The Changing World for Writers

It is difficult to pick just one career for your whole life. It is difficult because not only do your own tastes and desires change, but the world changes too. In the 1960s and 1970s, reporters used typewriters. The fax machine was startling new technology. In the eighties, reporters typed their articles on computers, and had access to a few elite online tools such as Nexus, but they mostly worked in the same ways that they had before. In the 1990s, newspapers and the Internet began to merge, but no one knew what model they would take. Newspapers tried to be the same, and it cost them. In the 2000s, people began to bypass newspapers and print media altogether. It became possible to strike out on your own and gain a genuine following online.

Print media is in trouble

Now, as we enter a new decade, print media is in genuine trouble. Newspapers have long been in decline and magazines are following, sunk not only by the speed of online information, but by the rising costs of mail delivery. Book publishing is also making rapid changes. Bestsellers are still bestsellers, but for the first time, online books are starting to make real headway. The iPad and the Kindle are now solid sources for books. This has made self-publishing and small press publishing more viable than they have been in years. When you can search for what you want online, the press to get on shelves at stores is lessened somewhat. It becomes more important to be the book that people search for, rather than the book that publishers promote.

You are not as ready as you think

If you are on the cusp of the technological wave, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. Sure, blogs are more popular, but a livable income as a blogger is still a challenge. The same goes for podcasting and social media. You hear about the people who make money at it, but you hear about them because they are the exception rather than the rule. People are more immune to advertising than ever before, and if they aren’t buying something, you aren’t going to make much money.

There is no roadmap

Change is in motion, and accelerating. The financial landscape of publishing and media in general is in the midst of a major transition, and there is no definitive idea of where it will end up. This makes picking a career, especially in the writing field, a tricky matter. We currently live in a crowded publishing world. Anyone who wants to publish can. That brings great freedom, but it pushes the level of competition through the roof. When media was controlled by a few gatekeepers, the goal was to get past the gate. Now, the big gatekeepers are still there, and can still offer a measure of success, but your true competition is the crowd. When everyone can be heard, it becomes increasingly difficult to stand out. When someone else is offering what you have for free, it is very hard to charge.

Fortune favors the adaptable

My point is that if you want to have a career as a writer, be prepared for change. Be prepared for an entire world of competition, but also a world of possible readers. Understand that the way you make money writing today may soon change and that you will have to adapt to that change. We see this most in the freelance world, but don’t be surprised if corporate writing world follows. No one is immune to change.

10 Ways to Make Editors Hate You Before They Even Know You

You wouldn’t think that writers would want to make editors hate them. Unfortunately, judging by terrible submissions writers keep sending in, that must be the goal. Always one to give guidance, even when it is bad guidance, I offer this short guide to making editors hate you.

Don’t get to the point. Editors are very busy. When they read a query letter or a submission cover, what they really want to know is what you are proposing and how it fits their needs. The longer you can keep yourself from telling them that, the better your chances of getting an editor to hate you.

Don’t use enough postage. Guess what? No one is going to pay the mailman just to see your submission. If you really want to aggravate an editor, send your submissions via certified mail and make them sign for it.

Get the editor’s name wrong. There’s no quicker way to get on an editor’s bad side than to misspell their name. This is a great way to get your query letter thrown away before it even gets opened. While you’re at it, get their title wrong too. That should ensure a quick trip to the garbage can.

Ignore the editor’s needs. Send the editor of an arts journal an article about ways to avoid a hangover. Send your proposal for a microwave recipe book to a publisher specializing in historical fiction. It may not quite make the editor hate you, but it will certainly be good for a laugh.

Insult other people’s work. The book you’re proposing? It’s way better than any other book in the genre and the editor should know that. Take the time to insult the competition. If you get lucky, you may just insult something the editor has worked on in the past. That should really tick them off.

Send the editor a letter that stinks. Chances are, your proposal will stink anyway. What I mean is send them one that smells bad. Smoke while you write it, or scent it with perfume. While you’re at it, use an obnoxious paper color like pink or orange. Make your query as unpleasant to smell as it is to read.

