I started this blog On August 30, 2011,
almost ten years ago. When I recently realized this anniversary was coming up,
I thought I should do something special to commemorate it, but what? Some kind
of contest or maybe a retrospective of some sort? Then it occurred to me that 2012
will mark my fortieth year since I dedicated my life to becoming a writer. So
what if I wrote about how the publishing industry has changed during those four
decades, at least from my perspective, and talk about the lessons I learned? Sounds
good, I thought, and started writing. And writing, and writing . . . This
has turned out to be the longest entry I’ve ever produced for this blog (slightly
over 8,000 words), but hey, it’s the tenth anniversary, right? Might as well do
it up big. Hopefully the length won’t put you off and you’ll find something of value
in my trip down memory lane (and hopefully I won’t come across as a cranky old
man who doesn’t understand these young kids today and their newfangled ways).
I’ve
been making up stories one way or another my entire life, but I mark the autumn
of 1982 (my first year at college) as the time when I fully devoted myself to
writing. I was eighteen then. I’m fifty-seven now. For those of you who aren’t
math wizards – and I count myself among your number (god, believe it or not, I
had no idea what a terrible pun I was going to write when I first started this
sentence) – that’s thirty-nine years ago. The world of publishing has changed
so much in that time, but in many ways, it hasn’t changed at all. So at the
risk of being viewed as a cranky old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, here
are my thoughts on my (nearly) four decades as a writer.
There
was no Internet as we know it in 1982, and while personal computers were on the
way, people didn’t have them in their homes yet. This meant two things: 1) I
was an extraordinarily lazy researcher. You had to go to a library to do any
sort of decent research, and I often didn’t know what I needed to know until I
was in the middle of writing a scene, and I damn sure wasn’t going to stop and
drive to the small library in my town or head back to my university to consult
its far larger library. And 2) I wrote my first stories and first couple novels
on typewriters. Manual at first, then on an electric one that my mom and dad
got me for Christmas that year.
Since
there was no email, writers had to type a clean copy of a story or novel, mail
it to a publisher with a self-addressed-stamped envelope (abbreviated as SASE
and sometimes pronounced as say-see). We’d wait for few weeks to a
couple months, and then you’d get an acceptance letter or, as was the case for
me until my late mid-twenties, you’d get your manuscript back, and you’d submit
it to the next publisher on your list. You’d keep sending the same copy out
until it became too ratty – which meant editors could tell it had been rejected
a lot too – and then you’d type up a fresh copy and send it out.
My first rejection slip! (I forgot to send a SASE.)
Since
there was no Internet and social media, writers got their information about
markets from Writer’s Digest and The Writer, and by subscribing
to market newsletters individuals put out, such as Janet Fox’s Scavenger’s
Newsletter and Kathy Ptacek’s legendary Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets. We
also bought Writer’s Market, a big book Writer’s Digest published
every year with tons of market listings. We usually only bought it ever few
years, though since it was a bit pricey and the info within tended to remain
good for a while. I also read every interview with a writer than I could find
in magazines, often in Locus, which I subscribed to as well. I ordered
sample copies of magazines to get a feel for what editors were looking for. (No
stories posted on websites to read back then.) All this searching, reading,
sifting, selecting, ranking of markets took time, but it also meant that I had
a really decent knowledge of what markets were available.
Responses
from editors were faster back then, practically motherfucking lightspeed in
some cases, and you got more personalized responses with feedback or, failing
that, a checklist with a number of reasons for an editor’s rejection, with your
particular areas marked. More book publishers were open to reading manuscripts
from unsolicited authors, and they’d write a short letter explaining the
reasons for your rejection. I sent three sample chapters of my first novel – a
fantasy titled A Wizard’s World – to Del Rey. (I sent three random
chapters that I thought were the most interesting because I didn’t know editors
preferred – and still do – to see the first three consecutive chapters.) My
folks had a PC by then – an Atari computer – and I used a primitive
word-processing program to print the manuscript. The program didn’t have a
spellcheck function (I don’t think any of the word-processing programs back
then did), so I’m sure my manuscript was rife with typos. (Throughout my
undergraduate years, I wrote all my papers on that computer, and professors
used to beg me to buy a spellcheck program – once they were available, they
came as a separate disk, but they were something like $100 in 1980’s money, and
that seemed like a lot to me at the time, so I struggled along without
spellcheck until it came standard with word-processing programs). I put the
manuscript (all 249 pages of it) into a box that had once contained a shirt
bought at a department store and used the tear-away strips on the sides of
printer paper as packing material.
I sent my opus – unagented – to Del Rey, and
two months later, I received a personal rejection. I continued sending
unagented novel manuscripts to publishers like Del Rey and Baen for several
years and received short personalized rejection letters every time.
