“You’re published? Why are you working here?”

“You’re published? Why are you working here?”


It was only a few weeks ago when someone at work asked me the question, “Why are you working here if you have a published book?” I always hate it when someone asks why I’m still working, or how close I am to being a famous millionaire. The truth is, very few authors are successful enough to just write for a living. There are just as many starving, published authors around these days as there are “unpublished” authors. Being “published” does not hold much weight anymore.
The reason for this is the emergence of hundreds of Print on Demand, e-publishing, and small press publishing companies, all of which offer to publish anything for a price. Since these modern vanity publishers aren’t charging a lot of money, more and more unpublished authors are cracking open their checkbooks.
It is a thrill to see your work in printed form, but very few of these authors will get a return on their money. Most writers (published or not) write because they love to write, and very few earn enough to meet the monthly bills. Even those of us who do get lucky enough to bring in some modest cash do not see the grand amounts that one would expect. Mostly, the checks serve to give us perks: A special night out on the town, a trip to someplace exotic, or just small luxuries.
This is the reality of writing, and one that very few people, including aspiring writers, realize. Big-name writers like King and Clancy are not the norm. Making a book sell is hard work, far more work than a regular 9-5 job, and for all your efforts you may only see a modest amount of money in return. Only a very few extremely driven writers turn words into gold.
So, why do we put ourselves through such pains? I call it “The Lottery Condition”, the hope that one day lightning will strike and we will suddenly become the next heavy hitter in the bookstore checkout line -- the kind of author that fetches the big six- and seven-figure advances that everyone reads about in the fan magazines, the kind of celebrity that draws phone calls from Oprah and Larry King.
What does a newly published, unknown author need to do to sell his book? Well, one way is to get a phone book and make a list of every bookstore and library in the city where you live. Next, start calling. Once you have the name of someone important (not the high-school kid behind the counter, or the overworked receptionist) you try to set up an appointment to meet and discuss your book. If you can successfully convince this person that you are worth his or her time, you will meet and give them a copy of your book to look at, and a quick description of what the book is about (they will hear about 10 percent of what you tell them at this point). Then, they will wave a hand at you and say either:
1) “I will order a few copies (2-3) and we’ll see how it does.” (Meaning that if they sell them before the end of the next month, they “might” order another three copies), or…
2) They will tell you they don’t have much luck with unknown authors, but thanks for stopping in and showing off your book. (Meaning that they have too many copies of unknown authors’ books on the discount rack already, and if they get one more copy they will need a permit from the city to burn them in the parking lot.)
Continue doing this until you have talked with every bookseller and retailer in the area. Once you have done all you can with the bookstores, you hit the media.
The media is a whole different animal. If you can get a reporter on the phone who will listen at all, you can say: “I am an author and I have written a book…” at which point they will either hang up immediately, or they will tell you to submit a copy to the submissions editor for review -- and then hang up on you.
Once you have covered the entire area thoroughly, repeat this process for every city in the country.
Okay, this is an extreme example of marketing your book, but others are no less time-consuming or painstaking. It takes dedication, persistence, and a lot of hard work to make it in the publishing world, because when it comes down to it, you are just another author with a book to sell.
You think your book is special and no one has ever seen anything like it before? (Sorry - on average there is an estimated 65,000 books published every single year in just the US alone - it’s been done before.) Think your family and friends will love your book and tell all their friends to buy it and so on and so on? (Be happy if you can get your distant family to even read your book.) Think that you have a story that will land you on Oprah and you’ll sell a million copies overnight? It had better be good, because this is what you are up against:


This is an actual Oprah guest author bio:
“ Gilberto. At the age of five, his father packed him onto the back of a donkey, took him into the Colombian town of Cali, and sold Gilberto and all of his brothers and sisters. The people who took Gilberto abused him and later threw him out on the street.
At the age of 13, lying under a bridge for shelter, crying himself to sleep, Gilberto made a decision. He set out to find the brothers and sisters he lost, who were scattered all over Colombia. Some of them had been purchased by sexual predators. Eventually, he found every one of them and reunited his family.
He taught himself English, moved his family to the USA, enrolled in night school (as a street child, he did not even have a rudimentary education). He put himself through college and became a teacher, and spent nine years in the Kansas City School system assigned to "disadvantaged" children. Gilberto, who now works for the New York Board of Education, has a point of view about the value of family and the importance of education.”
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I know this all sounds grim. I don’t want to discourage anyone from writing, and I also don’t want to give anyone too much pause about publishing, because you have to take your shot. (You just never know what will be the next bestseller.)
What I am saying is: don’t be fooled into thinking that it is going to be easy, and don’t think that once the book is finished, the hard work is over. The truth is, the easiest thing you will do is write the book; the real work comes after the text is set.
I write because I love to write. I would write whether I was published or not, and I don’t need to sell a million copies of my book to be happy with my writing (but it sure wouldn’t hurt). I have seen so many people lose sight of why they began to write, and far too many of them get lost in the glamour of being an author. They forget that the only difference between a reader and a writer is perspective. If you love what you do, be happy. If you love what you do, and sell a million copies, be very happy, but don’t forget why you started writing in the first place.

Michael R. Mennenga