Talk money. Make it clear in the first few sentences that you expect a certain amount of money for your efforts and you will accept nothing less. Whether your demands are in the editor’s range or not doesn’t matter. Your demands will make them hate you either way.

Tell the editor how much your friends and family love your work. If you’re really out to convince the editor that you know next to nothing about the publishing industry, including the opinions of people the editor doesn’t know and has no reason to respect ought to do it.

Try to sound cocky and sarcastic. You know you’ve got the goods, why should you try to be polite and businesslike? This should make it clear to the editor just how big of a hassle it will be to work with you. Note: Feel free to use this article as a guide.

Use a cheap printer, or better yet, a typewriter. Nothing screams “not worth the effort to read” more than poorly printed, smudged text.

How to Calculate Potential Book Profits

Most writers have no idea how much money they can expect when their book is published. The formula, however, is fairly straightforward. To begin with, a writer generally receives an advance. An advance is payment, in advance, based on the expected initial earnings of the book. It is a negotiable amount, but once the publisher pays this to the writer, the advance belongs to the writer whether or not the book ever sells a copy. Advances range from a few thousand dollars to over a million dollars for well-known celebrity writers. If you are an unknown writer, your advance should range from nothing to about twenty-thousand dollars in the United States. Some first time-writers negotiate more, but that is the usual range.

In order to make the writer more money than the advance, a book has to sell well. If it does, your payment as the author comes from royalties, which you can calculate using the system below. A book that sells moderately well, but is not a bestseller, may or may not make the author a few extra thousand dollars. Royalties (ranging from 4% to 8% in most cases) are generally based on the cover price of the book, but that does not include books that are discounted or remaindered. So, for the sake of argument, say you sold 20,000 full-price copies of a paperback priced at $7 (I know it would more likely be $6.95 but I am going to use round numbers.) If your royalty percentage were a generous 8% you would make a total of $11,200.

Now remember that your advance is an advance on these royalties, so your publisher would subtract the initial advance from the $11,200. If your initial advance equaled $10,000 you would eventually receive $1,200 in additional royalties. An author who makes a total of $50,000 or more from a fiction book should consider himself or herself to be doing very well. For the sake of argument, however, let us say that Oprah Winfrey chooses your book for her book club and you sell 500,000 copies of your book. With this same formula, at 8% you would make $280,000 and would have no trouble finding a publisher and getting a big advance for your next book.

Surprisingly, the publisher does not make most of the money from your book. The party that makes the most money off the sale of a book is the retailer. By the time a publisher pays all of the related expenses of publishing a book (production, distribution, salaries, promotion, etc.), they generally clear a profit of about a dollar a book for a book with sales of about 20,000. Therefore, the publisher made more than you, but not that much more and they took on all the risk. Remember, if the book never sells a copy, you still get to keep your advance.

For this reason, the market for mid-range books (under 100,000 copy sellers) is very tough, and major publishers are looking for books they expect to sell in large numbers. This is why it is hard to get a fiction book published in today’s market. A first-time author or even an author with modest previous sales is going to have a hard time finding a publisher. When they do, they can expect very little by way of promotion because the publisher expects so little return for their investment.

If you do get your book published, and you want it to sell well, be prepared to spend a great deal of your own time marketing the book. Most authors think it should be up to the publisher to promote the sale of the book, but the author is the one who really needs to be out there making phone calls to bookstores, lining up press interviews and setting up readings and signings.

Is Demand Studios the new Associated Press?

I recently wrote an opinion piece defending Demand Studios after another blogger chose to label them as a scam based on the fact that their pay is somewhat low and they make frequent requests for rewrites of articles. I still side with Demand Studios on that issue, but I do want to point out a better (though not perfect) article about Demand Studios at ReadWriteWeb. This article doesn’t try to portray the writers as victims but rather tries to analyze the effect of such a large content mill on the Internet as a whole. The basic premise is that Demand Studios has a content creation system in place (using both automation and live reviewers) that results in an assembly-line style article that RWW compares to Henry Ford’s original automobile production line. The article takes issue with the quality of the content being produced, and that is a more legitimate criticism than the exploitation of writers.