After
I received one or two rejections on a story or novel, I figured they must not
be very good, put them away in a drawer, and never sent them out again. I then
started work on the next project, whatever it might be. I continued with this
pattern for several years, until I read an article in Writer’s Market
called “The Rule of Twelve,” in which the author (whose name I can’t recall and
haven’t been able to find on the Internet) advocated sending stories out
forever until they sold. (When she tried this, she discovered her stories sold
on the twelfth time out, on average, hence the article’s title.) I started
selling regularly to small-press magazines after I adopted her practice. (And I
sold my stories on the ninth time out!)
When
I was young, I was a horror kid. I loved horror movies and comics more than
anything. Then in junior high I got into superhero comics, so I began to love
all sorts of genres, since comics – especially superhero ones – would tell
stories that fell into all kinds of different genres, changing from month to
month. One month Spider-Man would face a crime lord, the next month a vampire,
and the next he might have to deal with an alien invasion. Television was like
this too. No cable or VCR’s back then, so we couldn’t confine our viewing to
one specific interest. We watched whatever was on, a detective show one hour, a
variety show the next, a science fiction show after that. I think the
combination of not having a wide choice in TV programs along with reading
comics helped make my generation of writers more liable to write in multiple
genres and to write cross-genre fiction.
In
high school, I started reading a lot of quest fantasy novels. New editions of Lord
of the Rings came out then, along with The Sword of Shannara, and Lord
Foul’s Bane. It was early in Stephen King’s career, and the 1980’s horror
boom was just beginning, but at that point I envisioned myself as a fantasy
writer, and it never occurred to me to try horror. I wish to hell I had! Maybe
I would’ve broken into the horror boom back then. I still read horror and
watched horror, but it wasn’t my focus.
I
finished A Wizard’s World when I was nineteen. I finished my second
novel, The Adventures of Professor Peacock – a rip-off of Doctor Who –
when I was twenty-one. For my third novel, I thought it might be cool to write
a contemporary fantasy novel using horror tropes. I wrote Lycanthrope
and sent sample chapters to Del Rey. They told me it was too much like Piers
Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality series and that I should be
careful if I didn’t wish to be labeled a plagiarist. Horrified, I put the
manuscript away and never sent it out again. I wish I had. I’d essentially written
an urban fantasy several years before the genre became popular, and my novel
wasn’t anything like Anthony’s series.
When
I first started submitting short stories and novels, I went for the largest,
more prestigious markets in the genre. After a year or two of rejections, it
occurred to me to try the small-press markets. I still got a lot of rejections
from them, but I got a lot more personalized feedback, which I used to help
improve my writing. And I began selling stories, from time to time, at least.
During
my senior year of college, I served as the editor of the school’s literary
magazine so I could learn what it was like on the other side of the desk. I
think every writer should have some editorial experience. It’s an excellent way
to improve your own writing.
I
continued writing fantasy novels through college and into graduate school. For
short fiction, I wrote mostly fantasy, but some science fiction and horror. In
grad school, I decided to try writing humorous fantasy. Absurdist stuff,
really. One of my grad thesis advisors told me to tone down the absurdity and
helped me revise the book. Up to that point, I’d been a lazy reviser. I found –
and still find – the greatest energy in creating fiction, not in revising it.
But I learned to tolerate revising.
My
first year out of grad school, I decided to look for an agent. I sent a query
for the novel I’d written in grad school – Y3000, a humorous fantasy
about a computer that was God and the Devil who was a cable TV magnate – to the
Scott Meredith Agency. I had no idea that the agency had two aspects to it. One
was a legitimate literary agency, and the other was a scam agency that charged
reading fees and never took on any clients. I paid the fee (I think it was
something like $700 in 1990 money), sent my book, and lo and behold, they took
me on as a client. (Evidently this almost never happened, but it did for me.) I
was super excited and while my agent – a man named Mark Jolly – sent my book
around, I wrote two more humorous fantasies in the vein of Y3000. Mythopotamia,
about a world where ancient gods and contemporary gods who were versions of
Darwin, Freud, and Einstein clashed, and Newz, which was about how all
the weird stories in tabloid papers were real. But after two years of my agent
not being able to sell Y3000, we parted ways. A few years later, I
submitted Mythopotamia to Josepha Sherman at Baen. She loved it but the
publisher passed. I never sent it out again. I never sent Newz anywhere.
I
decided my weird contemporary fantasies were a dead end, so I moved on to
writing humorous traditional fantasies. By this point, I was
twenty-five/twenty-six, and I’d established a secondary writing career as a
horror short story author. I considered trying my hand at a horror novel, but then
I read Harlan Ellison’s (in)famous essay in The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction titled “Horror is Dead,” in which he correctly predicted
the collapse of the 80’s horror boom. Discouraged by this, I wouldn’t try to
write a horror novel for several more years.
