat the field as an opportunity to do social work. Recently, in the big kerffufle over why there are no YA s aimed at boys (And there are precious few) the snooty answer was given that boys were sexist for not reading about girls. Okay – deep breath – if you think that’s reasonable, turn it around. In the fifties, everyone was convinced girls just naturally read less. And if you had complained that there were no books aimed at them, you’d be told they could read books about boys. In YA, especially, the “feel” girls and boys like is very different. They’re still learning about themselves and their genders. Forcing them to read stuff aimed at the other gender will annoy them and discourage them. But of course, that’s okay because – there being no money in publishing – the true goal is to strike one for gender equality or perhaps feminine superiority. We’re going to make those kids feel how oppressed we... er... our mothers were back in the fifties, right?

Look, human beings work for many things – money, security, satisfaction. You remove those and what’s left is one thing: power. Perhaps another – self-indulgence, which is often tied to power.

I’m not saying we should all become utter mercenaries, and work for money only. I don’t think that’s possible, when you are in one of the artistic fields. But I do think that part of the reason there is no money in publishing is that very few people are AIMING to make money.

It’s not ebooks that are stealing the market. The market is turning to ebooks because it’s not being served.

Capitalism. We is doing it wrong. Keeping an eye on the main chance might be a good way to start a better foundation for the new system establishing itself. Remember Hugo Gernsback and John W. Campbell, whatever else they were, were aiming to make money. Perhaps that is why they ushered in the golden era of genre fiction.

Or perhaps I’m nuts. Perhaps I’m seeing things that aren’t there. What do you think? Would the field be better off if we all tried concertedly to serve the market? Or would that only worsen everything?

Related post at According To Hoyt

The Blessing Of The Vile Metal

Hello, my name is Sarah A. Hoyt and I’m a writer. I suspect I was born a writer and I hope some time in the future they find gene therapy to prevent such disastrous birth defects.

I’m always either writing or thinking about writing. Characters drop into my head, at times, to make my life miserable by simultaneously demanding I write them and not telling me things I need to know.

I am also a vile capitalist – card carrying – and I write for money. Despite all the various schemes that various enlightened people have come with to ensure a society where no one would need to ever work, I think I’m a better writer because I write for money.

I can see a bunch of you quirking your eyebrows. I wish you wouldn’t do it. What would your mother say if your forehead froze like that?

Toni Weisskopf told me once to never tell anyone I would write for free. I hope she forgives me, because I must tell you that I would. In that utopian world (just remember utopia means nowhere) where every tear shall be wiped away and everyone gets everything they need for free from the machines or the humunculus or whatever, I’d probably keep a schedule pretty similar to now. Only if I could get the machines or the magic or whatever to cook, clean, iron and do litter boxes, I could write MORE. Everyone else would be lazing about, and I’d be in front of the computer, having the time of my life. (Yes, even when this is expressed by hitting my head on the desk and groaning. It’s part of the er... process.) I realized how bad I wanted it when I was daydreaming about winning the lottery and I thought "wow. I'd have so much more time to write, then."

However, what I wrote would likely come out very... odd. Look, I’m as apt as the next fellow to get lost in my own head, captive of my own fantasy. And the next fellow in this case is probably John Norman. (Note I wouldn’t get captive of his fantasy because EW.)

These musings are the direct result of my reading Robert A. Heinlein’s biography – the first volume, Learning Curve. I noted that he wrote For Us The Living out of love and conviction. But then market realities intervened, and he started writing to sell and that shaped his stories and them... well, first readable and eventually and in the beginning with Campbell's help (THIS IS JUST MY OPINION AND I’M NOT GOING TO ARGUE IT. NOT THAT I’M TOUCHY OR ANYTHING) brilliant.

Why is this important? Because we’re living in a world where you can become published and even “sell enough to fit your ambition” without ever getting an editor who reminds you of market realities. This combined with the fact that say, short stories no longer pay enough to support anyone and that breaking into novels requires both , might create the conditions in which any future Heinlein would get stuck in the For Us The Living phase. This prospect keeps me awake at night.

Left to my own devices, I would still be writing books so profoundly unpublishable that even I don’t want to re-read them.

Instead, I wrote eight books. The first... six... were in a fantasy world people exclusively by an hermaphrodite humanoid species and run on high magic but really science fiction principles. It took me six books and a sharp rejection from – if I never say this again, everyone remember this – Ginjer Buchanan, for which I will forever be grateful to her, for me to snap into focus and realize that I’d gone so far out on a limb with this world building (Well – she says sulkily – it was supposed to say something about the equality of the sexes) that not only was it unlikely and vaguely repulsive but also – to anyone not as immersed as I was – insane. Not in a good way. The last book in this world had forty eight chapters each one by a completely different person. It had a cast of thousands. It... was unreadable. To make things worse – well better, really imagine otherwise – my treatment of sex in this “series” was at my most Victorian. To me the sex didn’t matter, it was the CONCEPT. But of course, the only thing that MIGHT have sold it was if I’d put sex in.

So I pulled back and wrote Big Bright Shiny Machines. It’s a space opera, set roughly in Athena’s world – it will eventually get rewritten. Then I wrote Mirrorplay, a fantasy set in a pre-Cretan world. This was a trilogy crammed into 100k words. This too will eventually get rewritten. The story is good, the crafter, however, was an idiot.

And then I wrote Ill Met By Moonlight. (Well, technically I wrote Darkship Thieves before it, but it wasn’t published till this year. Also, I heavily edited it, before it WAS published.)

The point is, if I had direct access to “publishing” and had gathered even a couple hundred fans – and there are fans for everything, which is kind of a corolary for rule 34, that if you name a form of exoteric porn, fifteen sites spring into being. In the same way if you wrote stories about elves who roam the Earth looking for one-eyed goats, or murder mysteries in which everyone is killed with a paper clip, a fandom for these would immediately spring into being – I would still be writing the early stuff and probably convinced only the worst of bad luck hadn’t allowed me to make it to the big time.

Instead, I spent ten years in the desert, writing novel after novel and emerged, I think, if not with the commandments, at least better for it.

Writing for money forced a certain discipline on me – beyond “I have to stop fooling with this now, deadline was three months ago.” It forces me to try to figure out when I’ve gone too far out on a limb.

Do you ever feel that sort of market pressure? If not, why not? And how do you think it affects your writing? For better or for worse? And what mechanism do you think – and please tell me one because I want to believe there IS one – will keep young writers striving for more, when they can get a couple hundred fans for any drivel they produce?