Baby Evil Writers 101: Writing for a Living

Baby Evil Writers 101: Writing for a Living

Julie Butcher

I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who doesn’t want to quit working, stay home and make their living from writing. Quitting the day job is the ultimate dream. The problem is making your dreams into reality. Those pesky children seem to want food every single day and then you need a roof, and electricity to run your laptop, and heat in the winter is a necessity and not a luxury. If this is a serious goal, you need to have a plan.

First of all, you have to sell some books. To live in a modicum of comfort, you need to have three books on the shelf for each and every member of your family. For most people this means that their career needs to be firmly established for ten years or more before they gain their freedom. During those ten years, you need to figure out some things.

1.      Where will the health insurance come from? If you are the working person who provides this necessity, you need to plan on paying for it yourself. It isn’t cheap. Unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars tucked away, this isn’t optional.

2.    Make a budget and learn to stick to it. An author gets paid twice yearly and that is a long time between paychecks. Ramen is good but it’s not that good. Also it will make you fat so there you go.

3.      Will any of your children be going to college when you plan to work at home? If so, add another book on the shelf for each child in college. Even scholarship students have expenses not covered by grants and loans

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4.      Pay off anything you can before you quit working outside of the home. You get bonus points for no mortgage and a decent, paid-for car that won’t need immediate repairs.

5.      Include in your budget traveling expenses for conferences and conventions. You’ll need the exposure and unless you’re a big time author, you won’t get your plane tickets paid for you

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6.      Don’t forget to set money aside for promotional items. Also don’t go nuts with these. It is kind of dumb to give away something that costs more than you make by selling a copy of your book.

Most of all you need to get into the habit of setting aside writing time each and every day and sticking to your schedule.  Working from home is still working. No work, no food. Easy-peasy.

It's Not Personal, It's Business

Dina here.

I'm going to expand on my previous post and talk about rejection.

It happens to EVERY WRITER. Every single writer gets a rejection letter for something at some point. Your favorite author? Rejected. Someone you know whose work is utterly brilliant and you can't in a million years see how they could ever be rejected? Yep, them too.

Even people who are already repped get rejections for some of their new ideas, so don't go thinking that once you're accepted by an agent everything is going to be fine and dandy and you'll never have to deal with rejection again. From bestselling novelists to not-yet-pubbed writers, rejection happens to everyone.

And you know what? To paraphrase The Godfather, "it's not personal, it's business."

The vast majority (and I'm talking like 99.8% here) of rejection letters aren't personal. Again, if you've made a complete ass out of yourself or are known to be a complete stalker jerkwad, there might be a bit of "personal" thrown into your rejection, but that's on you. You earned that. The rest of the time, though?

Strictly business. (We're not going to talk here about shit that should have been rejected outright/never have seen the light of day and was accepted instead of your shit. That's a blog post for another time.)

It's hard not to take it personally. Believe me, I know the feeling well. It's hard not to get discouraged. But take a long, hard look at your letter(s). If they're anything like "thank you but it's not right for me/my catalogue/etc." or "I don't believe I'm the best person to represent this" or "I didn't fall in love with this" or "I have to be very careful about the projects I take on and this just doesn't fit," here's a hint. These are FORM REJECTIONS.

Now, if your letter says something specific like, "I couldn't connect with the main character" or "I didn't understand _______" or "I love your voice and your concept but _______," these are generally personalized rejections. Now, "personalized" does not mean the rejection is personal. It means it was written specifically FOR you, not ABOUT you. That's the difference here.

A rejection letter is rejecting your WORK, not you as a person, and that's really what you have to keep in mind. I've read several blog posts lately from wannabe writers crying (angrily in some cases!) about how they've been rejected so many times and no one loves them and and and….

As I said before, if you've gotten more than 10 rejections, you might want to look to a few things. You don't just keep querying with your work thinking all is well. READ your rejections carefully. Form rejection? Okay. Suck, but okay. Try someone else until you hit double-digits. Once you hit double-digits, try revamping things. Your query letter, your work, your choice of agent…there's lots of things you can tinker with. Quick refresher from my previous post:

a)      the letter itself – it may not be effectively communicating your premise

b)     the project  - it may not be suitable for the house/agent you're querying

c)      your approach – there are reasons for submission guidelines. Follow them.