Since
graduating from grad school, I’d been teaching composition classes part-time
for colleges while I wrote and my wife at the time was finishing her doctorate
in psychology. Once she graduated, I continued writing and teaching, selling
stories here and there (this is around the time I read “The Rule of Twelve”)
and writing fantasy novels that got rejected. I started exploring different
genres such as mystery, nonfiction, and humor, still without much success. I
was finding it more difficult to persevere, and I wanted to quit plenty of
times.
In
my late twenties, I started going to local conventions (I lived in Columbus,
Ohio at the time) such as Context and Marcon. I attended every panel on writing
that I could, and I made friends that became my writing support network. There
was still no Internet yet and no YouTube, so this was the only way I could get
access to writers, and it made a huge difference. Through my friends, I learned
that you didn’t have to be the world’s most successful or experienced writer to
be on panels, so one year I wrote to Marcon and asked to be a panelist, and I
was shocked when they said sure, and put me on several panels. On one of these,
I sat next to a newly published writer named J. Calvin Pierce. After the panel,
he invited me to have a beer with him and fantasy novelist Dennis L. McKiernan.
Eventually, the two would ask me to join their writers’ group, which also
included award-winning science fiction author Lois McMaster Bujold. They became
my first professional writer mentors.
Around
the same time, I joined one of the first online social networks, a service
called GEnie (started by General Electric, hence the capital GE). Since there
were no websites yet or no other social platforms, writers flocked to GEnie –
especially because professionals got to use the service for free, and
they got access to private areas on the service where they could talk business.
Once I sold three stories for professional rates, I was able to upgrade to a
professional writer GEnie account and had access to the private areas. Everyone
in science fiction, fantasy, and horror was on GEnie back then, and I learned a
metric fuck-ton from reading their posts and interacting with them. I started
building a different aspect of my writing support network then.
There
were a couple incidents on GEnie that I still remember to this day. One was
when George R.R. Martin (pre-Game of Thrones) posted that new writers
should stop writing because they were making it hard for established writers
such as himself to make a living. I couldn’t tell if he was joking at the time.
Another
incident was when someone who had access to Zebra Books’ information posted the
advances horror writer Rick Hautala had made for several novels. Why this
person did this, I have no idea, but I thought it was dick move. That sort of
information wasn’t shared between writers back then, and it was illuminating to
see how small the advances a writer I admired got. Rick, perhaps embarrassed or
just pissed off, left GEnie and never returned.
In
the private areas on GEnie, writers would be open about their struggles to pay
bills and afford medical care. They’d talk about writers who died broke and
mostly forgotten at a relatively young age, and about writers living with all
kinds of painful health conditions because they didn’t have insurance. This was
when I realized that the whole teach until you can write full-time might
never work out for me.
Dennis
once told me during a writers’ group meeting that he expected me to have two or
three books out in the next few years, and that I’d be able to quit teaching
then and write full time. I doubted that then (although I didn’t tell Dennis
because I wanted to believe it), and it never happened.
Dennis
introduced me to his agent, Jonathan Matson, who took me on as a client. The
first novel of mine he represented was a light fantasy called True Thief.
He was never able to sell it. I was with Jonathan for nineteen years, and
during that time, he never landed me a book deal. I found all the deals and
brought them to him. He negotiated the contracts and did a better job than I
ever could, but this wasn’t the way I’d always thought author-agent
relationships worked.
In
this general period, I started going to the World Fantasy Convention because
all the SF/F/H authors on GEnie said it was the absolute best convention for
writers to go to business-wise, as only publishing professionals attended. I
learned a lot from going and made even more connections, both for business and
for my writing network. I would land deals to write stories for anthologies at
WFC’s, but no book deals resulted. I started going to the World Horror
Convention around this time too.
People
talk about branding and platform as the keys to writing success
these days, but back then it was networking. I read articles on
networking and did my best to put that advice into practice when I was at
conventions, but I felt uncomfortable doing so. I was attempting to make
connections to people only because they might be of use to me in furthering my
writing career. That wasn’t who I was, and if that was the kind of thing I had
to do to get ahead as a writer, then to hell with it. I decided to just be
myself and make connections naturally, to treat people as people and not as
stepping stones. I felt a lot better about myself, and my networking improved
because it was natural and genuine. I still see people – usually on social
media – attempting to curry favor with writers, editors, publishers, and agents,
often in very clumsy and obvious ways. I’ve also seen people who, once they’ve
set their sites on someone higher up the literary food chain, forget about the people
they were so desperate to network with before. However you may feel about networking,
I’ll tell you this: People can usually tell what your intentions when you try
to connect with them. You can’t fool anyone, especially if they’ve been in
publishing for any length of time, so why bother trying?
