Back in the 1990s, I made my first attempt at going full-time freelancer. I had a steady stream of income stringing for a locla paper, some magazines that liked my stuff, I was working on what I thought was a promising book, I had some money saved up. Looked good.
It wasn’t. The paying work dried up: the newspaper cut its stringer budget and the editors who liked my work moved on or found lots of other writers. I was not successful finding alternative sources which I think is a bigger problem: work often goes away but successful writers find alternative markets. And the novel — well, I was writing on my first computer and the freedom to endlessly revise a book led to me revising endlessly. Not Good.
It’s not gotten any easier in the years since. Like anyone else, we have to worry about financial reversals. Management can’t think of anything to do but slash jobs at newspapers and magazines. Here’s a good article about the boardroom games that led Arena Group to fire Sports Illustrated‘s staff. And switching to a non-profit model doesn’t necessarily help. Though for-profit propaganda hacks are definitely hurting. Then there’s the death of Pitchfork.
Going indy frees me up to publish books such as Questionable Minds and Undead Sexist Cliches even if nobody else does. It does not guarantee anyone will buy them, let alone that enough people buy it to put bread on the table. If I weren’t a two-income family and collecting Social Security, I’d have problems. Promotion is an art and as I may have mentioned it’s often frustrating. To prep for the release this year of Southern Discomfort and Savage Adventures, I’ve been looking for suitable book bloggers and none of the ones I’ve looked at so far are accepting new books for review. Local stores have no interest in events involving books printed at Amazon, presumably because they’d be sending people to buy from the competition (and maybe the average quality isn’t great). And out of the several cons I’ve applied to this year, it looks like I’m going to be a guest at just one.
I’ve read articles that say you should spend 90 percent of your time promoting books, 10 percent on writing them which just does not make sense. That means if I worked 40 hours a week on my own writing, I’d be writing 4 hours (and there simply isn’t 36 hours of promotion to do!). Rebecca Jennings looks at how personal branding has become a heavy workload; commenting on the piece, John Scalzi ponders the outdated concept of selling out and “where it feels like putting your art out into the world is often like chucking it down a hole and hoping enough people see it flashing by before it settles forever into the darkness.”
And there are always ways it could get worse: Yann LeCun, a French computer scientist, has argued that as the money we make is so little, books should be free to download: we authors won’t lose much and think how it will benefit society!
No conclusions here, just brooding. And I’m still writing. As John Hartness said when I was at a con a few years ago, I may not be a brand name but I do get to sit on the writers’ side of the panel table.
#SFWApro. Covers by Samantha Collins (t) and Kemp Ward, all rights to images are mine.
