I know I said I was going to let Writing 101 rest a while, but a few recent conversations have made this post seem necessary. Lately I’ve run into quite a few young writers who seem to be lacking very rudimentary knowledge of how the publishing business works.
I wish we could meet in person. If we could do that, in a room with a big white board and a nice assortment of colored markers, I could lay it all out for you in a single image, and then we could have a conversation about it. Since we don’t have that luxury, you’ll have to settle for this crude and hastily sketched-out scribble, with some comments.
Think of publishing as an inverted funnel: a stack of ascending and ever narrower chokepoints. I use an inverted funnel because this way a.) it looks less like Dante’s map of Hell, and b.) at the top, you find—
THE WORLD
The world is a wonderful place. It’s big, and beautiful, and full of readers, who are the people you want to reach. If you’re not writing with the objective of reaching readers, you are setting yourself up for frustration from the start.
The World is actually much bigger than it used to be. When I began to write for publication, “The World” basically meant the North American English-language market, with some potential crossover into the U.K. market. Now, it truly does mean the world, as in the entire population of the planet Earth. This presents both challenges and opportunities.
The foremost challenge for you as a writer is to fight your way up through this stack of ever-tighter funnels, to get your work out into The World and into the hands of the readers who live there. All else is subsidiary to this goal.
THE CRITICAL CHOKEPOINT
This is in hot pink because I couldn’t find a way to make it flash in some even worse eyesore of a color. We’ll get back to this in a minute, but think of this as the final challenge: the Boss Monster you will face on the last step your hero’s journey.
This boss monster has a name, and it’s name is Amazon, and it will pretend to be your friend, but really, it wants to drink your blood.
PUBLISHERS
This should be more of a wide, smeared, and cloudy bar, as there are a lot of different publishers of different sizes and with different agendas, but making it a smaller bar emphasizes the constricting nature of the funnel. There are a few large publishers, who can afford to pay authors large advances and put major marketing muscle behind new book releases, but there are fewer of these every day, as companies merge and consolidate. There are a plethora of smaller publishers, many of whom serve some religious or quasi-religious agenda, or else that are more directly coupled with their ownership, and thus are typically short on resources and funding.
With the exception of religious and/or grant-funded/non-profit publishers, all publishers work for the owners of their organizations and have the same job. It is to acquire content and put it out into the world, with the intention of moving a large enough number of copies of that content to make a profit by doing so. This means publishers have a built-in aversion to taking risks, and a bias towards making conservative choices when acquiring content. They want content they can get as cheaply as possible, and that will require as little production and marketing expenditure as possible, while immediately appealing to the largest clearly identified audience known.
The green dashed lines represent paths to the world that publishers used to have available to them—e.g., through independent distributors, direct sales, or independent bookstores—but that are increasingly more difficult to use now, if not completely defunct. Most publishers now depend on passing through the Critical Chokepoint to reach the World.
EDITORS
Editors work for publishers. There are many different kinds of editors, but the ones we are interested in are the ones who have the power to acquire content for their publisher. Their success depends on their being able to present their publisher with content that can be published profitably, on-time and on or under budget, with as little time and money as possible being invested into making it publishable. Therefore editors have a built-in bias towards considering submissions that “look professional” and buying work that aligns with their publisher’s current marketing goals.
AGENTS
Writers have a lot of misconceptions about literary agents. You don’t need to have an agent to break into publishing. True, some agents do function as pre-filters for editors, as certain editors and publishers will work only with literary agents. Basically, though, if you are not already famous, either for your previous books or for your accomplishments in some other field, this doesn’t apply to you. You are unlikely to attract the attention of one of these kinds of agents.
At heart, reputable literary agents are essentially commissioned salespeople. They make their money by taking a percentage off the top when they sell an author’s work to a publisher. As such, they have a built-in bias towards representing works they believe they can move very quickly, for as much cash up-front as possible—which means novels, not short stories. Some reputable agents will handle shorter work, but usually just as a courtesy, and only for someone for whom they are also selling novels.
I use the qualifier “reputable” because there are a lot of people out there who claim to be agents but really are parasites, feeding off the hopes and dreams of aspiring writers, and it is really easy to attract the attention of these kinds of agents. Remember: the money always flows to the writer. Any so-called agent who wants money from you in order to represent you is a creature to be avoided.
AUTHORS (YOU)
At last, we come to the place where most writers begin: with thinking about themselves and their writing. By inverting the funnel, I hope this helps you to think of publishing as a game, through which you, the writer, must keep striving to level-up until you at last achieve victory.
I made the Authors cloud messy and chaotic because for most writers, it is. A lot of aspiring authors write like mad, but go nowhere. Some get stuck in loops and keep repeating the same self-defeating mistakes. Looking at the drawing now, I should have drawn at least a few lines that went straight to ground, because I’ve seen so many authors do that.
Some authors believe they need an Agent to take them to the next level, but in the early stages of your writing career, you don’t. At this stage, the best an agent can do for you is to help you negotiate better contract terms, if you have written a novel and succeeded in getting a publisher interested in it. For most writers, though, time spent chasing after signing with an agent is time wasted.
For most aspiring writers (speaking in sweeping generalities again), the best path forward is to work on developing good relationships with Editors. Don’t get too attached to any particular one, as editors serve at the pleasure of their publishers, who serve at the pleasure of their owners, who can change their marketing direction at the merest whim of the Great Boss Monster. But in general, learning to work well with editors is the most useful skill you can develop early in your writing career. Editors are typically the gatekeepers controlling access to publishers.
I have seen writers bypass editors and go straight to Publishers. It doesn’t happen often, and it succeeds even less often, but to my astonishment, I have seen it work, once in a rare while. I have even seen writers bypass publishers entirely and go directly to The World, but that succeeds even less often.
The greatest danger at this level of the game is this. An author will look at their ever-growing collection of form rejections; look at all the traps and obstacles still lying in wait before them, and especially at all the conservative biases built into the game—
[N.B. I don’t mean “conservative” in the political or social sense. In this context it means, “What’s the safe choice? What’s going to be most profitable for the least effort? What is everyone else doing?” Depending on the zeitgeist, “conservative” might very well mean publishing yet another fangporn vampire romance with an LGBTQ+ protagonist.]—and declare, “SCREW THIS! I’LL BECOME MY OWN PUBLISHER!”
Whereupon they hurl themselves with all their might into The Critical Chokepoint…
And the Great Boss Monster feasts on their blood.
BUT WAIT! THERE IS YET CAUSE FOR HOPE!
COMING NEXT:
“The Great Boss Monster, and What Lies Beyond”
In science fiction circles Bruce Bethke is best known either for his 1980 short story, “Cyberpunk,” his 1995 Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, Headcrash, or lately, as the editor and publisher of Stupefying Stories.
What very few people in the SF world have known about him until
recently is that he actually began his career in the music industry, as a
member of the design team that developed the MIDI interface and the
Finale music notation engine (among other things), but spent most of his career in
supercomputer software R&D, doing work that was absolutely
fascinating to do but almost impossible to explain to anyone not already
fluent in Old High Unix and well-grounded in massively parallel
processor architectures, Fourier transformations, and computational
fluid dynamics.Now retired, he runs Rampant Loon Press, just for the sheer love of genre fiction and the short story form.
