A bit of housekeeping first. This is a new section of the newsletter. If you don’t want to receive it, you can opt out of it via your subscription management page.
I am a failed writer in the sense that I have never had my fiction professionally published. These posts, which will run on most Fridays, are an attempt to keep myself creatively motivated and just generally discuss the creative process from someone trying to figure it out. I genuinely love the process of making things — any things, from writing to drawing to music to woodworking to baking. Maybe my own failures can be a source of amusement or interest to others.
First, thanks to the people who had kind things to say about the introduction. I appreciate all of you reading and all of the feedback. One piece of feedback I did receive was that the traditional publishing route is fickle, does not always correlate with quality, and people can often do better self-publishing. While I would not rule that out entirely, right now, I don’t think that is the right choice for me and thought a conversation about why might be interesting.
Self-publishing is not cheap, not if you want to produce a good book that people will read. You will almost certainly need editing, and good editors cost around $50 to $100 an hour (which, granted, is a big range) or about 1500 to 3500 hundred dollars per book. My roughly 85k sarcastic little fantasy about fighting monsters and capitalists would cost about 1700 dollars, at the $50 mark, based on the page count and how long good editors are said to work though a piece of that size. And that does not include copyediting, which is likely another 700-1300 dollars given the size of my book and the rates I have seen for quality editors.
Then there is the need for a cover. I am not allowed to create visual art in eighteen states. (It’s a capital offense in Texas which used to really bother me. But then I realized its Texas. Everything there is a capital offense. They just really like killing people.) But even if I were not the worst visual artist of all time, I don’t know how to make a cover that sells. That’s a skill, and one that would cost in the low to mid hundreds. Let’s say three hundred for the sake of argument. I have spent about $3,300 just to get the book ready for sale. At the low end.
And then I have to advertise it in some fashion if I want people to read it. As I write this, this newsletter has 137 subscribers. I love all of them to death and am very grateful that they want to read my ramblings. But there is no guarantee that a significant portion of my subscribers would want to purchase a fantasy novel. And even if they did, even if all 137 purchased my book, that would come nowhere close to paying for the prep costs. I need to expand the audience, something as a non-marketer I don’t really know how to do.
But why spend that money, some people will ask. First, because I do want people to read and enjoy my stories. That is one of the reasons I write them. I also want them to be quality, both as a story and as a product. And that brings me to the primary reason I am reluctant to self-publish: I don’t know if the book is any good.
Yes, it is out on query, so I obviously think it has some potential to be published. But it has gotten nothing but polite rejections, one or two which have contained some helpful reasons as to why it was rejected. None of the rest of my books got much beyond that when I queried for them. I have no external validation around their quality. Yes, my beta readers (who are not all close friends and family) did not have consistent criticism to level by the time I sent the queries out (if no one agrees on a specific problem, and the disparate criticism are generally small, to me that’s a good sign that we are looking at taste issues not structural issues), but beta readers are not agents or publishers. And sometimes they get too used to your style and quirks to see clearly. And I, of course, as the writer, have no clue if the books are any good. And quality matters to me.
I like the stories I tell in these novels, and I want other people to see and like them as well. Which means I want to make sure the story is the best it can be before sending out into the world. Getting an agent, even if the book ends up not being a fit for the market as it is now, would give me some outside validation that the book is worth showing to the public.
I don’t have anything against self-published books. But given the cost and the fact that I have no way to judge whether the work is of a high enough quality to justify either the expense or my time and effort, I don’t think it is for me. Maybe that changes in the future. Maybe I serialize the novel on the newsletter once it is finally rejected by all the agents in this round — I could get other feedback or, if there is enough interest, prove its publishable. But right now, there is simply no way for me to tell if the quality is high enough to justify trying to get people to read it.
Weekly Word Count
1,000-ish, almost all of it in one session. Better than last week, but not great. I ran quickly through the first scene in a chapter, then crashed to a dead end in the second. I am not sure how to stretch it to a decent word count to close out the chapter. Hopefully next week will be better.