The Business Rusch: How To Make Traditional Publishing Writer-Friendly

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 A few weeks ago, Sebastian Marshall raised eyebrows throughout the writing community by writing an open letter to Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster.  Marshall identifies himself on his blog as a former entrepreneur who wants to become “the most skilled strategist of our era.” He freelances, and sold S&S his first book in December of 2010 for a $65,000 advance.

The book—which is a business book—had a due date of July 1, 2011. The contract called for payments in three increments. A third on signing, a third on acceptance, a third on publication, but no later than a year after acceptance. Standard stuff.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with publishing, this isn’t a large advance, especially considering the fact that it’s for world rights in all languages. For non-fiction, it’s a relatively middling advance, especially these days. Just so that you have a frame of reference.

His open letter says things went downhill from the moment the deal got made. And by downhill, he means that it took until March to get his final contract. Then he got his signing check six weeks after that.

Here’s the thing, y’all: this is normal. In fact, this is fast for traditional publishing.  Amazingly, he got a deal the week before Christmas (it almost never happens).  Then, factoring in the winter holidays, which were relatively short in 2010-2011 in publishing time, going only from December 24 to January 3 (meaning no one of import was in the office at that time, if anyone was there at all), the fact that he got his contract in the first quarter after the holidays ended is pretty startling. That’s the quarter it was due.

The book was (is?) clearly fast-tracked.

The six weeks from signing to payment might not be the publisher’s fault. They might have paid quicker, but the money had to go through an agent. Marshall didn’t say whether it took six-plus weeks for the check to arrive in his account or in his agent’s office. (I have had no agent who could cut a check within a week. Most took two, and one of the major agencies I was with took almost a month to cut a check. That’s right: they held onto my money for a month for no real reason except “policy.”)

So when I first read Marshall’s piece, I had the same thought his agent and editor had: He’s new. He’ll learn.

Then I read what he had to say.  Really read it.

In addition to the payment issues, he ran into another feature of publishing. Remember his business book got purchased because he’s a good businessman. In particular, he knows marketing and marketing strategy. So right after the book sold, he talked to the entire editorial team about his marketing ideas.

And the publisher didn’t implement a single idea. Again, not  unusual. Really, not. Except that someone kept giving the poor man deadlines to meet marketing goals as well as to write his book. For ideas no one planned to implement. That was just cruel.

But, folks, it’s normal for the editorial team to make marketing promises, and then go to the marketing team, only to have the  marketing team reject those promises. Marshall calls S&S out on that, not realizing that the entire industry is this way.

He writes:

“Here’s the thing—it’s the  year 2011, and you guys lack basic technology calendaring. Your editors don’t work with your marketers. There’s no rudimentary project management in place. There’s no consistency or fairness or transparency in the author’s contract process. You guys don’t keep your own promises….I think the system is the problem, it’s broken, and it should be fixed.”

Yep. That’s right.  For more than ten years, my husband Dean Wesley Smith and I have taught professional writers how to work inside  that system because it’s crazy-making if you don’t understand it.  A single writer can’t change it.  And if there weren’t alternatives these days, I would shrug and write off Sebastian Marshall as a guy who needs to learn how the business works.

But he’s not just some new writer who needs a clue. He’s a businessman who understands how to make businesses efficient. And he’s aware of what’s going on in other businesses, and the other options in his new business of writing.

And in this piece he writes something very important. He writes:

“I think you really ought to speed up. It’s not so hard. Modern businesses run fast, there’s people who know how to make that happen. Three months from agreement in principle to contract, followed by a six week breaching-of-contract delay? Not okay.”

You really ought to speed up. Modern businesses run fast.

They do run fast. Traditional publishing does not. It runs on 20^th century time. Early, pre-computer 20^th century time. For example, in today’s mail, Dean just got an advanced reading copy of a book he agreed to blurb, a book with a publication date of 2013. (You read that right. 2013. Spring. Eighteen months from now. And the book is done except for the proofing.)

Now realize as you read Marshall’s post, that nothing has gone wrong. His traditional publishing experience is—by traditional publishing standards—a damn good one.

He got a nice advance, he’s been treated well by the Simon & Schuster editorial department, he got a contract in the usual period of time, and he got paid relatively quickly in New York publishing terms. But this is a man who is used to working in the modern business world, and the experience he’s had has left him feeling angry, disrespected, “ignored, lied to,” “jerked around,” and oh, so much more.

He writes, “I’m a hell of a lot less sensitive than most artists; I’m not even an artist, really.”

And the kicker—for me, the truth to what he was saying—is this: “Most artists aren’t businessmen. So they’ll stay afraid, desperate, clinging to your company like a life-raft in a sea of obscurity and toil.”

Oh, boy, is that true. Oh, boy, do I want that to change.

Because we are in the midst of a huge change, a gigantic change, one in which we writers can essentially say, Take this crap you’re tossing at me and shove it.

We can change the industry from within, as long as we start demanding respect.

My initial attitude toward Marshall’s post was part of the problem, not part of the solution. Because he’s right. And the kicker is that he has been right for as long as I’ve been in the business which is (guessing) probably as long as he’s been alive.

The way that traditional publishing works is just plain ridiculous.

And we, as artists, don’t have to take it any more.

The nice thing is that we also don’t have to leave traditional publishing to change things.  If more of us who dislike how traditional publishing operates remain in traditional publishing, even part time, then we can change things for those clueless writers who will never understand that they deserve some respect.

Here’s how.

1. We make one-book deals.

Yes, yes, I know. Traditional publishers will offer you a lot more money for multibook deals. And isn’t a multibook deal security for the writer in a tough publishing environment?

In a word: No.

Right now, publishers are trying to lock up every single right they possibly can. They’re trying to lock up as much product (read: your books) as they possibly can for the best deal that they can possibly get.

If they successfully publish your first book with their company, then sign on for the second. Then if they do that well, sign on for the third.

Give them an incentive to court you. Make them work to keep you in their publishing house. They see it as security to have as many books under contract as possible, just like writers used to.

Do not give them that security.

And don’t believe the hype—from them or your agent. Your agent, by the way, will want the multibook deal. Why? From their business perspective, the multibook deal makes more sense. They get guaranteed money over a long period of time (15% of what you make). They don’t have to work for that money after the initial deal is completed.

Sure, they might have to make a phone call or two, track down a check or two, maybe nudge someone in the publishing house once or twice, but after that, the agent doesn’t have to do anything.

Compare that with renegotiating a deal every year, and running the risk of having the author walk away from that deal if the deal isn’t to the author’s liking. Twice the work for (maybe) half the pay.  If you were an agent, which deal would you argue for? The multibook deal, of course.

So your  agent, with skin in the game, cannot be trusted to advise you on this one. Trust me. I don’t know you. I have your needs as a writer at heart.

One book at a time.

If you don’t believe me, go back to my post called “Writers and Traditional Publishing Companies,” and look at what happened to Dr. Yvonne Thornton. Ask yourself, would you want to have a multi-book deal in her situation? The publishing company still exists after all, and they just might hold her to the contract, if the sales of the first book are good enough.

It’s better—and easier—to leave a company if they do badly with a one-book contract than it is with a two- or three- or ten-book contract.

Besides—and here’s the best part—if your one book does really really well, then you can negotiate for better terms on the next book. And even better terms on the third book.

You can’t do that with a multibook contract.

Ultimately, though, the one-book contract makes everyone act responsibly and stay on their game. If the publisher drops the ball, then you can walk—either to another publisher or to self-publishing.

