A year ago, a new indie publisher, Left Hand Publishing, accepted a blog I’d written with the above title and were kind enough to split it into two parts owing to length. I’d like to continue that train of thought with a few additional comments here on the woes and joys of being a writer. 

First, one thing to get out of the way:  every writer knows he or she must take the good with the bad, and anyone with a sensitive ego should find another hobby.  Anyone looking for fame should expect little outside applause from friends and family.  Getting more than 3 stars on Amazon or Goodreads is a bonus. Fame will happen to a few but that, I think, is owing less to a writer’s talent than an indie publisher’s diligence and plain old word-of-mouth advertising.

Now, for money to be made, that’s a tricky one for two reasons:  sometimes a writer will get a nice chunk of change. Writer and publisher Chris Black in the U.K. created Number Thirteen Press, born to die in a year after producing a monthly publication output totaling a baker’s dozen crime novels. These were recently picked up by Fahrenheit Press and are currently running beside Fahrenheit’s new acquisitions and garnering praise from critics that have in the past not deigned to glance at indie presses. The satisfaction of writing and being paid for it always pleases—no one objects to extra coins ringing (so to speak) into one’s PayPal account. The odd thing is that, unless the quality of a writer’s stories varies considerably, you can get paid a standard $5, $10, $25, etc. per story—or, if the magazine/website has real clout in the market place, a check for 10 or 20 times those amounts. Again, you won’t be renting beach condos in Boca Raton on it, but it’s better than money gong I the opposite direction. Many writers I know choose not to take money, a fine idea because it supports those publishers putting up their own cash to break the mold of the big publishing houses that have always assumed a stranglehold on the entire racket of writing. 

That latter comment will surely irk some writers have been complaining in online threads of the beggar’s portion many contracts (as low as 15%) stipulate to the writer in the huge digital market. It might sound naïve to hope that, in future, equity, like water, can find its equilibrium point.

Now let’s consider the reality of the money aspect:  you’re going to spend money. When I published Haftmann’s Rules back in 2011, I was a new novelist, beaming with pride, buying copies of my own book to hand out to friends and family with pompous or falsely humble inscriptions on the available white space of the front matter.  Those days are over (not the pompous or humble inscriptions, unfortunately). In the first place, your family and friends most likely don’t read the fiction you write, and they have lives and hobbies of their own. Any time spent flattering you with a five-star rating on Goodreads or Amazon, which, I blush to admit, had benefited me as well as many others. It happens all the time despite the “Verified Purchaser” tag applied to some as if that meant gold-plated objectivity. I eschew the term critics for the time being.

But that isn’t always a bad or vain thing, is it? Check out any well-known writer’s past and you’ll see the same thing in his or her pre-social media era.  Whether literary or popular, writers must cut their own swathe through the morass of clamoring wannabees and writers manqué who all believe they “have a story to tell.”  Not many, think, made their way into the big time of the inner circle of the New York elite without the help and encouragement of others. Now, you can say that, once an author has arrived there, it takes dynamite to blast that writer from the bestseller lists regardless of talent and you’d be partially right at least. My whipping boy is Clive Cussler, multimillionaire author of seafaring adventures, well into his eighties now, might never get New York’s permission to stop writing, for a team of younger ghost writers stand at the ready to churn out more Dirk Pitt novels ad infinitum. Like toadstools after a spring rain, post-mortem novels arrive like toadstools after a spring rain. Money-makers won’t be allowed to die with their canon intact. In brief, editors and literary agents have done yeoman’s work for every established writer—good, bad, or ugly—I can recall.  Joyce Carol Oates, at 80, whose contract from Princeton wasn’t renewed a couple years back (how did they avoid an age-discrimination suit, by the way?) will have a place at the table of any major literary conference or publisher’s banquet she wants to attend. In her case, well deserved. Where’s that Nobel?

To take one example of the latter, I recall a story, apocryphal or true I can’t say, of Stephen King’s wife Tabitha (author and activist in her own right) fishing the manuscript of Carrie out of the trash where he’d tossed it after so many rejections.  Horror fiction fans everywhere are fainting at the thought he’d have quit and gone back to his post as an obscure high-school English teacher in Maine.

