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| Harlan Ellison. One of the most prolific pulp writers ever. Courtesy the NYTimes. |
Do you write
only when you feel like writing? Perhaps you consider yourself a hobbiest and
you don’t much care about making a profit from your words. It could be that you have a day job, preferably one you like, and you don’t need the money that can
potentially come from your writing. If that’s the case, may you go with God and
prosper.
But what
about the rest of us who write for a living, be it as a freelance writer, journalist,
blogger, nonfiction book author, fiction book author, or a rather strange and
stressful all-of-the-above combination? We have no choice but to profit from
our words, one by bloody one, or else the rent doesn’t get paid...The food doesn’t
get served...The car gets repossessed. The words stop flowing, the cash stops
coming in. What’s the only choice you have left? Getting the dreaded day job.
I'd rather hang from the ceiling by my nipples.
Writing School
In writing
school, I wrote far more material than was required by my professors. I wrote
so many words, I drove some of them nuts. But when I told
them that I planned on making a career out of my writing…that I planned on “entertaining”
readers...I was only derided, and laughed at behind my back when the professors
returned to their dorms for the evening. Well, laugh it up, because while you’re
still teaching the same thing over and over again, year after year, I’ve sold
hundreds of thousands of books and made close to a million bucks in the past
ten years alone. And I’m not even close to being as popular an author as say
the Dan Browns of the world, or even uber-successful indie authors like Hugh Howey or JR Rain.
The Value of the Written Word: Pay the Writer
Words should
be exchanged for cold hard cash. I’m a staunch believer that if your words get
printed, you should be paid for them. Sadly, we no longer get paid for
everything we write. With the advent of the Internet, our words have become
democratized. Blogs like this one are all the rage, but so are YouTube videos,
Tweets, Facebook Posts, and more. I’ve even written for some stellar
publications that no longer pay (they shall go unnamed). Payment, they say, is
exposure, or perhaps the reader will pay indirectly by buying one of my books.
I find this appalling on one hand, but reality on the other.
Writers have
always had to beg and grovel to get ahead. Why should that change now?
Proliferation
What’s a
writer to do? Quite simply, write. I’m not necessarily a speed demon at the
typewriter, but I can easily write 2,000 new fiction words a day while also
leaving time for blogs like this one and/or magazine articles. What’s 2,000
words a day equate to? Approximately one new novel per month. That’s a lot of books.
My ability to do this day in and day out means that I’ve accomplished what I
set out to do in writing school, when the profs were having a good belly laugh.
Proliferation is Profit but…
Just because
I can, theoretically write one novel per month, doesn’t mean I should be
publishing one novel per month. Over the course of three years, I’ve published
maybe thirty products, most of them under my own imprint, Bear Media, and some
of them with publishers like Thomas & Mercer (Amazon Publishing Imprints),
Down & Out Books, and Polis Books (I'm what they call a hybrid author). My belief was that the more content the
better. That might hold true for the romance genre, but as it turns out, it
doesn’t necessarily hold true for the crime, hard-boiled mystery, and thriller
genres.
Flooding the Market
I believe at
present there’s something like six million books available on Amazon. You might
ask yourself, How the hell can I compete?
The market is flooded. But I firmly believe that I’m only competing against my
own genre(s). Maybe there’s far more thrillers available today than when I
first started, but many of them are subpar or aren’t really competition anyway.
However, when I flood my own market with too much of my own work, I actually
rob myself of royalties. Even if the Beatles had put out a new record every
month for ten years, there would have come a time when they would have been
stretched just a little too thin, and sales would have suffered. One must give
one’s readers (and listeners) a chance to keep up. One must give them a chance to breathe, or so I've discovered.
Proliferation to Profit Conclusion
After
speaking candidly with one of my publishers, 2020 will usher in a new phase for
me, in which I will only publish one full-length novel per quarter. This should
give my readers both old and new, a chance to catch up with all of my published
works. It doesn’t mean I might not put out a novella or a short story or two in
between, but full-length works will be released one once per quarter. That
should make everyone happy, including my publishers and my wallet.
In this new golden
era of writing and publishing, proliferation is extremely important if not
necessary. But man was not made to eat a full meal, every hour on the hour. He
was made to eat three squares per day. Anything beyond that, and you just make
yourself sick.
Vincent Zandri's lastest novel is The Extortionist.
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