Gary
A. Braunbeck eventually moved to Columbus and we become friends. From Gary, I
learned a ton about how horror publishing worked, and his passion and dedication
to making his fiction the absolute best it could be, inspired me to the do the
same. I started selling stories more regularly after this.
I
was selling short fiction to pro markets, including Cemetery Dance
magazine (which to me was the most important market for short stories). I’d
already been changing direction in my writing and moving more toward horror –
and developing my own weird brand of it – so I thought I’d try my hand at
writing a horror novel. The result was The Harmony Society. I sent it to
Jonathan and worried over what his reaction would be. After all, it was very
different than anything I’d ever sent him before. But one day his assistant
called and told me he liked the book, which was a relief. Back then the game
company White Wolf published original horror and dark fantasy fiction alongside
their tie-in novels, so I asked Jonathan to send the book to them. He did, they
said they loved it, and offered me a contract with a $4000 advance. I was
thrilled! I’d taken an artistic risk, followed my own muse, and it had resulted
in my first book contract.
But
then for some reason, White Wolf pulled their offer, saying they were “no
longer comfortable” with the book. When I asked Jonathan what that meant, he
said it didn’t mean anything. A no was just a no. I don’t know if he ever sent
the book out again, but I eventually got a small-press publisher to take it,
but they folded before bringing it out. Prime Books eventually brought it out,
and some years later, Dark Regions brought out a new edition. It’s still
available from them in print and ebook versions if you’d like to check out my
very first horror novel that’s recognizable a “Tim Waggoner” book. (And while I
don’t make a big deal of this, The Harmony Society is the
foundation of a mythos upon which all my horror fiction is based, especially my
novels.)
After
this disappointment, I sat down and wrote the first version of what would
eventually become Nekropolis, a series people still email me about to
this day. (And no, I doubt there will ever be a fourth book, unless I decided
to self-publish it someday, and right now I have too many other book contracts
that I need to fulfill.)
My
first daughter was born around this time, and I didn’t go to big conventions
anymore for a while, just local ones. I started exploring the possibilities of
writing media tie-ins, and Michael A. Stackpole was kind enough to introduce me
to some game publishers at an Origins convention, as well as give me advice on
how to break into the field.
Thanks, Mike!
He urged me to start going to Gencon, and since it
was in Indianapolis every year, only a four-hour drive from where I lived in
Columbus, I started going. Once I began presenting at Gencon’s writing
symposium, I was lucky enough to get my hotel stay comped, which helped a lot financially.
I started writing books for Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf, but eventually
White Wolf stopped publishing fiction altogether, and while it took more years,
Wizards of the Coast cut way back on their fiction lines once Hasbro bought
them. (The mandate was to focus on toys and game product, not books.) I did a
few tie-ins for other publishers – Black Flame, iBooks, and eventually Titan
Books. Only Titan’s still in business.
Signing books at the Wizards of the Coast booth at Gencon.
Around
this time, ebooks weren’t a thing yet, as there weren’t any decent ereading
devices. People tried selling electronic books to be read on computers (you’d
buy a disk and insert it into your PC), but these never caught on. I never
tried this route. It seemed like a dead end to me. I didn’t like reading at my
computer, so why would anyone else?
Something
else that started this time was “royalty-sharing” instead of advances.
Small-press publishers began offering higher royalty percentages in book
contracts in lieu of a traditional advance. Supposedly, authors would
ultimately make more money this way. The original edition of The Harmony
Society was a royalty-only deal, as was my first collection All Too
Surreal and later my Samhain novel The Way of All Flesh. I doubted
royalty-only deals would result in any money, but I decided to give it a try. Of
course, I never made a dime from these deals. (I have no idea if anyone else
ever did.
The
Internet became a thing, as did email, and word processing programs continued
improving. Ereaders came into existence, and while the ebook market didn’t take
off for a while, eventually it became a normal part of publishing. The advent
of ebooks freaked out publishers, and for a while they were trying to grab
rights for any technology that could be conceivable but didn’t exist yet. I
literally had several contracts that asked for rights to versions of stories or
articles published in any technological form, whether it currently existed or
any that would one day be invented, now and in the future, throughout the
universe. (I’m not making a joke here. I’ve paraphrased, but this is what the
clause said.) I signed those contracts at the time because I doubted the clause
would come into play, and it never did.
Other
publishers tried to buy all rights to stories and novels, meaning that you’d
sell all rights to the work to them forevermore, and they could do whatever
they wanted with it, just as if you’d sold them your car or your home. It would
be theirs, and that way they would own the story when a new unforeseen
technical development like ebooks happened. This shit I didn’t put up with and
never signed such a contract. It’s one thing to write a work-for-hire book when
you’re doing a media tie-in. You didn’t create the movie, TV show, game,
whatever the book is based on. But never sell all rights to your original work.