If you drop the ball, then the publisher doesn’t have to work with you again. Really, it’s a win-win for both  you and the publisher (although not for the agent).  It’s not the way that things are done, but it’s the way that things should be done.

So hold out for your one-book contract and then….

2. Negotiate the hell out of that contract.

Note I use the word “negotiate.”  According to my handy dandy Encarta World English Dictionary, the word “negotiate” means “to attempt to come to an agreement on something through discussion and compromise.”

Discussion and compromise does not mean accepting the deal that you are offered because you’re afraid you’ll lose the deal. Nor does it mean fighting to the bitter end on every tiny unimportant detail.

You must figure out what the important details are to you, and then you must negotiate—either through an intermediate (agent, attorney) or on your own.  Do not skip this step. Always negotiate, and do so from a position of strength.

If your agent tells you that he doesn’t even want to attempt to negotiate certain parts of the deal that are important to you, then fire the agent. Or, if you don’t want to fire him, then take him off this deal, do not pay him 15% of this contract, and hire an attorney to handle the rest.

You can shepherd a negotiation, even if you aren’t talking to the other party. It’s not easy the first few times—in fact, it can be nerve-wracking—but you can learn to do it. If you’re scared of this and it makes you take bad deals, then look up the chapters on negotiation in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide. You can find them for free on this website, in the entire book The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, or in a short e-book called How To Negotiate Anything.

As for what you want from this deal, well, that will vary according to the reasons why you’ve gone into traditional publishing. Some writers might want an excellent e-rights percentage; others might not care so long as they have a huge advance with very few payouts.

Do make sure that you have a time limit on how long the publisher can exercise the rights in this book. I would suggest that the time limit is firm—three years, five years, ten years—and after that the contract terminates and must be renegotiated.

I used to say that there should be a “speed limit”— a certain number of books sold in a six-month period. But as an indie writer pointed out to me a few months back, all the publisher has to do is put the book up for free for a month, and that target will get hit.  A financial limit—the book must earn $200 in royalties paid to the author (not against the advance, which should be earned out) in a six month period—does not work either, because that simply becomes a fee for keeping the book.

Nope. Give the contract a firm end date, with a promise to renegotiate on the same terms. That will stop any publisher from keeping a book “in print” and holding onto the rights to that book, effectively, for the entire term of the copyright.

The more of us who make this clause non-negotiable, the more the publishers will have to eventually cave in. And you bestsellers—yeah, you guys, the ones with a lot of clout—do this. You’ll help the rest of us, and you’ll help yourselves. You will now have an escape route from a bad publishing company, one that disrespects you or has decided that your book is no longer worth their time and effort or one, like Yvonne Thorton’s above that might hang onto the book even though the book line and all publishing support has vanished.

One more thing: Do not sign a contract with a non-compete clause in it. That means anything masquerading as a non-compete clause. Those clauses do everything from tie you up, and prevent you from writing other books in your most profitable series, to preventing you from writing anything at all.

And if you think you avoided these non-compete clauses because you haven’t negotiated a contract in a few years, think again.  In the early 1990s, publishers tried to get me to sign non-compete clauses. I spoke to a writer last week who believed that non-compete clauses were boilerplate and couldn’t be negotiated away. (I wonder: Did the writer’s [truly incompetent] agent say that? Or did some editor way back as part of the negotiation? Either way, the poor writer believed it and has signed contracts with that clause for fifteen years.)

As you try to negotiate anything, you will hear your agents (in particular) and other authors telling you that negotiation is a bad idea. That you should be grateful to get a deal in this current publishing climate. If the person telling you this is your business advisor, this person should be fired.

A contract negotiation is a negotiation and should be treated as such. The writer has as much right to get terms important to her as the publisher does. Compromise where you can, but…

3. Walk away if the publisher refuses to budge on important matters.

I know, that’s a scary thought, especially for those of us who came of age in the bad old days when walking away from a deal meant that the book won’t get published. If you’re a bestseller, you will find someone else to take the property.

If no other traditional publisher is interested, consider self-publishing.

Here’s the truth of it, though: If you walk away, and the publisher really, really, really wants that book, the publisher will chase after you. The publisher may not offer what you want. The publisher might offer a compromise, which you should consider. But…

4. If you don’t like the terms, don’t sign the deal.

It’s that simple.  You have other options now. Make it clear to the publisher that you know you have other options, that you and this publisher are a team, and that they must behave as part of that team, not as the king of the publishing world. If they don’t respect you, then don’t work with them.

Period.

5. Once your contract is signed by both parties, it’s final.

These are the terms you’ve both agreed to. Both of you. Not just you, but the publisher as well. Until the publisher signs the contract, you do not have a valid contract. So if you change your mind between the time you sign the contract and the time you get the counter-signed contract in return from the publisher, you can back out of the deal.

Realize, however, that the publisher might simply sign that contract and send it to you at the moment you try to back out.  But always be conscious of the fact that you do not have a deal until both parties sign the agreement.

Both parties.

6. Final does not mean permanent.

A contract is a blueprint for your relationship. As such, it has clauses that allow the contract to be terminated. Right now, in most publishing contracts, those termination clauses only favor the publisher. I suggest you add some that favor you as well, whatever that might mean.

Oh, yeah, I already told you: Make sure the contract has a real end date, three to ten years from the date the contract is signed. Believe me, that’s an important one.

7. Keep your contract out until all of its terms are met, and refer to that contract constantly.

An editor friend, now a hell of a fiction writer, once told me that many of the writers in her stable at the traditional publishing house where she worked (some of you would mistakenly call this place one of the Big Six, mistakenly because there are more publishers than six) had the same refrain about contracts:

Those writers said that the only things they cared about in their contracts were the due dates for the manuscript and the payment dates for the advance. Nothing else.

Those writers are idiots.  Traditional publishing contracts have ten-to-twenty pages of legalese for a reason.  That reason is to define the relationship for both sides. And there is more to that relationship than payment dates and turn-in dates.

But let’s stick to payment dates, for a moment. As Sebastian Marshall said above, “Three months from agreement in principle to contract, followed by a six week breaching-of-contract delay? Not okay.”

I would say “Not okay” is an understatement. How many of you noticed his phrase “six week breaching-of-contract delay”? Hmmm? Any of you? Do you know what that referred to?

The on-signing payment. Which in his contract was due “immediately” upon the signing of the contract. Which happened in March.

The last two publishing contracts I signed with two different publishers both had this in the contract: the first third of the advance was due thirty days after the signing of the agreement.  Publisher #1 sent the money in less than thirty days (and has done so on all projects I’ve done with them). Publisher #2 missed that deadline every single time I’ve signed a contract with them. I have always given them an extra thirty days because I like working with the editor, and then I get tough.

In every instance with that publishing company, I have had to notify the company that they are in breach of contract, and I will cancel that contract if I do not receive payment within a week. The publisher scrambles to make the payment—and guess what? It always shows up after I threaten.

In the bad old days, it would have ended there. In today’s market—when that publisher offered me another contract—I said no. I don’t need the headache. Nor do I need to constantly chase payment in what is clearly a company policy of delay, delay, delay.

But breach of contract doesn’t just happen if the company refuses to pay on time. There are clauses throughout every contract that states the contract will be terminated if such-and-such doesn’t happen. Usually such-and-such reflects badly on the author—the book is late, the book isn’t up to the company standards (that’s what “acceptance” means—they have to accept the book to make the next payment, and there are times when publishers do not do that)—but there are other clauses inside the contract that the publisher might breach.

Like not sending royalty statements in a timely manner. Like not having open accounting practices.  And on and on and on.

