Captives in Obscurity

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture to Brandon Sanderson’s English 318R class at Brigham Young University. I was one of Brandon’s students back in 2008, and he wanted me to talk about my experiences as a self-published indie writer. The lecture wasn’t recorded this year, but here is a rough outline from my notes. Enjoy!

How many of you know for sure that you want to write fiction professionally? (about half) How many of you know enjoy writing as a hobby, but know that you don’t want to do it professionally? (a handful) How many of you aren’t yet sure? (the vast majority)

Eight years ago, I was where you are today: sitting in Brandon Sanderson’s class, wondering if I should turn pursue this writing thing as a career. Back then, self-publishing was the kiss of death. If you self-published any of your books, you would never be taken seriously by anyone in the publishing world again. They would treat you like the kid who ate the paste in kindergarten.

You see, back then there was a very strict and well-defined path to get published. First, you wrote query letters to agents. You did not write them to editors, because none of them accepted unsolicited submissions, and submitting to them directly was bad form. You had to personalize your query letter for the agent you were submitting it to. You had to spend almost as much time revising and reworking your query letter as you did on your manuscript.

If you were lucky enough to get picked up by an agent, they would (hopefully) get you a publisher. If you were lucky enough to get a publisher, they would (hopefully) get you into bookstores. And if your books got into bookstores, you would (hopefully) get readers. Get enough readers, and you’d be swimming in caviar, having dinner parties with Castle as a bestselling author. That was the dream.

After taking Brandon’s class, I decided to pursue writing as a full-time career. I graduated in 2010 and immediately faced a dilemma. The Great Recession made it virtually impossible to find a day job, so I had to figure out how to make the writing thing work. Writing was my plan A, and there was no plan B.

Brandon Sanderson had taught us to attend the major conventions, where we could rub shoulders with the bigwigs in publishing and maybe score a book deal through networking connections. But when I attended World Fantasy in 2010, I noticed a couple of things that were disconcerting. First, there were a lot of other aspiring authors trying to rub shoulders, many of whom were more aggressive about it than I was. Second, none of the major publishers seemed to want the stuff that I was writing (far future space opera and military SF).

Brandon’s advice, I realized, basically amounted to “if you want to get struck by lightning, wave a metal pole from the rooftop while standing in a bucket and shouting at the wind.” Which is good advice if there’s a thunderstorm. But it’s not so good on a clear and sunny day, and since none of the major publishers seemed to want the kind of science fiction I was writing, I realized I would have to find another way.

I kept trudging along, writing more books and querying agents (most of whom never responded). Then I submitted my novel Genesis Earth to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. To my surprise, it passed the first two rounds of voting and became a quarter-finalist. It looked like this could be my lucky ticket into the world of publishing.

Around this same time, Amanda Hocking became one of the first self-published writers to sell more than a million books on Amazon. When she did that, it made me sit up and take notice. Here was a twenty-something aspiring writer just like me, who had decided to eat the paste and do the thing that you were never supposed to do. Instead of failing at it, though, she made it big. What was going on here?

I began to re-examine the traditional path to publishing that before had seemed so sure. I started following Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rusch, Joe Konrath, David Gaughran, The Passive Voice, and a bunch of others who were breaking out of the mold. I questioned the established wisdom, and started to find all sorts of inconsistencies in what I had always believed.

For example, why has the slushpile been outsourced to agents if they aren’t getting paid for it? Is an agent really going to go up to bat for you if you only represent an income stream of a couple hundred dollars for them? Why should publishers take 75% of net for the lifetime of the book for something that you can do on your PC in a couple of hours with open-source software?

In the Writer > Agent > Publisher > Bookstore > Reader value chain, there are really only two people that matter: writers and readers. Everyone else is a middleman. In the traditional publishing model, however, the bookstore takes half, the publisher takes most of the rest, and the agent takes a 15% cut of whatever you make. Most books never earn out their advance, and most book advances for SF&F are $5,000 or less!

As I was sorting through all of this, I heard back from the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. Genesis Earth had not made it past the quarterfinal stage. The review from Publisher’s Weekly read like someone had handed the manuscript off to an unpaid intern and said “here’s one of the books that didn’t make it past the quarterfinals, write a half-assed review that makes us look good so we can fulfill our contractual obligations to the contest.” It was clear from the review that the person at PW didn’t even read science fiction.

It was at that point that I realized I didn’t want to win the publishing lottery or be struck by publisher lightning. I wanted to build a career.

Now that I’m self-published, am I swimming in caviar or having dinner parties with Castle? Hardly—or at least, not yet. There’s nothing about self-publishing that makes it easier or less work than the traditional publishing path. But it does give you a lot more control, and a lot more ownership over your successes and failures.

My first year of self-publishing, I put a lot of money into my first couple of novels and published them to a resounding chorus of crickets. In my second and third year I wised up a bit, wrote a series of short novellas, published them on a shoestring budget, and made the first one permanently free. Sales began to rise, and I went from making pizza money to learning just how much it sucks to pay self-employment taxes.

Ever since then, I have been running a profitable business. Of course, it’s had its ups and downs, but even in the bad months, it’s made more money than it’s cost.

In fact, my second and third years were successful enough that in 2014, I made enough to support myself on my writing income alone. It was then that I learned one of my most important lessons: that you always need to have an impossible dream to strive for. Up until that point, my impossible dream was to make a living telling stories that I love. When I found I had achieved that, I lost direction and went into a writing slump that lasted the better part of a year.

One of the other important lessons I learned was not to underestimate the importance of marketing. When Amazon rolled out their Kindle Unlimited program, my sales took a major hit because Amazon’s algorithms started prioritizing KU books over non-KU books. Until that point, I’d been relying almost totally on Amazon to market my books for me, which was a major mistake.

My biggest mistake, though, was to underprice my books, which I did for the better part of 2015. In order to push sales of my other series, I dropped the prices of all my Star Wanderers novellas to $.99. It backfired spectacularly. I did glean a lot of data from it, however, and learned that the best price points for my own books was between $2.99 and $3.99. The $.99 price point did not see enough of an increase in sales to offset the lower royalty, or lead to any noticeable increase in my other books. However, the $3.99 price point did see increased sales and revenue compared to $4.99 and $5.99.

As you can probably tell, self-publishing is the sort of thing you learn how to do as you’re doing it. There is no clear path, no one true way to success. But I’ve learned a lot over the past few years, and I’ve seen my sales and readership grow from it. I’m no longer as worried about my future as I was back in 2010, because I know that I can make it work. And if you’re willing to put in the effort and learn from your experiences, you can too.

I sincerely believe that this is the best time in history to be a writer and a reader. There are so many publishing opportunities available to us now that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago, and this has led to an explosion of fantastic new books that would have never gotten published under the old system.

So is it possible to make a living as a self-published writer? Yes! It’s not easy to make your own path, but it’s definitely possible to do it and find success. So set your sights on an impossible dream, and when you’ve achieved it, find another one. When you have nothing to lose and everything to gain, don’t let your fears hold you back.