Publishers
settled down after a bit, and whereas ebook and audio rights used to be
negotiated separately in contracts, now they were bundled in as part of the overall
deal. That sucked, but there wasn’t anything to do but accept this since all
publishers started doing it.
As
technology advanced, writers got websites – crude ones at first since web
design was a field in its infancy – but they rapidly improved in quality. GEnie
died when writers began migrating to the web and setting up their own message
boards on their sites. I still miss GEnie. Everything became so fragmented
after that. MySpace began and writers created profiles there. Facebook
supplanted MySpace, and then Twitter (arguably) replaced Facebook. Then came
Instagram and Pinterest, etc., etc. The social media landscape began to
resemble what it was like on GEnie, and writers were able to connect with each
other, share information, get feedback and support, like never before. I used
Facebook the most for a long time, but once I learned that there was a strong
horror community on Twitter, I began spending more time there. I still use
Instagram, but I gave up on Pinterest. Three social media accounts are enough
for me to take care of, and unless a new platform comes along that’s absolutely
incredible, three is where I’ll stay at.
Horror
began to have a resurgence in the late nineties and early 2000’s, with Leisure
Books being the preeminent publisher and Don D’Auria the editor for
horror. I loved Leisure’s horror output and was determined not to miss this
boom (or more of a boomlet, I guess). I wrote Like Death specifically
for Don at Leisure. I pitched it to him at a World Horror Convention in
Chicago, and he asked to see it. I also pitched it to Melissa Ann Singer at Tor
and Jo Fletcher of (naturally) Jo Fletcher Books. Both of them asked to see it
as well, but I could tell neither was very enthusiastic about the book. Jo
began our pitch session by saying that horror as a market was crap right now. I
wanted to ask her if that was the case, why did she bother flying all the way
from England to listen to pitches in Chicago (but I didn’t).
Don D'Auria and me back in the day. (Yeah, I know my eyes are closed. Deal with it.)
Don
took Like Death, and I wrote two more novels for Leisure: Pandora
Drive and Darkness Wakes. I thought I had made it, man. Sure,
Leisure’s advances sucked, but I was proud to be part of their horror program,
proud to work with Don D’Auria, and happy to be writing my brand of horror
fiction and finding readers who enjoyed it. I didn’t do much marketing back
then. I had young children, and I’d taken a full-time, tenure-track job
teaching composition and creative writing at a community college and didn’t
have a lot of time for marketing. Plus, I was still of the old-fashioned
mindset that publicity was the publisher’s job. It was my job to write. (I took
a full-time job – and I was lucky as hell to land it – partially because of
what I’d learned about a writer’s finances on GEnie, and partially because my
psychologist wife came home one day and told me that just as I had a dream of
being a writer, her dream was to work part-time, so she was going to quit
working full-time. I realized then that I was stupid – and selfish – to expect
someone else would support me while I worked part-time and wrote. And I
realized I never wanted to be dependent on another human being for my income
again, especially not when I had kids.)
After
the publication of Pandora Drive, Don told me the sales weren’t so good
and that he might have to let me go after Darkness Wakes. I tried making
Darkness Wakes less batshit crazy than Pandora Drive (which is
probably the most fucked-up thing I’ve ever written, which is saying something)
so it might appeal to a wider audience, and I suddenly found the value of
self-promotion.
Reading from Pandora Drive at the World Horror Convention in San Francisco.
I was unschooled and clumsy at it, and my efforts were too
little too late. Darkness Wakes would be the last book I published with
Leisure. This would turn out to be a blessing in disguise, because I asked for
my rights to be reverted to me before Leisure died and went into
bankruptcy, so I didn’t get tangled up in that mess (and it got pretty damn
messy). One bad thing did happen to me because of Leisure’s death, though. The
company sold a lot of their assets to Amazon, which began putting of their own
versions of Leisure’s books. For some reason, Amazon put out audiobook versions
of my three Leisure novels, even though they didn’t have the rights to do that.
I’ve tried on and off over the years to get Amazon to quit selling these
unauthorized audiobooks, but no one ever replies to my emails about them.
(Although Amazon has fixed other problems for me, such as when a small-press
publisher dies and one of my books with them is still available for sale on the
site.) Amazon has never paid me a cent for my audiobooks, and I have no idea
how much money I’ve lost because they keep selling the damn things. (Don’t feel
guilty if you bought any of them or buy any in the future. I’d rather have you
enjoy my work. (Besides, this kind of thing is another reason I have a day job.
Financial setbacks in writing don’t have much impact for me.)