4000 Articles a Day

According to the RWW piece, Demand Studios produces approximately 4000 articles a day through its combination of freelancers and editors. The one issue that I have with the article is that they use this as an indictment of the quality. They ask:

The bigger question is: there are surely many examples of good Demand Media content on the Web, but how many of the 4,000 articles it produces every day aren’t?

To me this is a poor argument. Yes, I’m sure that some of the 4000 articles aren’t great, but no one can judge what the percentage of this is so it is a specious question. I mainly read blogs by single authors. Mass produced blogs leave me a little cold. As a follower of individuals I can tell you that even the best bloggers put out lousy articles on occasion. Lord knows I do. No one is brilliant every day.

The better point the article makes is that the Demand Studios assembly line style and fast turnaround time creates a certain sameness to the articles being written, that there is a Demand Studios style, and it isn’t very interesting or incisive. I don’t read enough of their types of articles (like I said, I follow individual bloggers) to know if this is true, but it seems like a legitimate possibility.

In the Eighties the Definition of a Content Mill was “Associated Press”

Way back in the eighties, I served as the Associated Press Wire Editor for my college newspaper. Having an AP feed back then was as close as you could get to having Google News now. Article after article printed out on the dot matrix printer they provided, and I looked at them all (while dressed in my linen Miami Vice jacket) to see if they were relevant. I can tell you that AP’s style (they do have their own stylebook after all) was pretty bland even then. For most articles, you got the facts, and nothing but the facts. There was little room for color or individuality. A single article might get published in 500 different newspapers all over the world. Any sort of colorful writing had to be killed in case someone out there didn’t get it, or worse, was offended by it. Another interesting similarity between the Associated Press and Demand Studios is that AP has always used a number of low-paid writers (they call them stringers) to freelance for them. In the eighties, the saying was, “You can’t spell stupid without UPI and you can’t spell cheap without AP.”

Obviously Demand Studios is not identical to AP. The journalistic standards and the general level of talent at AP are considerably higher than at Demand Studios. AP is more selective about who they hire and more stringent about the sources for their articles. It is the similarities though, not the differences, that catch my eye. Both organizations tap a worldwide pool of writers. Both organizations exist to provide content to other organizations. Both organizations rely heavily on freelance work. Most importantly, both organizations have writing philosophies based on a universal cookie-cutter style.

I believe that sort of generic writing was the beginning of the end for newspapers, and I think that it can only have limited success on the Internet. A certain number of people will be satisfied with these articles, and search engines may never be able to tell good articles from bad articles, but there will always be plenty of room for individuals with distinctive voices to keep writing. A loyal audience that comes back again and again is in most cases preferable to a large number of casual readers who never return.

Demand Studios is a company that is filling a content niche quite successfully. The fact that they have enough writers and customers to be publishing 4000 articles a day shows that they are filling a need that exists on both sides. That said, if someone else comes up with a better way to do it, then the market will change again. I think Demand Studios does a lot of things well, but I also think there is plenty of room for improvement. If they can make a profit doing things their way, then surely someone who improves on the concept can do even better.

For Further Information:

• Is Demand Studios Worth Your Time?
• The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model
• About Hub Pages: An Interview with Ryan “Hup” Hupfer
• FakeAPStylebook on Twitter

How to Write Quality Query Letters: Be real, specific

When a potential publisher reads your query letter, you want to excite them, but don’t promise something you can’t deliver. Not only would this make it difficult for you if you did get the assignment, but a good editor can easily spot ideas that are too broad or unrealistic to make it into their publication. The best query ideas are specific and achievable. For example, if you were pitching an article for a men’s magazine, How To Make Any Woman Go Home with You is general and unrealistic (not to mention creepy) but Six Pickup Lines that Won’t Make You Look Like a Jerk is a little more specific and a little more realistic.

