Not getting published? Vent here!
There was once a time when I said I’d never self-publish – too much to do (being every department in your own enterprise) and not enough time to concentrate on what’s important: writing.
However, that was before, back when I’d only dabbled with some submissions in traditional markets and received the expected rejection slips. That was fine. Back then.
Now, however, I’m enlightened. Yes, Houston, we are live!
I took the plunge. My first leap into self-publishing.
It’s just a wee short story, not a novel. An interesting and not too daunting learning curve. And why not? Much less editing time and it gets my stuff out there. This decision stems from the shreddings of my absolute frustration with the traditional publishing carousel. It’s a familiar story, I’m sure. (Hands up who has an experience similar to this).
For those of you non-writey folks, or those of you who haven’t started yet, this is how it works:
You spend years ‘getting good’, under the belief that good writing gets published, and those other folks (you know, the ‘chancers’) will stay at the back of the queue because they haven’t even tried to ‘get good’, just want a quick buck, or see their names in lights. Or some such.
You write what you like. You start with some short stories, maybe, to test the waters. You spend time crafting characters you love or find interesting. You agonise over every comma and should you make that one sentence its own paragraph for effect, or does it sit better alongside the previous one? You send it out; it gets rejected. So you hunt for another publication, and another. It all takes up a lot of time, just finding somewhere you think might fit. You’ve already moved onto the next project and you want to be left to get on with it.
Even just searching the zillions of short story markets takes time, let alone crafting the cover letter, author bio, and formatting to their requirements, if necessary and they often vary. Then they want you to buy the mag, read it, see if you’ll fit. This takes up more time (away from your own writing), but you do it, and you write something you think will suit their publication. You might even write to a theme or a specification. And always they say: it must be well written and well edited, so you go to great pains to ensure it is just that. You send it in. You get a response: thanks, but this isn’t what we’re looking for.
??
But I wrote to your specifications, I spent years ‘getting good’, I put it up for critique, I spent weeks editing that two thousand words story to balanced perfection, and I read your magazine to see if it would ‘fit’.
And nobody has the time, or perhaps the inclination, to tell you exactly why it is the story was rejected. With form rejections, or polite but inexact personal ones, you can’t even take stock of your strategy and see if there is something you can tweak. There also seems to be a belief that writers are such fragile creatures they can’t handle the truth, even if it is said in all politeness, and must be protected, like children.
Then you get the feeling that editors are after that next ‘big’ thing: high concepts, unique dilemmas or styles, diverse characters – as in, they must be of any ethnicity other than white/western, they must be gay, or at least unsure, or have some kind of disability. I support writing diverse characters, but I don’t tell my characters what to do, nor force them to be something they are not, just like with my kids. As one writer acquaintance put it, what if you just wrote a good story with a character you like about something that interested you? Is that no longer enough?
I’m not a high concept writer; my strengths lie more with building character, looking for the quirkier sides of people, or the grey areas in between good and bad, dark and light. Does that mean I’m shafted? Are you really telling me that there are no readers out there who would like this type of fiction?
And each time you submit that one story – to markets that pay peanuts, or competitions where it’s you who pays to enter – there’s a wait of maybe a month, three months, six – possibly nine! And while there are markets out there who don’t mind you submitting to them and everyone else, there’s many that do mind. So you have one story that, on condition it is accepted, will earn you maybe £100-150. It sits in their database for approximately three months, or more, and in that whole time you can’t submit it elsewhere. Then they say ‘no’.
So you start again.
Under the ‘no simultaneous subs’ rule, this limits that one particular story to maybe four submissions per year. For 150 quid. Or it might only be twenty.
No wonder they say there’s no money in writing.
You start to feel more like a circus act, not a writer, jumping through all these hoops. Hey folks, why not set those hoops on fire, just to make it really exciting? And cover me in paraffin – let’s see how I light up! Not enough? Oh. Well, at least I have a stack of magazines I can read. Maybe I’ll set those alight and make myself feel better. Or not; they’re mostly digital now. Bugger it.
And the whole time, the ‘chancers’ seem to be getting published.
Then there are the literary mags. Those are the ones where you need a university degree in creative writing to be published, otherwise you’re not arty enough, or zany enough, or maybe just not insightful or deep enough. But they pay almost nothing. You do it for the credits, because you’re ‘serious’ about writing.
With all these markets, there’s an ever creeping feeling that you stand no chance unless you can bring a built-in audience along with your fiction. Chicken; egg, anyone? I’ll have Salad Cream with that, thanks.
So you write more, churn them out. Surely that will work. Well, maybe. But you still have to find ‘your’ market, your home.