After
my time at Leisure ended, I mostly wrote tie-in novels for a while. I wrote
horror short stories still, but I didn’t know when, or if, I’d write horror at
novel-length again.
Somewhere
in all this, agents upped their percentages from 10 percent to 15 percent, and
editors stopped reading unsolicited manuscripts and began unofficially using
agents as first readers. This situation continues to this day.
I
started getting more invites to submit stories to anthologies as well as
invites to be a guest at conventions. I loved teaching, so I started presenting
writing workshops wherever I could – and especially at cons. Sometimes I’d get
paid for them, sometimes I wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. I loved helping people,
it was good promotion for my writing, and – as I keep saying – I had a day job.
My
first wife and I divorced, and I moved to an apartment. The plan was for us to
divide our debt equally, except for the house, which my ex would keep. She’d
live there with our daughters. But her lawyer convinced her to file bankruptcy,
which my lawyer said would force me to do it too. I tried to talk her out of
it. She, working part-time, would be free and clear if she declared bankruptcy,
but I made too much money and would have to still repay a certain portion of
our shared debt. She said that was ridiculous and it would never happen. My ex
knew nothing about bankruptcy law, and I did indeed have to make debt payments
while also paying child and spousal support. I’d begun paying both types of
support the moment I moved out, but the official payments didn’t begin until a
year later, and since there was no record of my having made payments for a
year, the amount of those payments suddenly doubled. It was a rough few years, but
I made it out of bankruptcy, restored my credit rating (with the help of my
current wife who is a literal genius), and things have been sailing smoothly
enough for the last decade financially. It was during the hard years that I
depended on my writing income (as well as the money I got from teaching in
Seton Hill University’s MFA in Writing Popular Fiction Program) to get by. If
I’d been a full-time writer, I don’t know if I’d have made it. Yeah, the
financial details of my situation after the divorce would probably have been
different in that case, but still . . . Thank Christ for my day job.
Eventually,
Jonathan stopped responding to my emails and not answering my calls. He hadn’t
really been doing much for me for several years at that point, so I sent him a
certified letter ending our business relationship as cordially as possible and
began to look for a new agent. I was talking to Jonathan Maberry at a con one
month, and when I told him I was looking for an agent, he suggested I query
Cherry Weiner. I did so, and she’s been my agent ever since. She works her ass
off for her clients, and she’s a wonderful person to boot. I couldn’t be
happier with her.
A
while later, I found out that my former agent Jonathan had died. I don’t know
if he was sick toward the end, and that’s why he stopped responding to attempts
at contact or not. He was always good about chatting with me when I called, and
he was happy to answer any questions I had about the publishing industry. I
learned a lot from him, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
When
Don D’Auria started a horror line at small-press publisher Samhain, I jumped at
the chance to work with him again. Samhain died not long after that, and when
Don started another horror line at Flame Tree Press, I jumped at that chance to
work with him too. I love working with Don, and while Flame Tree may be a
small-press publisher, they work hard to promote their authors and their books.
I’m not getting rich from them, but that doesn’t matter to me (day job).
Debut Flame Tree Horror Authors at Book Expo! In the back: Me and Don D'Auria
In the front, Hunter Shea, Jonathan Janz, John Everson
For
decades of my career, self-publishing was looked down on by everyone in the
publishing industry. It was called vanity publishing, and it was for writers
whose work wasn’t good enough to get a traditional publishing deal. With the
advent of ereaders and software that allowed for greater ease of formatting
books, self-publication really took off. It’s now referred to as indie
publishing, which is a much more positive term, and it’s considered a
viable career alternative. There are still some people that see indie
publishing as second-best or as a path that impatient writers take, and of
course there is a wide spectrum of quality in indie work. Traditional publishers
may have acted as gatekeepers, but they also acted as quality control (to a
certain degree – not everything they published was Great Literature, of
course). I still enjoy the challenge of traditional publishing, but I’ve dipped
my toe into indie publishing a little, and it’s something I might do more of as
the years go by, if for no reason than to see what I can learn from it.
Right
now, I’ve still got a dual career as a horror writer and media tie-in writer.
Tie-ins pay better, but I couldn’t live on that money alone. I’d still have to
have different incomes streams, as so many artists do. My day job does all the
work of arranging classes and finding students for me and paying me regularly
so I don’t have to work at finding money. I just have to teach people (and do
some administrative-type stuff as a full professor). I love it, so it doesn’t
feel like work, and I still have time and energy to write, and my writing ties
directly into my teaching. I’m in a constant state of professional development
for the teaching part of my life.
Writing
articles on writing craft topics and writing this blog led me to write Writing
in the Dark and The Writing in the Dark Workbook. Cherry says maybe
we’ll get a second career going for me as a nonfiction writer. Maybe so.