If you have a question about your relationship with your publisher, go to your contract first. And if the publisher is in breach of that contract, then write a polite letter asking for whatever it is that they haven’t done. If they still refuse, then notify them that they are in breach of the contract and that you will terminate the contract if the publisher does not rectify the situation according to some timeline that you give them.

Once again, literary agents—who generally do not have a legal education—often refuse to do this stuff.  Agents are terrified of pissing off publishers.  So if your agent refuses to handle this, hire an attorney to handle this part of the negotiation.  And if your agent actively fights you on this, cancel your relationship with them, and use your attorney to cancel that 15% payment to the agent as well.

8. Contracts can be amended.

“Amended” as in changed.  Usually this happens in the form of an addendum that both parties on that contract sign. Again, that means a negotiation, usually a negotiation to change some term in the contract.

Although lately, publishers have been sending out amendments to their contracts like crazy—and I’ll wager most of you professional writers reading this signed those amendments without understanding them, probably on the advice of your agent.

Never do that again. Seriously.

Because what the publishers have been changing is the e-rights clause of your contract, usually to include more rights for a worse deal to the writer. Most writers haven’t even checked that addendum the publisher sent against the original contract (if the writer could find their copy of the original contract).  Most writers signed away rights and didn’t have to.

I got three such addendums in the last year, all amending different contracts I had signed—one on a contract that was signed in 1995. I refused to sign all but one of them—the one signed in 1995. And that was because the publisher’s dumbass lawyer didn’t understand a work-made-for-hire contract, and gave me more money than I was entitled to, granting me more rights in the contract, by using a boilerplate that had been designed for an original works contract, not for a work-made-for-hire contract.

(And if you didn’t understand any of that previous paragraph, then get yourself a copy of The Copyright Handbook because you need to understand this stuff. Writers don’t sell books or manuscripts or stories. They license copyright.)

Anyway, by refusing to sign the other two, I caused the legal department of those publishers no end of headache. They wrote me letter after letter. One even threatened me. Another said they would cancel my contract if I didn’t sign. I smiled—because I wanted that contract canceled—and said, “Okay.” And dammit, they didn’t cancel. They just moved on, and I still have the excellent rights deal I’d had for more than a decade.

Because I read and understand my contracts.

Now, please note that I do not have a law degree. I am not a lawyer and I do not play one on TV.

But I follow one simple rule in business: I do not sign anything that I do not understand. And by understand, I don’t mean that someone explained it to me in general. I have to understand every word as it relates to every other word.  Believe me, in contracts, that’s important. Because every word is important.

Going back to amendments and addendums. Publishers aren’t the only ones who can amend a contract. You can too.  You can send an amendment as an addendum to your contract to your publisher. If your publisher signs that, then you have changed a term of the contract. (Of course, you would work with a lawyer to draft the proper language.)

If you don’t like something in an old contract, folks, and you can’t find a way to cancel that contract, see if you can find a way to amend that contract.  If you’re willing to do the work and to be a squeaky wheel, you can always find a way.

9. Stop being grateful and stop being a victim.

You no longer have to be grateful that some publisher condescended to buy your book. You have other options. You might never use those options, but they should remain on the table in a negotiation at all time.

Under no circumstances should you ever, ever, tell your publisher that you would never self-publish. Even if it’s true.

Never ever ever.

Because they need to think you’ll take your golden goose and run at any point in a negotiation. They need to know that you know that traditional publishing is not the only game in town.

And don’t ever accept terrible contract terms because you have to get published.  Those days are over.  Most self-respecting writers never acted like that, but too many did.

It’s time for all writers to stop being victims of their publisher and to start acting like the powerful people that they are.

Finally,

10. Be businesslike in all things.

Business is not personal. It’s not about friendship and “marriages” and trying to avoid making the other party mad.  It’s about making an alliance to do something.

In the case of publishing, you—the content creator—are making an alliance with a traditional publishing company to publish—and distribute—your book to readers.

That’s all.

Nothing more. It doesn’t matter if you like the people at the publishing company or if they flatter you a lot.

You should always act in business as if the people you like will be fired tomorrow and replaced by some draconian person with no soul who is out to crush you. If your contract protects you from the draconian person with no soul, then you have a good contract.

If your contract is contingent on the nice people whom you like keeping their jobs, then you have a bad contract.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You can’t think like that about people you work with. Fine. Then hire a lawyer. Because too many agents become too cozy with the publishers in New York, and have that same bad attitude. (“Don’t worry. Those nice people at Traditional Publishing House A will take very good care of you.” Not.)

In this new world of publishing, writers finally have options. We don’t have to settle for the 20^th century ways of doing things.

Sebastian Marshall is right: traditional publishing treats its writers badly and is badly run. But sometimes, we writers want to do business with traditional publishers.

So we have to approach them like the dysfunctional companies that they are. We have to protect ourselves, and we have to be willing to walk away when the deal is harmful to us and our careers.

That’s a sea change, folks. That’s an attitude only a few of us had in the past. Now all of us should have it. All the time.

If we all negotiate our contracts from a position of strength, then the publishers will move toward us. They’ll give us better contract terms, and treat us better.

They’ll have no choice. They’ll need to accommodate the writers in order to have product.

You don’t have to self-publish to be part of this new world of publishing.

You just have to stand up for yourself.

These blogs have given me the freedom to say things that, in the past, I only told students face-to-face. Can you imagine me getting this chapter into a book on traditional publishing—published by a traditional publisher? Of course not.

So if you find these blogs helpful, if you’ve gained something useful out of what you’ve read, please leave a tip on the way out. The blogs take a lot of time from my full-time gig, which is fiction writing, and I need to justify the time spent. Your comments go a long way toward that, and so do the donations.

Thanks in advance.

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 “The Business Rusch: How To Evaluate A Traditional Publisher” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: The Writer’s Guide To Evaluating A Traditional Publishing Company

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 About once a week, I get an e-mail from someone asking me to recommend a traditional publisher for them. I can’t, not because I don’t believe in traditional publishing, but because I have no idea what that person wants in a publisher, what that person is currently writing, and what’s going on within all the different traditional publishing houses.

That ain’t my job. My job is to manage my own career, and to know the things relevant to the writer that I am. Nothing more.

I also get letters asking me about my experiences with the various traditional publishers. Sometimes I can answer those letters. Sometimes I can’t, usually because my experiences are more than two years old, and too much has changed in the past two years to give a good answer.

I answer as truthfully as I can, but I also assume that the writer will forward my letter to other writers. So I don’t give out confidential information, nor do I say anything that I wouldn’t say in public.

Recently, I answered a question about one of my traditional publishers, and found myself getting angry. I’m going to excerpt what I wrote below. I’m removing names and identifying information, however, because this is going to be an example for the blog post, and not a blog post about bashing this particular publisher.

I wrote:

“I love my editor, but the support at [the publishing company] is awful. The company has never paid on time. I’ve had to threaten to pull books twice to get a payment that was significantly (months) overdue. I still haven’t gotten my royalty statement for one of my titles. (Statement owed two months before.) The production on my last two books ran so late that there were no review copies sent to major markets. By the way, I had turned in my manuscripts early, so the problem was entirely on the publisher’s end. This latest book, I had to ask for the copy edit because the book—out in two months—had no copy editing, proofing, or ARC.

“The e-book on my most recent title came out four months after the book appeared, to no fanfare and no advertising. The e-book sales were insignificant because all of the readers wanted the e-book when the paper book came out. The e-book on the previous volume came out nine months after the paper book. I suspect this is company policy and I think it short-sighted.