There are two advantages to pitching very specific subjects. The first is that it makes you look more knowledgeable. Specificity and knowledge go hand in hand. Anyone can pitch an idea about picking up women. Even “six pickup lines” is general. If you dig deeper, you might find a more unique perspective. For example, if you have studied linguistics, you might pitch, Why Your Pickup Lines Don’t Work, Six Tips from a Cunning Linguist. If you used to be a bartender you might pitch, The Bartender’s Guide to Picking up Women: Six lines that never work (and three that do).

The second advantage of specificity is that it reduces the risk of you pitching the same idea as someone else. The last thing you want is to pitch a topic your potential publisher has seen (or even published) before. There are limits to how much research a writer can do into the past topics at a magazine, especially if you want to spend more time writing articles than pitching them. Specificity gives you the best chance at originality.

Realistic ideas are the other side of that coin. If you don’t know anything about pickup lines, don’t pitch an article about them. Your query letter should start with some flash, but the body of your letter is going to have to back up that flash. You will need to give examples of what you intend to write about. You not only have to convince your potential publisher that your idea is perfect for them; you have to convince them that you can turn that idea into a great article. If you can’t convince them you are the right person to write the article, your great idea won’t help you.

Glossary of Publishing Terms

After our recent comments discussion, I thought it would be a good idea to compile a small, publishing-related glossary, so we agree on our terms. Please note that these definitions are geared toward book publication and our discussion is geared toward the publication of poetry books.

• Acquisitions Editor: An editor whose job it is to find new books and authors to publish.
• Advance: Money paid by a publisher to an author for the right to publish a book. It is called an advance because it is payment on “potential” royalties in advance. In other words, until your book sells enough copies to generate a percentage of profits above what you have been paid in advance, you will not receive any more money.
• Backlist: A list of books, published more than twelve months earlier, which are available for sale from a publisher.
• Best seller: A fairly ambiguous term that will be applied by a publisher to just about any book that makes a profit.
• Book proposal: A sales tool consisting of information about a possible book that an author sends to a publisher. The proposal often includes sample chapters, an outline, a discussion of possible markets and a list of the author’s credentials. The goal of the author is to persuade the publisher to pay to produce the book and to share the profits with the author.
• E-book: A book produced digitally, often in the absence of a printed book.
• First printing: The number of books produced in the initial print run.
• In print: A book that is still available to be ordered directly through the publisher.
• Independent bookseller: A locally owned book store that is not affiliated with a large chain such as Barnes & Noble or Borders. Independent booksellers, in general, are more likely to display and sell books by local authors.
• ISBN: Short for International Standard Book Number. This number is required if a book is to be stocked or available to order by a major chain or sold through an online publisher. If a book is only going to be sold directly by the author (such as at readings or through a personal web site) an ISBN is not required.
• Midlist book: A book acquired by a publisher for a relatively small advance and given a smaller print run and less publicity than a book that the publisher expects to be a best seller.
• Niche book: A book that is aimed at a smaller market of possible buyers. Most books of poetry are considered niche books because few of these books sell more than 5000 copies. Many “how-to” books also fall into the niche category.
• Out-of-print: A book that can no longer be ordered directly from the publisher.
• Print-on-demand: A book publishing process mainly associated with self-publishing, in which a book is printed in small runs (sometimes as small as a single book) from an electronic file. This process makes it possible to produce niche books more cheaply.
• Publisher: A company or individual who is in charge of producing, printing and distributing a book or other material.
• Publishing: The process of producing, printing and distributing a book or other material.
• Review Copy: A free copy of a book that is sent to the media with the hope that the book will be reviewed.
• Royalty: The percentage of book sale profits paid to the author.
• SASE: Self-addressed, stamped envelope. Often used when submitting a query to make it easier for the editor/publisher to respond.
• Self-publishing: The production, printing and distribution of a book (or other material) by the author of the book or at the author’s expense, rather than by a third-party publishers.
• Slush pile: Unsolicited (not requested) queries/manuscripts that may or may not get read by the editor or (more likely) an assistant.

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