To
avoid giving you a false impression, my writing life isn’t all roses. I often
question whether I should try writing more mainstream material – like thrillers
– that would appeal to a mass audience. Then I think maybe I should only write
for art’s sake and write whatever satisfies me the most creatively. Then I
think about trying a film script or giving up writing entirely. I’ve come to
believe that a state of perpetual dissatisfaction is normal for creative
people, and it may be a big part of why they’re creative in the first place.
So
where’s publishing now? The midlist – where most writers earned a living in the
past – has mostly died, making it a lot more difficult to write full-time. As
technology advanced and entertainment options wildly proliferated, fewer and
fewer people read for pleasure, meaning everyone’s competing for a smaller
audience these days. As home computers became a thing, more and more people
started writing. It was easier now than in the days of using typewriters, and the
number of aspiring writers increased exponentially. (As a teacher, I think this
is a good thing. As a writer, I sometimes think George R.R. Martin was right
about competition from newcomers.) Increasingly over the years, accountants and
salespeople have started making the final decisions about what books get published,
so it’s much harder for newer writers with interesting, offbeat, original work
to get book deals. Because editors have to fight so hard to get any book
published, they only take on books they feel passionate enough about to go to
battle for. So they take fewer chances on stuff they know the numbers people
won’t like. (This is also why editors are obsessed with comp titles. Comp titles
are how they convince the money people a new book is a good investment.) Established
writers used to be able to get three-book deals on novel pitches. Then
publishers started offering only two-book deals, then one. Now even if you’re
established, editors often want to see a complete manuscript, especially if a
particular editor has never worked with you before. This is another reason it’s
hard to make a living in traditional publishing. Writing on proposal means you
don’t write a book until it’s sold. Writing a complete manuscript without a
contract means it may take a long time to find a publisher for it, if you ever
do.
The
small press has become a far more powerful and influential force in publishing,
especially in horror, over the last decade. It was able to react far more
nimbly and effectively to the challenges posed by Covid than traditional
publishers were able to. I think of the small press as the tiny mammals that
will outline the big, lumbering dinosaurs. I still publish with larger presses,
but I publish with the small press too, and I often think about saying to hell
with larger presses and sticking with the small press for the rest of my
career.
Social
media is a great way to find support and get publishing information and writing
advice, but I also see people giving incorrect or even damaging advice to
others, and I fear there’s so much useless noise in social media that it’s
difficult to tune it out and find the good stuff. (This may just be me in
full-on angry old man yelling at cloud mode, though.)
So,
in what ways has publishing changed since 1982?
·
Traditional
publishing is much more business than art than it was then.
·
Agents
are even more important if you want to get your book seen by an editor.
·
Ebooks.
·
Increased
popularity of audiobooks.
·
Indie
publishing, baby!
·
Rise
of the small press, in horror especially.
·
Writers
are expected to do a shitload more publicity than they were back then. Editors
and agents check writers’ social media presence as part of deciding whether to
take on a writer. So being an asshole on social media can really hurt your
chances of getting a publishing deal.
·
Everybody
and their brother wants to write a book (even if they don’t read them).
·
The
Internet has made research so simple that even I like doing it now. There’s no
excuse for writers not doing as least a basic minimum of research for their
projects.
·
It’s
more difficult than ever before to make a full-time living just from writing
(and it’s never been easy).
·
Having
different income streams – especially ones that pay more regularly than writing
– is hugely important.
·
Having
a day job really helps – if your day job doesn’t make it too emotionally
or physically difficult to write at all.
·
There
are exponentially more creative writing programs in colleges and universities
than in 1982, especially graduate programs. Unfortunately, those jobs are
highly competitive and get snapped up fast.
·
The
ACA has made health insurance more obtainable by writers, and the Horror
Writers Association and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association now
have insurance options for members.
·
Branding
is a huge focus (probably huger than it should be).
·
Greater
interaction with readers, other writers, and publishing professionals, but
being so reachable can have big downsides in terms of trolling or harassment.
·
Big
cons like World Fantasy and Worldcon aren’t as important to doing business as
they once were. There are no “must-attend” cons anymore. You can find all the
craft and publishing information you need online, and you can connect with
people online as well.
·
People
are much more aware of race, gender, LGBTQ+, and
diversity issues than they were in 1982.
·
It’s
far more competitive than it was when I started out. There are fewer big
publishing houses and a lot more people writing and competing for fewer
publishing slots.
What hasn’t changed in publishing since
1982?
·
Writers
are still neurotic as hell.
·
Writing
is still an artistic pursuit at its core. If we only wanted money, we’d be in
some other profession.
·
Writers
struggle with what kind of stuff they should write.
·
Writers
still struggle with the tension between art and commerce.