“Needless to say when they offered for the next book, I turned them down. I can’t recommend anyone work with them ever.  I wish I could say better things because I like the editor. But the company is one to avoid these days.”

If the writer had asked me about one of my other current publishers, my response would have been almost entirely the opposite. I love the company, love how quick they are at payment, how organized their business is, how they are excellent at marketing. But I had a lot of trouble with the acquiring editor.

Having trouble with an editor, btw, is an easily resolved problem, if indeed the problem is the editor only. If you’re having trouble with one editor, ask for a new editor within the house. (If the problem is with the publishing house’s attitude toward fiction or writers, however, and the editor is acting on company orders, then that’s a different problem.)

I am as honest as I can be with writers who ask about publishers, just like I used to be honest about my agent (or former agents) when someone asked about them. The only way to evaluate relationships in the traditional publishing industry right now is to ask other writers who are involved with that company. Eventually, I would hope there will be some other way to evaluate, besides an editor beware column. Some sort of Better Business Bureau clearing house to report issues with publishers, etc.

(And no, to my knowledge, no one reports major publishers scummy business practices to the Better Business Bureau, although maybe they should.)

Some of the letters I get come from writers who are currently having trouble with their publisher. Even if I’m honest about that publisher, my information really can’t help except, maybe in a you-are-not-alone kinda way.

The best letters come from a writer who is thinking of approaching a publishing house or a writer who has a deal on the table, but hasn’t signed anything.

The time to find out about a traditional publishing company is before you sign an agreement with that company. Long before.

And even then, get information from a variety of writers.  Writers who are bestsellers with that company. Midlist writers. Writers who are no longer with the company. And writers outside your genre.

Just because one writer loves that company doesn’t make the company good. And just because one writer loathes the company doesn’t make it bad.  We all have different experiences and different natures, and sometimes one writer’s problem is another writer’s joy.  So before you ever send your work to a traditional publishing company, do a bit of research. Don’t just look at their writer’s guidelines or read what they publish, but ask the writers who work with them what they think of the company itself.

And a side note: Writers guidelines are designed to discourage you and keep you out of the company, not to help you submit to it. Most of the hoops—particularly the submit-through-an-agent-only hoop are there to keep the masses away. Submit directly to an editor at the company, include an e-mail address and a self-addressed stamped envelope, and give your manuscript a shot. And if you can’t figure out who is working where, then you really need to research this business. One place to start is Publishers Marketplace.  And that is all I’m going to say about the submission topic—even in private e-mail. So please, don’t ask.

When you ask a writer about their experiences with a traditional publishing company, make sure those experiences are recent—within the last two years. The publishing industry has changed so much that information older than that is worthless.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Will the company negotiate its contracts or is every point a deal breaker?

I’ve never submitted to certain traditional publishing companies because their contracts are too draconian. Not only do they want to control too many rights, but often (not always), they reserve the right to have another author revise my manuscript and still put that manuscript out under my name, even if it’s not my work. That’s a major, major, major deal breaker for me—more so than failing to pay me—and so I’ve never worked with these companies.

Some want to own all rights to any pen name used by its writers. Again, major deal breaker for me.

Sometimes writers can’t talk about the contract terms they have with their publisher because they have a confidentiality clause built into the contract itself. But you can always ask if the negotiations went smoothly. The author can answer that without revealing terms at all. Watch how you phrase your questions, and you can often get the answers you need even if the writer signed a confidentiality clause.

2. Has the publisher lived up to its contractual obligations?

Does the company pay on time (within 30 days of the payment’s due date)? Does the company issue royalty statements on time? Has it published the books in a timely fashion? If not, is this a one-time thing (happening to one writer) or is it chronic?

3. Has the publisher gone above and beyond, and done great things not included in the contract, things that have benefited the writer?

Some companies do. Many do for their bestsellers, but some do go above and beyond even for their midlist writers. It’s nice to know if the publisher enjoys working with—and rewarding—its authors.

4. Has the publisher tried to change the terms of the contract after the contract has been signed? If so, have these changes (usually in the form of addendums) been in the company’s favor or the writer’s favor? Did the writer feel forced to sign, even if he didn’t want to?

In the past two years, I have had many traditional publishers attempt to change the terms of my contract with them, mostly concerning e-rights. Only in one case did I benefit from the change (and I believe that was because the attorney for the publisher made a grievous error—which I wasn’t about to point out). In all of the other cases, the changes were for the worst—for me. These changes greatly benefited the publisher.

One publisher’s representative (not my editor, but some clown in legal) actually threatened me when I refused to sign the addendum. Since the book was already published, and the company needed my permission to make the changes, I just laughed. But I would wager that this guy’s threats forced a number of writers to sign that change.

Of course, after the threats, I’ve been  monitoring that company to make certain that they didn’t just implement the changes even though I never signed the addendum.

A lot of companies these days think it’s okay to ask forgiveness when a writer refuses to give permission. Me, I don’t believe in forgiveness. If something like that happens, we start talking copyright violation and whether or not I should hand the entire mess over to my attorney.

(I  know I’m being vague here, but if you don’t understand why a change in e-rights clauses could be a copyright violation, get thee to The Copyright Handbook right now. Because writers don’t sell books or stories or manuscripts. Writers license copyright. You should understand that much before you sign anything.)

5. Has someone in a position of power at the publishing company lied about something important?

That sounds so silly and so juvenile, but I can’t tell you how often editors, accountants, and others in a publishing company have lied to me. The most common lie these days? E-books make no money for the company because they’re such a small percentage of the market. So if you wouldn’t mind writing a short story or a novella in the world of your bestselling series for free, you’ll help us all out. We won’t make any money either.

Frankly, y’all, if anyone at your publishing company has said that to you, then they are lying, and the company holds you in contempt. This is a red flag, and should put you on alert in all of your dealings with that company.

And if you believe this lie even now, check out my post “How Traditional Publishing Companies Are Making Money,” which examines the third-quarter earnings statements. After reading that—and looking at the earnings statements—you’ll never believe that lie again.

6. How many times has the staff been cut?

Traditional publishing has pared its staff to the bones, and the problem with that is that the institutional memory goes with it. So even if your contact calls for a great advertising plan, the person who was supposed to implement that plan might have lost her job in the last few months. So the plan goes out the window.

In the 1990s, my Fey series was orphaned (I believe) seven times between my British and American publisher. By the time the last book came out, the British editor hadn’t even read the series. The American editor had no clue what promises were made and which ones weren’t. There was no in-house continuity on that series—and small wonder, since the entire fantasy publishing arm of the American company had gone through three major personnel changes for the duration.

Continual personnel changes might mean trouble at the top (one publisher I used to work with was known as the Evil Empire for this very reason), but it might also mean that the company is trying to get on firm financial footing. Once the company has improved its bottom line, the personnel changes will stop. It’s up to you to assess if the company with many personnel changes is firming up its bottom line or is vying to be this year’s Evil Empire.

7. Is the company organized?

Such a simple thing, and so crucial to book publishing. Over a decade ago, one of my editors forgot to put one of my books into production—and no one in the publishing house believed me when I said there was a problem. So the book was a year late. (For the full story, see this link.)

The company I complained about in my e-mail is either extremely disorganized (possible) or it’s having serious financial troubles (also possible). Either way, that’s not a company you want to work with.

On the other hand, one of my current publishers sends me the in-house production schedule whenever I turn in a book. That way I know when the revisions are due, when the copy edits will come my way, when I need to go over the galleys. And more than once, I’ve notified them that I would be traveling during a crunch period, and we’ve worked on the schedule together, making it work for all of us.

