If my most recent post (“Sean’s Top 7 Indie Author Annoyances”) is any indication, my fine readers seem to love when I vent about the frustrations we indie authors endure. And why not? After all, we face so many of them—everything from agents rejecting our masterpieces to critics telling us our masterpieces aren’t actually even masterpieces in the first place to Microsoft Word telling us a green-underlined portion of our manuscript is a “fragment” when we’ve double-checked it a million damn times and it’s not a bloody fragment, MS Word!!! Whew. Yes, on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure, and these reasons can leave us susceptible to falling into a handful of indie author traps.
Oh, and if you don’t know who Admiral Ackbar is, he’s that character from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi who looks like a cross between a catfish and the actor Peter Lorre (at least he does to me). It’s not really all that important from here on out. Let’s continue:
1. Falling Into Query Limbo – No, this isn’t what happens when you’re querying potential agents/editors in Jamaica (although maybe it should be…). This is what happens when you get sucked into the black hole of query submission, during which you are not working on other projects. You send out the first slew of query letters, you hear nothing. You work a little more on your book, tweaking and editing a few things, and then you send out another batch of letters. You hear nothing. This cycle could go on and on, for all you know, and this is a LONG process: Some agencies require up to 6 weeks to review queries and that’s a long time to wait!
I know as well as anyone that it can be difficult to admit defeat on a project, but if you have sent out 20 query letters without a single response or request for material, you should really reevaluate your project. Why? Because it seems evident that you have a fatal flaw with one of the following: Your query letter, your story, your writing, your genre, or the agencies to whom you are submitting. I will elaborate on some of the finer points of this bullet below, but the point is to be exploring other projects and writing outlets even while you’re shopping agents/editors for a completed manuscript. For all you know, the NEXT book you write will actually sell!
Disclaimer: I do not know Dean Koontz.
2. Period Publishing – When I say “Period Publishing”, I’m not talking about trying to publish a period piece; I’m talking about shipping sample chapters off to agencies and editors the second you type the final period at the end of your manuscript. I don’t care if you’re Indie-author Jones or Dean F***in’ Koontz (Mr. Koontz and I go way back; he insists that I call him that), your book is not ready to be dropped in the lap of someone in the industry the moment you finish it. Your book should be treated with all the delicacy and scrutiny as if a friend told you a burglar broke into your house one night, sat down at your computer, opened up your manuscript, and dropped “1-3” absolutely unutterable racial slurs somewhere in your 300 page manuscript and they aren’t ones you’ll be able to find just by hitting CTRL+F.
3. Refusing to Sell Out – As much as I hate to say it, you also should not be afraid to just sell out. Maybe you have an absolutely fantastic idea for a vampire, werewolf, zombie book, but you don’t want to write it because the genre is so tired. Pump the brakes! Are those genres still marketable/popular? Yes? Is your idea really a great one? Yes? Then WRITE THAT BOOK. Write it now! If there is one thing the YA market has taught us it’s that the world always has room for one more vampire love-triangle. Is it awesome that you have the integrity to not want to write something that’s already been done? You betcha, but I would rather pet myself on the back all the way to a paycheck than keep living in squalor with the knowledge that I could have written a book that sold a million copies. That’s what sucks about integrity: You can’t purchase things at Best Buy with it.
I’ve tried.
If you’re concerned about selling out, might I point you to the landmark case of Furtado v. Music. Nelly Furtado burst onto the music scene in 2000 with her popular album Woah, Nelly! which sold a ton of records, had a couple of hot singles, and made her like a bazillion dollars. Her follow-up to that album? A more folky, stripped down album that, I’ve always heard, was more of a passion project in keeping with her roots and values but didn’t sell very well. After THAT album? A sexed-up, hip-hop album that made her another bazillion dollars, which she ALSO followed up with a more independent, Spanish-language album that didn’t bring her mainstream success but was also probably more in keeping with what she wanted to do, like her folky sophomore effort. The point is that sometimes you have to sell out in order to write the books that YOU want to write. Focus on the market first and if you have a passion project in mind, develop that separately. DON’T ABANDON IT! Just wait for the right time to release it.
4. Devoting Too Much Time to Social Media Promotion – I’ve had quite a few fun conversations in the talkback on this site about social media. Everyone wants to know how to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to increase sells, promote new projects, and establish a market for one’s work independently. Am I an expert? Hell no! Twitter has been invaluable for helping me attract interest in this blog and in my books, but this has been a LONG process and not one that has been extremely beneficial to me in any financial sense.
However, there is one thing that I know for certain: When I’m screwing around on Twitter or Facebook, I am absolutely NOT writing anything worthwhile. When I’m tweeting, I’m not editing. When I’m bookin’, I’m not working on my actual books. That is a problem for writers! I have come to realize that, for all my efforts in social media, I will probably never be as successful at promoting my own books as those in the publishing industry, so my incentive turns back to writing something good enough to be formally published. Unless I get extremely lucky and happen to write the next 50 Shades of Grey (that seems highly unlikely), I will never be able to make a living doing everything on my own.
5. Falling into Editing Limbo – One aspect of my site that I’m trying to remedy is that I speak mostly to prospective authors like myself who plan to make a long living writing multiple books. However, I do not wish to alienate the many writers I’ve met through this website who confess to having the noble goal of writing only one book. Sometimes I downplay what an accomplishment it is to write a book. Most people do not have the discipline to embark on this journey and anyone who does should be commended.
But why am I mentioning this here, under the headline “Blah blah blah Editing Limbo”? Because it has been my experience that indie authors who are focusing all their energy on one book are also those who tend to fall into the black hole of editing. Maybe this isn’t true for you; I only came to this conclusion based on the writers who I met at my most recent conference. Most of those writers were older than myself and had fallen into the limbo of either endlessly editing their manuscripts or throwing out and rewriting chapters they had already written. Let’s just lump that ALL together under the same “Limbo”.
If you have fallen into this trap, the best advice I can give you is to seek out a writer’s group. It sounds like you don’t have confidence in what you’ve written. The feedback of a writer’s group should give you a better understanding of whether or not you have been right all along to throw out your material and how you might improve going forward. Such a group might also help bolster your confidence so that you can move forward and write new material or finally wrap up your edits and begin the querying process. I could keep going for another 5,000 words on this issue, but I need to wrap up this article.
6. Avoiding Networking – Whatever you do, do not alienate the writers around you. The writing community can be your greatest resource in pointing you to agencies, editors, peer reviews, writing groups, conferences, theme parks, best hot dogs in town, etc. If you’ve ever applied for a job in the U.S. in this economy, you have probably learned that 90% of success is who you know. The same can be true in the publishing industry. Make a name for yourself, be friendly, and become your own brand. I have yet to find an industry that has no place for kindness and honesty.
Earlier in this piece, I remarked that on any given day we indie authors are probably given a million reasons encouraging us to jump ship on this whole adventure. You might agree with that or you might reject it. Maybe you’re thinking, “Well, I only receive about 400,750 reasons a day…” Whatever. There is only one thing I can tell you as reassurance: In spite of all the frustrations we face, all it takes is one perfectly-chosen word, one startlingly clever piece of dialogue, one period at the end of a newly completed chapter to remind us why we do this. If every sentence you’ve written throws some fuel on your fire—some burning desire to want to reread that sentence a hundred times and make it better and better and BETTER—then you have the passion and that passion is a gift you should cherish. If you can look yourself in the mirror and see, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that you have such conviction, never abandon that passion. Just try to refine that passion and, with any luck, some day you will reach your goal.