·
Editors
and agent still love books or else they’d be in some other profession.
·
Never
pay reading fees. NEVER.
·
New
writers often believe there is some kind of magic key – a hidden technique, a piece
of coveted knowledge – that will grant them the success they desire so much.
There is, but professionals will never tell it to you. (Just kidding – there’s
no magic key, just hard work and persistence.)
·
The
small press is still the place where the coolest, most interesting stuff is
published.
·
New
technologies may come and go, but a good story is still a good story.
·
The
basic genres have remained the same since I started out. Romance may have grown
into a behemoth, for example, but people are still reading and enjoying the
same genres as in 1982.
·
Networking
is still vitally important.
·
Agents
still don’t always find deals for their clients, and writers have to find the
deals themselves and then bring them to their agents to negotiate contracts.
·
There
are emotional and economic ups and downs.
·
Dealing
with rejections and bad reviews is still a thing. (Only now bad reviews can be
sent to you directly as email or IM’s or you’re tagged in them on Twitter.)
·
Writers
still like getting together and meeting readers, so even if cons aren’t as
necessary to networking and doing business as they once were, they’re still
here.
·
Things
may be better in publishing when it comes to race, gender, LGBTQ+, and
diversity issues, but the work has really just begun.
·
If
you’re an asshole or abuser on social media, you can tank your publishing career.
Assholes and abusers used to be tolerated if they could write. Not anymore.
·
I
think it’s important to try all kinds of different things with your writing.
You never know what you might enjoy or what will be the most successful for
you.
·
Writing
and publishing have always been competitive.
·
Day
job.
·
Writing
is still the greatest profession on the planet.
·
Writing
can save your life, and sometimes your readers’ lives.
·
Never
stop learning.
What have I learned from my nearly forty
years working at a writing career?
·
All
the stuff I’ve listed above.
·
Writing
is as natural to me as breathing. I have to do it to survive.
·
There
will always be ups and downs. I think of them like bad weather. They will pass.
And they will come again. I just need to keep writing.
·
I
set out to create a life in writing, not so much so have a specific kind of
career. In this, if nothing else, I’ve succeeded.
·
I
get as much joy from helping others as I do writing.
·
The
most beautiful phrases in publishing are “check enclosed” and “light revision.”
·
I’m
terrible at believing good things about myself or my writing. It’s almost as if
I literally cannot comprehend or process them. So I’ve learned to assume
these good things are true, even if I can’t feel they’re true.
·
The
work is everything. Nothing else in a writing career happens without doing the
work.
·
As
the I-Ching says, “Perseverance furthers.” It’s one of the most
important lessons I’ve ever learned as a writer.
·
Always
strive to improve.
·
When
I started out, old-timers used to say, “The first million words are practice.”
With the rise of indie publishing, this may not be true functionally (since you
can publish anything you want whenever you want), but I still think it’s a good
principle to keep in mind when it comes to improving your craft.
·
Identify
your strengths as a writer and work on making them even stronger. Do you best
to get better at the stuff you’re not great at, but don’t kill yourself trying
to be great at everything. No one can be.
·
Creatively
challenge yourself, at least now and again.
·
It’s
okay to take breaks from writing (although I never seem to).
·
I
stayed with my second agent for nineteen years, which in retrospect was way too
long. An agent should be an effective partner, advocate, and advisor for you.
Don’t change agents ever couple years looking for the one that will suddenly
make you wildly successful, though. Agents need time to build their clients
careers.
·
Markets
come and go. You are the only stable element in your writing career.
·
Networking
doesn’t mean you have to cold-bloodedly use people.
·
Promote,
promote, promote! Don’t spend all your time doing it, of course, but don’t
ignore it either.
·
Writers
are often afraid to share certain information – how large their advances are,
how effective their agents really are, etc. Editors and agents don’t want you
to share this information, but the more we share with each other, the stronger negotiating
positions we’re in. And if writers are going to share this information, they
won’t do it in public usually. That’s what hotel bars at conferences are for.
·
Establishing
a building a writing career is a marathon. It’s a life-long endeavor, so you
need to be prepared for the long haul.
·
When
I told my wife how long this blog post was, she said, “I love you, sweetie, but
that’s insane.”
Which is probably a good place to stop.
DEPARTMENT OF SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION
This blog post is long enough. I’m not
going to add to its length by inflicting promotion on you. You can find out
whatever you need to about me and my work at my various Internet hangouts.
Twitter:
@timwaggoner
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/tim.waggoner.9
Instagram:
tim.waggoner.scribe
Blog: http://writinginthedarktw.blogspot.com/
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZEz6_ALPrV3tdC0V3peKNw
Newsletter Sign-Up: https://timwaggoner.com/contact.htm