Beautiful.

8. Does the company support its books?

This sounds so stupid, but it’s not. I’ve had books hit a bestseller list, and had the publishing company refuse to return to print on those books because the book was a midlist title.  So no books were available when the additional orders came in, and the novel immediately dropped off the bestseller list. By the time the new books were printed and shipped, the interest had peaked, and the books sat in the warehouse for a long time.

In another instance, a traditional publisher sent me on a major book tour throughout Southern California. I stayed in 5-star hotels, did all kinds of media (TV, radio), and for no reason at all.

Because the company did not ship extra books to the California distributors.

By the time I got to most of the stores where I supposedly had signings, there were no books to sign, and none to be found in any of the surrounding warehouses. Only one independent bookstore had copies, and that was because the owner was prepared.

“This has happened to me over and over again with your publishing company,” the owner said. “I order extra books in advance when I see the word ‘tour.’”

Then he added: “Have you thought of getting a new publishing company?”

As you can tell, I’m not the only writer this has happened to. It happens all the time, especially through some companies. In fact, it happened to three of my friends who were with three different publishers just last year. Find out in advance which companies support their books and which ones do not.

9. How easy is it to revert the rights in your book?

This is becoming more and more dicey as time goes on. As e-books are growing, more and more companies do not want to revert the rights in the books that have been long out of print.

Here are two problems you might hear about:

The first is that the company keeps the paper book “in print” by having a print-on-demand edition in its catalog. Even if that edition only sells two or three copies per year, the book is still considered in print under some contracts (not all, but writers are still signing those awful contracts, so be forewarned).

The other problem is a true scam, and it’s being perpetrated by a major publishing company.  Book goes out of print. The writer asks to revert the rights. Traditional Publisher A sends a rights reversion letter to the author.  Relationship between author, traditional publisher, and book is severed except—

There is a clause in almost all publishing contracts that allows the traditional book company to continue to sell the remaining stock in its warehouse.  By the time a book goes OP, that stock is usually gone. But for the sake of argument, let’s say there is still some stock that the publisher does not want to pulp.

This clause refers to paper books only. Got that? There can be no e-book backstock. None. It’s not possible.

Yet this particular traditional publishing company is telling writers that as long as there are paper books in the warehouse, the traditional publishing company has the right to sell the e-book.

That is a lie. Worse, that’s a violation of the author’s copyright.

A version of this happened to me with this traditional publishing company. My book remained available in e-version for one month after I got the reversion letter. I didn’t give the publisher a chance to lie to me. I told them to remove the book immediately. The company did not, so I notified them that if the e-book did not come down in the next two weeks, my lawyer would be talking to them about copyright violation.

Lo and behold, the e-book came down.

I thought that a fluke, an error, someone forgot to take the e-book down, until I heard from another writer with that company. Only the publisher had told her the lie above—that the e-book could remain in print as long as the paper book overstock was in the warehouse. Said writer’s agent thought this sounded fishy, but wasn’t sure why. (See why I rail against agents who have no legal background?)

So I told the writer what I just told you—it’s a copyright violation. (Please note that I am not a lawyer, so do not consider this general legal advice. Always make certain your own situation is similar before taking action.) I don’t know what happened in that writer’s case, but because this happened twice, I got suspicious. I then contacted some folks in the industry, folks with lots of writer clients (agents with legal backgrounds, lawyers) and found out that this practice is company policy for this traditional publisher.

It’s like a phishing scam. Many people won’t believe the lie, but those who do will give extra revenue to the publishing company.

If this is your publisher, be forewarned. They will make your life difficult at some point, because the company does not care about its writers. Only about its profits. And the company sees writers as interchangeable widgets.

10. What is the best thing the traditional publishing company has done for you? What is the worst?

If the writer you ask has trouble answering the “best” question, then there’s a problem. Listen closely to these answers because sometimes my “worst thing” might be something you want. Don’t criticize your source; just listen with a grain of salt.

Last week, I listed a few other questions to ask. If you haven’t read last week’s post, I suggest you do so, because it outlines ways writers should think about traditional publishing in this brave new world.

Finally, ask yourself one very important question about a traditional publisher before you approach that publisher:

What can this publisher do for you that you can’t do for yourself?

You may not have ventured into indie publishing yet. Pick up my husband Dean Wesley Smith’s book, Think Like a Publisher. You don’t have to become an indie publisher to appreciate the information in that book. You just have to know what’s possible for writers these days outside of traditional publishing. That way, you’ll know if going to some traditional publishers is a good deal for you or not.

In my case, I can do everything one of my traditional publishers does and more. In another case, I’m getting a lot of benefit from one of my traditional publishers that I wouldn’t get on my own.

Will it be that way in two years or ten years?

I don’t know. But right now, I can tell you I will work with some traditional publishers again and never work with others.

And because publishing is constantly changing, I will reassess my position in two years or so. Maybe the traditional publishers will become more writer friendly. Maybe I’ll need more traditional publisher support. Or maybe I’ll turn my back on traditional publishing forever.

Right now, however, I’m keeping a toe in both worlds—traditional and indie. I’m benefiting from both. Some writers will never go indie, but that doesn’t mean those writers should be screwed by their traditional publisher.

You need to research the publisher before approaching them.

And in next week’s post, I’ll tell you how to negotiate a good deal that will benefit you—and other writers—in traditional publishing.

Writers have clout now. We have alternatives to traditional publishing.

We don’t have to jump to the alternatives, but because they’re there, we have the ability to use them as leverage in our negotiations.  That’s  next week.

See you then.

Almost three years ago, I decided I had missed my window of opportunity to be traditionally published with my Freelancer’s Survival Guide. (I hadn’t written the book, and I believed it needed to be out immediately.) So I decided to publish it chapter by chapter on my blog.

I’m glad I did. It got me writing nonfiction regularly again, and it forced me to learn all the new forms of publishing. I still consider myself a fiction writer first and foremost. I make the bulk of my money on my fiction, so each nonfiction blog digs into my fiction earnings—unless I get support from the readers. So please, if you got a benefit from this post, please leave a tip on the way out.

And thanks to everyone who has commented, donated, sent me links, and e-mailed. I appreciate all of it.

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 “The Business Rusch: The Writers Guide to Evaluating  A Traditional Publishing Company” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Business Rusch: Writers and Traditional Publishing Companies

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, writers had limited choices if they wanted to publish books. Sure, the writer could spend thousands of dollars self-publishing, and wind up with thousands of books in a garage and no place to sell them. Only a handful of writers spaced over fifty years managed to succeed that way.

But for the most part, the writer’s choices boiled down to this: If a publisher offered to buy a book, the writer could decide whether or not to take the offer.  It was pretty simple really: the writer tried to make the offer better, but the situation boiled down to take-it-or-leave-it. Writers with self-confidence left bad deals on the table, but not without anguish.

Writers with business sense often didn’t approach certain publishing companies with their work at all because that publisher was known for screwing the writer, never paying royalties, rarely publishing a book, or making excessive demands on the writer (forcing dozens of rewrites without ever paying, for example). By deeming certain companies impossible to work with, the writer had even fewer choices of places to publish.

At some point in a long-term writer’s career, she could chose between offers on the same book, usually in an auction situation, with a hot property. The savvy writer in that situation would pit publishers against each other to get the best possible deal for the writer. Every writer hoped for such a situation, but when faced with it often had trouble deciding what was best.