Maybe lowly indie writers like me shouldn’t look up at the stars from the depths of our dark oubliette like prisoners in a French romance novel. We are daring to speak of what occurs over our lowly heads. But isn’t that the same as telling LeBron James to “shut and dribble”? The few writers I’d met before I began writing my own crime fiction, such as comic mystery novelist Ross H. Spencer to Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, whose Random Family cannot be categorized as a mere non-fiction “study,” have been among the most pleasant memories I have of talking to writers about their craft. The only snobs I’ve encountered in the writing game are critics who either shill for New York (the Mystery Writers of America, namely) or the big reviewer websites like Portland Book Review and Publishers Weekly. Others with whom I’ve had unpleasant, brief experiences with include some bloggers, website publishers, and of course those “professional” commenters on the big sites, Amazon and Goodreads. A few are hangers-on, for lack of a better term, and dabble in writing as proofreaders for publishers, an under-appreciated class, to be sure, but one that encompasses a multitude of personalities that, in my experience, range from the casual to the obsessive.

Two examples: my first collection of short stories was proofed by someone who added a snarky “Really?” into the margins whenever he encountered a passage or a phrase he didn’t like.  He also had an anal fixation with certain words, such as “woke” for “awoke.”  More recently, an anthologist publisher who accepted a short story apparently resorted to a handy “meter” for counting the first-person pronoun allowed per page—in a first-person narrative.  Whatever happened to the excellent advice from an old grammar classic that goes: “Break any rule rather than say something awkward”?

To my dying day, I’ll never understand someone who doesn’t write who thinks he or she can spew venom on a writer who does write, however one might characterize that writer’s work, which as everyone should know contains a huge dollop of subjectivity. What I like to read, you might despise and vice versa. Neither of us (sorry to incriminate you, dear reader, by proxy) has the God-given right to attack any writer willy-nilly to rack up another point toward some prize or for the sheer vanity of climbing the ranks to be noted as a “Top Customer Reviewer” on Amazon. I discovered there’s an ultimate class for the most aspiring, assiduous reviewers to achieve knows as “Hall of Fame” Reviewer.  Wasn’t it Napoleon who said when he created the Légion d’honneur that “by such baubles men are won”? I imagine the wizards behind Amazon’s gears laughed themselves silly when they created that one for the rabble.

But I digress.  Readers have the First Amendment right to heap abuse or praise as they see fit and one must live with that essential condition. I despise that cliché that stipulates “cream rises to the top” (i.e., truly good writers will be discovered).  No, they won’t, sorry. That’s as naïve as the medieval belief that a murder victim’s dead eyeball had imprinted the murderer’s visage on it. Chaucer was pulling legs when he had two of his pilgrims utter the superstitious as common wisdom like the belief that a corpse will bleed if the murderer approaches. Good writers can be suffocated, stifled, worn down, humiliated, and crushed by the forces of life and darkness just as easily as good people in any endeavor of life. The public and those who participate in the writing game from readers through bloggers and critics to publishers should heed that so that bad writers don’t rise to the top, but they should not throw themselves in front of other writers without good cause. Social media, boosted by youth’s nonchalance toward anything traditional, has unleashed the dogs—and they need to be roped back in in many cases. A critic’s first duty is to applaud, forbearing that, silence. Trolling is bullying, and it’s stamped into the culture. The younger generation might have accustomed themselves to it, but it’s still an ugly fact of life.

I hope this hasn’t sounded too offkey for a rant about being published nowadays with all the big and little obstacles, the personal ups and downs, that every writer faces by acknowledging every writer’s experience differs. One area I’ve neglected is marketing. Some publishers want your first-born as token for being published, and I speak of the active pimping via social media with newsletters, tags, and announcements, ARC reviewers lined up, and stints at the website. Mine is probably in the middle and leans toward the positive.  Others say they’ll buy you a beer if they run into you on the street someday.  For all I know, both work just as well as far as raising a writer’s profile.

I happily profess the conviction that writing today for publication, despite all I’ve said seemingly to the contrary, is healthy because of indie publishing and the outstanding men and women behind blogs who want to assist writers toward more readers. It’s unwise to speak for others, and I try to avoid it in life. Here, I’ll risk that contempt and say that it’s only going to get better for readers and writers of all kinds of fiction. No snob of a literary agent or critic or big-shot editor at a major publishing house can stop this train or turn this tanker around.  The power of numbers is being felt by the many writers and their fans who intend to reject force-feeding by the Big 5. So long, New York, nice knowing you.