If you want the straight dope on how to create a viable, sturdy, profitable writing career, The Writer's Workout can serve as your writing career checklist.
Publishing has changed quite a bit even since my first book deal in 2005. Now, only seven years later, the distance between totally unknown writer and book deal is longer and steeper than ever.
What you need to know about the publishing industry right now is that folks who would have been very likely to land book deals with decently paying first book contracts, are not landing these deals at the same rate of success.
I’ve noticed this pattern as publishers hold back on any kind of book other than what might be perceived as a sure seller.
What does this mean?
Bad news first: it will likely take you longer than you think to land a book deal. Actually, it will likely take you much longer, if it happens at all.
But I’m not sure this is all bad news. I’ll share more about the upside of author ownership tomorrow.
The good news is that more time before a first book deal means that writers can spend that time acquiring a broader range of skills, like the types of skills I enjoy teaching, which also (eventually) include self-publishing skills in the form of micro-publishing.
When you have a broader range of skills, you have more possible ways to succeed.
You will also probably have more self-motivation than a person who is traditionally published and falls into the trap of thinking that after traditional publication they will be “set.” (Nothing could be further from the truth.)
More time until your first traditional book deal means you also have more time to learn to produce your own success, which pays off in both the long run and the short run and is always necessary for any kind of success anyway.
In other words, micro-publishing teaches you to be less dependent on the failure or success of any one book and more dependent on what you accomplish today. And this is good news for writers, because if there is one thing we can control, it’s what we accomplished today.
As I always teach, writers, it’s not anything you do, it’s everything you do. And micro-publishing, whether that means writing for others or writing for yourself (or best case scenario–both), is going to play a huge role in your success as writer today and tomorrow.
So if you think about it, over-emphasis on the ever-elusive book deal with the traditional agent and tradition publisher is not really a well-rounded experience when it comes to publishing success in the short run and the long run.
You need to think bigger, wider, deeper. Any well-rounded education includes a discussion of author ownership and what that means in terms of leveraging all of the hard work you have already done into more profits and exposure today and tomorrow.
I am really looking forward to my 90-minutes session at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference today called Mailbox Full of Money. If you ask me, a longer road to publication is one of the most exciting things going on in publishing right now, right after the rise in author ownership, which I will talk more about tomorrow in our three hour workshop on How You Do Anything is How You do Everything.
In the meantime, you may want to check out the free motivational poster available from Writer’s Digest that I created to celebrate publication of The Writer’s Workout. It’s got some solid tough love in there. And we all need this kind of pep talk on a regular basis, whether it’s welcome news or not.
Go to this page at Writersdigest.com and click on the link that says, “motivational poster” to download your free poster.
As a side note, in creating the content for this poster, I emulated the format of an article written by the late, brilliant author and screenwriter Nora Ephron. She wrote a piece for Time magazine after her book I Feel Bad About My Neck came out, sharing some of the nuggets she had learned from life. I loved the piece and was inspired to use it to write my own straight-shooting inspiration about what I’ve learned from my writing career. I hope you like it.
Thank you, Nora Ephron for the inspiration and the laughs.