The best deal didn’t always equal the most money, although as the decades went on and corporate think took over, the most money and the best deal were often synonymous. (Corporations often put the most money behind that thing they have invested the most money in, not necessarily the best thing, but the most expensive thing.) The best deal usually included a vision, a marketing plan (often negotiated into the contract), escalators on royalties, limited rights purchase, and excellent royalty rates.

None of those things were a guarantee that the book would do well. While the royalty rates and escalators got handled by the accounting department and would happen once the book went on sale, the marketing plan, the vision, and actual support of the book itself often got tossed out the window if the editorial team that bought the book left the company. Some new editorial directors, concerned more with their own careers than the books they inherited, would actively kill a line designed by their predecessor. (This has happened to me personally three different times—fortunately, in two instances, I was able to buy the book back from the publisher before publication.)

These things still happen on both large and small scales. A large-scale case hit the news just last week. Kaplan Publishing, which those of you who have taken the SAT test recognize for its ubiquitous test prep books, tried to add a trade line. The problem is that they did so right at the beginning of the economic collapse.

Kaplan reassessed, as good businesses do, and dropped the trade line this year, firing staff, and disbanding everything from editorial to publicity to sales. The problem was that no one told the authors. One author, Dr. Yvonne Thorton, with a major bestseller to her name (The Ditchdigger’s Daughter) had sold a book at auction to Kaplan, foregoing other companies that offered more money for Kaplan’s better promotion model.

By the time her new book came out, Kaplan had decided to abandon the trade line. By the time she noticed that her book had been published “dead” as the phrase goes, there was only one guy left in the trade arm’s office, and he couldn’t do anything. I suggest you read about this case if you ever think of going with a traditional publisher, because these things happen all the time.

Traditional publishing companies have a lot of inventory—books written by writers—and these publishing companies are dealing with the inventory as they would any other product. The problem is, that for the writer, the inventory, the product, might be the only thing they worked on for the past five years.

Folks, when any business has a term for something, that means the something is common. I’ve had at least a dozen books published “dead” either here or overseas. What happens is that the publishing company has decided to move away from that genre, or the editor left and no one picked up the slack, or the publisher has decided to quickly get rid of “excess inventory,” which your book is part of.  The first time that happened to me, it happened at the end of the horror boom, and my publisher cut their horror line. They published my novel, co-written with Kevin J. Anderson, anyway, with a terrible cover and no support. They dropped the second book on the contract, returning it to us like bad fish.

The next time I had a book published dead, the editor had left, and the publisher loathed the replacement editor.  The publisher decided to destroy the replacement editor’s career, and actively ruined the book line that the new editor was overseeing, so that the new editor could be fired. I managed to buy one book back from that debacle, but another got published dead right into the mess.

The most recent time I had a book published dead was with my novel Fantasy Life, part of Pocket’s aborted modern fantasy line. My novel was supposed to be a hardcover lead. By the time the book came out, the editor had been gone for nearly a year, the publisher had left, and the novel had no editor at all. No one in the house even knew the book existed. Some poor managing editor shepherded the book into print, slapped a bad cover on it, and didn’t even know that my contract and letters back and forth with the team stipulated hardcover first, with tons of promotion.

Once upon a time, back in the land of no choice, a writer had to do what she could to save her career when such things happened. She had to change her name or be savvy enough to see the handwriting on the wall and rescue the book before publication (usually by buying it back and canceling the contract) or find some other publisher to buy a bunch of books before the “dead” book came out, so that the other publisher would throw a lot of money in the mix to save the other books.

A lot of careers ended because writers didn’t know how to handle the situation above.

On the other hand, a lot of careers got made when traditional publishing did everything right. The publisher followed the original marketing plan—or designed a better one. The book sold better than expected and the publisher printed more books to accommodate that. There was good buzz inside the publishing house before the book came out, so someone there decided to take the book out “big”—yet another term, the opposite of publishing dead.

For every sob story, there is a good story of things that went right or better than expected.

Back in the old days, writers effectively tried to hit the lottery with their small product. That was like throwing a toy boat into Lake Michigan and hoping someone noticed. Sometimes someone did. Usually the toy boat sank without anyone noticing.

As I mentioned above, these things still happen—good and bad. But with the option to self publish and make a lot more money, why would an author ever throw her work into that gigantic lake?

The obvious answer is the simple one: If the publisher offers enough money up front, the author might be willing to do so. Although that didn’t work out well at all for Dr. Thorton. Just because a traditional publisher makes promises and throws a lot of money at a book doesn’t mean that the publisher will come through.

But it might be a good risk to take. The chances of a book that gets a large advance—and by that I mean at least mid-to-high six-figures—doing well are much greater than a book that gets a small advance.

But very few writers ever hit that mid-six figure jackpot. Even fewer do on the first novel. Plus, the chances of something going wrong are greater in the current publishing environment as everyone—from publishers to agents to writers—struggles to figure out exactly what’s going on.

I recently went over my fall royalty statements from all of my various traditional publishers. There are some publishers that clearly are underreporting royalties, even though many of us have railed about this repeatedly. Things have gotten so bad that some companies aren’t issuing royalty statements at all. One of my publishers, for example, did not give me a royalty statement for a book that came out in May. (The royalty period ended June 30.) The stated reason? The book hadn’t been on sale long enough to matter.

Um…by contract, I’m due a royalty statement no matter what. Of course, I’m following up on that ridiculousness. (One of many ridiculous things from this traditional publisher, who “forgets” to do things like sending out review copies and nearly forgot to send me a copy edit on the book due out quite soon now. I suspect the fiction line is in trouble at corporate headquarters, because I’ve seen this behavior before—except for the royalty statement nonsense.)

So let me clarify: I went over all of the royalty statements that I received from all of my traditional publishers. These statements covered the first half of 2011.  Then, I chose to examine a statement closely from a publishing company whose royalty statements are accurate. This company is working hard to be transparent, which I appreciate.

The numbers I got from the company for my e-books are in the same ballpark as the numbers I have from WMG on the e-books under the same byline. I’ve seen other numbers which confirm that the numbers I’m getting from this company are accurate.

Using this royalty statement, I did a comparison of the amount of money I would have made if I had self-published the book compared with the amount of money I made because the traditional publisher published it. I did this for the e-book only.

Here was how I figured it: The traditional publisher put a $6.99 price on the e-book, but sold it at $5.49, which I would not have done.  I would have used the $6.99 price, since the book was new. (I put backlist at $4.99; front list at $6.99.)  The contract I signed with this publisher pays 15% of net on e-books, and I had an agent on the deal.

The time period was also short, a little over one month from the time the book came out to the end of the royalty period. That made the comparison very easy.

The sales of this e-book that month were no different from backlist titles by this byline. So the traditional publisher added no value on this e-book (for the front half of 2011).

It seemed like a good opportunity for a comparison.  So I did the math. I was startled by the number that I came up with.

When all of the factors were taken into account, the traditional publisher paid me 10% of what I would have earned on my own had I published the e-book myself. At 70% of the cover price (from Amazon, etc), I would have earned about $800 on that e-book. From the traditional publisher, I got about $80 on the same e-book.

This frontlist book came out in the middle of the darkest part of the publishing downturn, as Borders disappeared (and wasn’t ordering), and Barnes & Noble hadn’t yet determined what they were doing with books. So the paper book only sold 5,000 copies.

Compare that with the first novel published under that byline, which came out more than 10 years ago. At that point, the first novel under that new pen name sold 30,000 paper books in its first month of publication. Different time period, different market, different company, and a completely different world.