Sometimes it feels like if you write bland crap you stand more of a chance. Bland crap doesn’t offend anyone. Bland crap is the happy clappy club where the favourite flavour is vanilla. Bland crap is more marketable to the masses. For example, Mumsie markets pay higher than most other places, but you have to write about marriage, kids, gardening and such-like. How not to burn a cake (stop drinking the cooking wine helps). And being ‘good’ doesn’t necessarily cut it, because you wrote to market and often that counts for more.
Know your market. That’s what they say.
But what if your market doesn’t yet exist? Or, it’s so small that the magazines serving that market is like some little bitty star out on the other side of the universe and there will never be a telescope big enough to see that far out? Then what do you do? In a world that seems hell-bent on squeezing out any alternative forms of culture and society in favour of stock drones, how do you find this market, this Holy Grail; your niche? Sometimes it feels like mankind will find a habitable planet sooner than we will find a suitable fiction market.
I understand why the publishing industry works like this; at our mag, we too ask for exclusivity during the submissions period, and I get it – I do! We don’t have a huge circulation yet, though we are growing. But at the very least we try to get through the outright rejects as soon as possible, the potential-but-not-quite-there-yets within a couple of weeks (after much discussion). For the ones we’re seriously considering, we notify the authors we’re holding the piece and how long they have to wait until final voting. That way, if we reject them, they know they came close and have the gumption to keep going.
Knowing why the industry works like this, though, doesn’t make it any less frustrating from a writer’s point of view.
The publishing carousel is just too slow to make writing – for most – anything more than a fun hobby. This is why the whole industry around writing these days is set up to take money from authors rather than give it – because it is largely seen as being a hobby. A side-line. Something you do outside of your paid job, or in your retirement, despite the enormity of the task (and its aftermath: selling and marketing), and gives way to the rise in vanity publishers. There are novelists who have endured over decades – centuries! – and have influenced our societies in a multitude of ways. People listen to writers. And yet, we are undervalued and under supported. And definitely underpaid.
Well, it often feels that way. (A topic for another day.)
We’re told not to talk about it, because sounding bitter wouldn’t be good for one’s future career, but it’s not bitterness to express an opinion that this barrier that still exists around traditional publishing feels exclusive, archaic and ripe for change.
Cue self-publishing. Knocking down the walls between reader and writer.
Now I get it, why so many people have turned to it. Who wants to sit around growing old, waiting for that email to come through saying, Yes! – We want to buy your work? But we’ll only pay you twenty quid because we only sell a hundred copies per edition. What’s important – finding readers, or receiving validation from an editor? An editor who, even though you set fire to your own hair while jumping those hoops, is still just one reader, or four. Of anything I’ve learned about ‘getting good’ is that the story reading experience is subjective, no matter who you are, and you have less control over who ‘gets’ your fiction or likes it than how to employ effective narrative techniques. Taste is not a point you can argue, or change.
(I should just state here that I do believe in having your work read by others for the purpose of improvement. I always hand my stories over to other people to critique and to beta-read.)
So, will I stop submitting to the trads?
No.
I’m going to do both. I still believe in the power of the traditional publishing industry, even if I do think it needs a more updated model. Publishing via the trads not only opens up to new readers — even if it’s a small niche — it creates important networks. Support. People who will spread the word that You. Are. Here. I also understand that collecting rejections is a rite of passage, a bit like smoking pot when you're a teenager. But I can’t sit around on my hands waiting for something to happen to me, or for me. I, like many a protagonist in their own story, need to take action, make things happen, move the plot forward, so to speak, even if it is just one minor step up a very long ladder.
And while I do search for my fictional home, or ‘locale’, I’m getting my work out there and keeping my impatience at bay (of which I have a great deal). I’ve chosen stories that I think will be hard to place in the trads, but that most convey my voice. I don’t expect to make any money from them, but at least if someone cares to look, they can get a taste of what I do. My genre focused fiction (fantasy, mostly) I’ll continue to put onto the carousel. I’ll blog more about my reasons for why another time. (I have a cunning plan. We’ll see if it pays off).
But most the most important thing from this decision is that I enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed designing my own book cover, which, for a first go, isn’t even half bad (and yes, I started designing more, even for stories I haven’t finished!). I used to be excellent at art when I was a kid, and this has just rejuvenated that kick. And it wasn’t even as hard as I first thought.
So, need to vent? Feel free in the comments (but please keep it polite — there’s a difference between venting and flaming. Or being a psychopath). Tell me your frustrations with your publishing — or not-yet-published — experiences, or what you’ve decided to do to further your efforts, other than waiting.
And if you do care for a taste of what I do, here’s the link for my first officially published short story. The first, but not the last.