If it's a personalized rejection, PAY ATTENTION to what they say. If they say your voice needs work, study up and revise. If they say your pacing is slow, revise. If they say your concept is played out, revise (or trunk, or resub to someone else).

Upon rejection, allow yourself a day to mourn. It's a traumatic experience, form rejection or no. Do NOT post an angry rant NAMING THE AGENT on your blog. Do NOT upload your opus angrily to Createspace in an effort to "show them" (hint: they're not going to notice or care, I promise you).

Notice the part about anger up there. Yeah, rejection sucks. It always hurts no matter how gently it's done, and it's hard not to be angry about that. But SUCK IT UP and TRY HARDER. Try again.

Or don't. I mean, the less you try, the bigger chance someone else has to be accepted.

Following The Crowd

It's pretty well known in the writing community that if one intends to commercially publish, they shouldn't write to trends. By the time you finish your book and get it out there, the trend will be over.

There have been a slew of highly-publicized, huge-amount book deals for trendy things lately. What's the trend?

Fan fiction.

You heard me. The latest is Penguin offering a 16-year-old an e-book deal based on boy-band fanfic. The now infamous 50 Shades of Gray started out as Twilight fanfic. Gabriel's Inferno also began life as Twilight fan fiction and was ALSO bought by Penguin for seven figures. 

Depressing, I know. With all this money being offered for what was once considered the least professional, basically junk food of writing, it's easy to take one look at your manuscript and think, "Why the hell am I wasting my time on this?"

Well, I'll tell you why. Because these examples are TRENDS. They're exceptions to the rule. They're what people want NOW, but in six months? A year? Who knows? Next month they might want ninja mermaid aliens from Neptune (totally my idea by the way) or cranberry farmer/mushroom hunter CSI riffs. Unless you can see the future, you just don't know what will be the Next Big Thing, and you can't constantly stop and start new projects trying to keep up with whatever it is people are buying now.

Write what YOU want to write. What YOU want to read. You can't write to trends. Book trends are like any other – they come and they go. Remember stone-washed/acid-washed jeans back in the 80s? Remember? (Look, just go with me here. I realize I'm dating myself.) Jordache and Guess jeans were the big favorites. Swatch watches (about six or more worn at once was the thing). Crimped and feathered hair. Trends, all of them. They came and they went.

This too shall pass. Jersey Shore has finally been cancelled (but not before one of the, uh, "celebrities" got a book deal) but has been replaced, regrettably, by Honey Boo Boo (just when I thought television could sink no lower). Twilight is finally sinking into obscurity (please, please, please).

And why is all this happening?

Because it's what people want right now. People want to watch "reality" television and eat junk food. Sure, there are several people who want to watch other things (or nothing at all) and eat better stuff, but the majority don't. And therein lies the problem. It's all about what sells (you know, money), and ice cream sells way better than frozen yogurt. In a battle between Cheetos and carrot sticks, guess which one most people are going to choose?

Consumers set trends, and what the consumers want right now is the literary equivalent of a sheet cake. (Mini rant: DEAR ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY: STOP ENCOURAGING HORRIBLE CHOICES BY MAKING THEM SEEM "ACCEPTABLE!" STOP IT! NO MORE TRAIN-WRECK TELEVISION OR BULLSHIT "BOOK" DEALS, DAMN IT! THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLE ARE NOT ONLY CAPABLE OF BUT WILL INDEED LIVE UP TO EXPECTATIONS GIVEN TO THEM AND YOU'RE GLAMORIZING IDIOCY AND TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE BEHAVIOR! STOP IT! /rant) Pretty soon, though, they'll get tired of the frosting and want something that actually satisfies more than their sweet tooth. You can't eat cake forever (it's not like PIE!). Eventually consumers (readers) are going to want something more, and when they do, you need to be ready.

Someone awesome once said to me, "There's always going to be an audience for penny dreadfuls. It doesn't negate the need for good stuff."

I couldn't agree more. So don't pay attention to trends. And don't stop growing your carrots because people want Cheetos. There are always people who want carrots, even if it's just to make carrot cake.

And now I'm hungry.