Right now, we all—the traditional publisher and me as well—consider that shipment of paper books at that point in time, on an unusual book, a complete success, given the book’s advance and the expectations we all had.  I should also note that I am happy with this company’s marketing efforts, its covers, and the penetration the company got into stores.

Still, that 10% e-book number bothered me, and made me ask the question: What could the traditional publisher do for me that I couldn’t do for myself?

I have some answers to that question, and I’ll be getting to those later on. But looked at from cold financial point of view—and with the expectation of an exponential growth in the e-book market—the traditional publishing route looks like a bad deal.

Yet I’m going to continue to traditionally publish some books, even though I am a midlist author and am not receiving mid-six figure advances on my books.

Why?

Because I’m a fast writer. I can afford to make one book per year (at least) into a loss leader. I look at it this way: Instead of paying an ad company to do the advertising for me, like James Patterson is right now, I’m paying a publishing company to introduce me to a new market, paying with lost revenue. I’m taking a pay cut to find a new market that I wouldn’t have found on my own. Weirdly, by doing this, I get cash up front.

I mentioned last week that the jury is out on whether or not this method works. But that’s really not accurate. With this particular company, I know—because of other promotions and things that are happening in the second half of 2011—that the gamble is paying off.

However, I made the same gamble with another publisher at the same time, and that one is actually hurting my writing career (under a different byline). The e-books are consistently late (months after the paper book comes out, which makes it company policy, imho), hurting e-book sales dramatically. The first book I did with the company went very well. The last two have been a nightmare. No review copies, late production making it impossible for me to do some of the promotion myself, almost no promotion inside or outside of the genre, book design that’s so simple I could do it, covers that are okay but not great, and on and on and on.

I have gotten no added value from this company and I have had a lot of problems. In fact, some of this company’s policies—like the e-book debacle—have actually angered my fan base, which is exactly not what I want.

So, what I have learned is this: some traditional publishers are worth taking a gamble with as the world of publishing changes, and some traditional publishers must be avoided at all costs.

What I look for in a traditional publisher will probably differ from what you look for. But we must all assess the company before we sign a contract. And that’s different than before.

What else is different is this: We no longer need to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. Now we can approach each company and every contract with a “what can you do for me?” attitude. It’s the same attitude that Barry Eisler took last spring, when he turned down St. Martin’s Press. He believed that St. Martin’s couldn’t do anything he couldn’t do.

Then Amazon approached him with an offer on that same book, and he made the assessment again, deciding that Amazon could help in areas that he would have difficulties with. He made the right decisions for him all along.

In this new world, writers shouldn’t blindly choose between traditional publishing and indie publishing. Writers need to learn how to assess all the offers that come to them and then see what will benefit the writer the most.

Then the writer is going to have to do something most writers haven’t done in the past: the writer will have to negotiate.

Let me repeat that: The writer will have to negotiate.

That doesn’t mean that the writer must handle the actual back-and-forth herself. She can hire an intermediary, be that an agent or an attorney. But the writer has to control the negotiation herself, and make all the decisions herself.

Why am I stressing that? Because the changes in the industry mean that agents at the moment have a different agenda than the writers they represent. The agent might not want a writer to say no to a $50,000 deal from a traditional company because the agent wants the commission. But if the writer does the book herself, the agent won’t get a commission (or shouldn’t—never give an agent a commission on a book you publish yourself. Ever.)

If the writer hires an attorney to do the negotiation for her, then she has to know what she wants from the negotiation. Because an attorney will only do what the client wants. The attorney makes recommendations, but never takes action on his own. (Unlike agents, who often make decisions without asking the writer at all.)

I know many of you are terrified to negotiate anything. I have several chapters in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide that will help the most timid person learn how to negotiate. You can find them for free on this website, in the entire book The Freelancer’s Survival Guide, or in a short e-book called How To Negotiate Anything. If you’re afraid to negotiate, read this and start to educate yourself on how to do it.  If I can do it – and I used to run from negotiation—anyone can do it.

But how can a writer adequately evaluate a publishing company she has never worked with? How does she know if the company is late making payments or doesn’t put out e-books on time? How does she know if the company makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to revert rights on books long out of print?

She can’t, not from personal experience, not until she’s actively involved with the company. So it becomes more and more imperative that writers talk with each other and share information, honest information, about their traditional publishing companies.

A lot of publishing companies have a non-disclosure clause in their publishing contracts. The writer cannot talk about the terms of the deal that she has signed.

But there is so much information that this writer can give another writer that won’t violate that non-disclosure agreement. The writer should be able to answer simple questions like: What are the pros and cons of working with Traditional Publishing Company A? or Are you happy with your experience at Traditional Publishing Company A? or Would you recommend a friend sign a book deal with Traditional Publishing Company A? or Knowing what you know now, would you have signed your deal with Traditional Publishing Company A?

A “no” on any of the last three questions would be a red-flag.

Also, the writer considering an offer from Traditional Publishing Company A should talk to a writer who seems (from the outside) to be happy with the company and one who is not happy with the company. Just because someone had a bad experience doesn’t mean you will. And in fact, the bad experience might not be bad from your perspective. I’ve often learned more from someone’s bad experiences than the good ones—especially if the bad experiences can be mitigated with a contract term or two.

So you educate yourself about the publishing house before you sign the deal. You negotiate the deal on your own or through an intermediary.

And here’s the important thing: In this day and age, never ever ever sign a multi-book contract. The multi-book contract forces you and the publisher to stay together even if the relationship doesn’t work.

Writers have a lot of clout now because we can say no to a bad deal. We no longer have to take or leave what we get offered. We can not only walk away, we can walk somewhere else—and often, somewhere better.

The more of us who stay in traditional publishing and negotiate better contract terms, the more that will help the writers who decide to only publish traditionally.

Whether you want to go indie part time or not, you as a writer must now take a position of power. You need to negotiate from the position of power, not from the position of someone who is grateful for attention. Even if you never indie publish anything, this new world can benefit you—if you let it.

Next week, I will tell you how to evaluate a good traditional publisher and a bad one. I will tell you what to look for, and whether or not those things can be mitigated through a good contract or if a contract won’t help you at all.

Writers need to step into our new-found position of power. We need to stand up for ourselves whether we’re traditionally published or indie published or both. We need to learn the business so that we can make the best deals for us and for our work.

It would help if we work together to do this. Not band together, because we’re all individuals. But we should share information, share tactics, and share experiences—without trying to force someone to be like us.

We have writing communities. It’s time to put them to good use.

I spend a lot of my fiction writing time working on this blog. Today, between the obligatory pie-baking and Thanksgiving prep, I didn’t manage to get any fiction work done at all. This blog took all of my available writing time and honestly, without a donation or two, that means I lose money. So if you’re getting value out of this blog, please leave a tip on the way out.

And, since we in the United States are giving thanks this week, let me thank you all for coming to the blog, contributing through information, e-mails, comments, links, and donations. I greatly appreciate all of it. Thank you!

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“The Business Rusch: Writers and Traditional Publishing Companies” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Giving Up On Yourself

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Amazing the difference eighteen months make. I first wrote the posts entitled “Giving Up On Yourself (Parts One and Two)” in June of 2010. But as we head into 2012, I realize that some of what I wrote is out of date.

I’ve revised this section and it will eventually go into the second edition of the Freelancer’s Survival Guide. The core information is the same but the outdated information is now gone. I initially wrote this section about giving up on yourself by focusing on publishing. But I no longer agree with those parts of the section. I am going to keep the overall structure, talking about artists first.  So the initial introduction is gone, but the important stuff remains.

KKR, November, 2011

First, a disclaimer. The Freelancer’s Survival Guide is for freelancers of all stripes, not just writers, actors, musicians and people who work in the arts. The Guide is for anyone who works for herself.

This topic applies to all of us, but I’m going to start with artists—and by that I mean people who make their living in the arts—before I broaden the scope of the topic.

Artists occupy a rather unique place in the freelance firmament. Unlike most professionals, artists don’t need a formal education. Artists don’t need a license to hang out a shingle. Anyone can declare himself an artist, quit his day job, and try to make a living from his work.

While that’s sometimes freeing, it’s also a danger. Because unlike a doctor who can’t get his license without years of formal training and a certain level of competency, an artist can start “working” the moment she sings her first note or draws her first straight line. In some professions (the securities trade comes to mind), this level of accepted incompetence gives rise to fraud. In the arts, however, the only person who gets cheated when an artist is inexperienced is the artist herself.

Most people who attempt a career in the arts suffer from a mixture of extreme ego and extreme insecurity. We need the extreme ego to attempt success on an international level. After all, what makes our voices different from everyone else’s? There are billions of people on the Earth. Why do we believe that we will stand out?

Ego gives us that belief. But common sense tells us that we will fail at our goal. Worse, we take every mistake to heart. Most artists are sensitive souls, easily wounded by criticism. We believe in ourselves, but not all the time. That insecurity keeps us grounded. It also gives us an Achilles heel.

When the ego and the insecurity are out of balance, the artist tips in the wrong direction. Too much ego and the artist becomes insufferable. A mild-mannered bookstore owner once told me the story of the one and only time he kicked an author out of his store. The author was doing a book signing. A line of customers waited there to get their books autographed. The author was so abusive to his fans, he reduced even the most jaded of them to tears. The bookstore owner stepped in, stopped the signing, and when the author got more belligerent, asked the author to leave. The author refused, the owner threatened to call the police, and the author left in a storm of invective.

That author’s ego was so out of control that he alienated everyone around him. In fact, when the bookstore owner told me who the author was, I was not surprised. I had heard through other sources what a mean, egotistical jerk this man was.

At the time of the signing debacle, the author had several books on the New York Times Bestseller List. Now, no major publishing house will touch him. Why? His ego. His writing is just as good as it always was, maybe better. But no one in a major publishing house—from the publisher to the editor to the sales force—wants to deal with the man. He has alienated everyone in the business.

An out-of-control ego is one side of the imbalance. The other side is rampant insecurity. I can tell you of writer after writer—many of them former students of mine—who write tremendous fiction and can’t sell a word. Why? Because they refuse to let the work leave their offices, believing it no good. A single negative comment will get them to shelve not just that work, but also any other work that might be in the same genre or have the same tone.

I threaten a few of them occasionally, saying I’ll go into their files and mail their stories for them, but of course I don’t follow through. Because Dean and I have a philosophy that runs through all of our workshops:

You Are Responsible For Your Own Career

The egomaniacal writer I mentioned above is responsible for the downturn in his career. The insecure writers I mentioned right after him are responsible for the fact that most readers have never heard of them.

Artists must learn to balance that insecurity and ego so that they’re not raving lunatics (except in the privacy of their own offices) and so that they’re not so self-effacing that they refuse to let their brilliant work see the light of day.

Successful artists walk that line every single day. Push any of us hard enough in either direction and you’ll hear a burst of ego or a whisper of insecurity. But neither will last long, and one (the ego) will often result in an immediate apology.

No successful artist has gotten where she is without paying her dues. Paying dues is a long hard slog, often done in complete solitude. The end result is rather like the end result of going to medical school. You emerge exhausted, different, but with a working knowledge of your field and yourself. You must continue learning from that point on, constantly improving your craft, or you will destroy something (or someone—including, but not limited to, yourself).

When I started in the writing profession, paying dues took a certain amount of courage as well as ego. Most writers did not live anywhere near publishing central, which was (at least for Americans) New York City. We had to convince someone we’d never met to buy our work, and we had to do it via snail mail. Cold-calling an editor was a breach of etiquette. So was dropping into an editor’s office if, indeed, you decided to fly yourself to New York. Writers’ conferences were few and far between.

You had only yourself, your words, and your trusty (but somewhat inaccurate and out-of-date) Writer’s Market. You had to take the flyer.

It took years to run that gauntlet, often with little or no feedback. The writers who survived the constant rejection, the writers who worked at improving each and every day, the writers who persisted against all odds, became the ones whose names you recognize now.

All of the arts had some form of this gauntlet: musicians made demo tapes that had to be mailed to various record studios; artists developed portfolios that had to be mailed to galleries or publishing houses; actors sent resumes and photographs before getting auditions. We didn’t have the benefit of the internet. We couldn’t build websites that promoted our work, and we couldn’t tell someone to look at our online résumé/portfolio/demo.

I’m excited about the changes digital media will bring to my industry. I already love the way that it has changed the other arts. I can now look at my favorite artists’ portfolios online or listen to music from musicians who don’t get Top 40 airplay. I watch made-for-internet-only video, and I spend too much time looking for the unknown on the web.

But I worry. I watch the internet providing newer artists with an easy way to give up on themselves.

I see this most strongly in the publishing industry because that’s where I’m tapped in. Instead of a writer enduring years of rejection to get a book published, learning craft, improving, figuring out how to entice a publisher to buy the work (learning the proper use of an agent—which is not as a publisher’s first reader), learning the entire business as she gains experience, writers now make a few attempts, and then give up.

Initially when I wrote this piece, I said that new writers who didn’t try the traditional publishing gauntlet were giving up on themselves. At the time—eighteen months ago—I was on the cusp of being wrong. I hadn’t seen the changes in the industry or if I had seen them, I hadn’t understood them.

Back then—and before—it was easy to see a writer who was giving up on herself. She tossed in the towel, didn’t fight that gauntlet, and just defaulted with publishing online.

Now it could be argued—and I just might do it some day—that writers who refuse to learn how to publish their own work (particularly their backlist, if they’re professional writers) are giving up on themselves. These writers don’t have to do the work themselves, but they should learn how to hire the best help for a flat fee, and then get that work online.

Because, in the eighteen months since I wrote this piece, e-books have become 25% of the book market (and they’ll continue to grow), bookstores have all but vanished except in a few (lucky) places, and most books are ordered online.  There is little that a traditional publisher can do that a writer can’t do herself—provided she’s willing to learn how.

The learning is the key. Because the writer who gives up on himself is the writer who stops learning.

There are a variety of ways to see that unwillingness to learn.

Among professionals, it’s a refusal to look at the changes in the industry and figure out how to apply those changes to the writer’s advantage. The writer remains stuck in the old way of doing things and never even bothers to look at the new way.

Among newcomers, it’s an unwillingness to admit that they still have learning to do in their craft. Maybe their self-published title isn’t selling because it’s unusual. But maybe it’s not selling because readers have sampled it and found it lacking—either in storytelling, grammatical basics, or in just plain old good writing.

The publishing craft might be lacking as well. The writer might have a great story buried in terrible formatting, hidden behind an awful cover, or hidden behind a bad cover blurb. All of these are skills that a writer can learn or, if he has the funds, he can hire someone to do the work for him for a flat fee.

I keep repeating that flat fee statement because yet another way for writers to give up on themselves is to fail to understand business. Right now, writers can post their work online or do the work to do a trade paper edition, and get up to 70% of the profits. But so many writers are refusing to learn the various ways to do this and retain that 70% profit.  Writers can retain the profit either by learning to do the work themselves or paying someone a flat fee to do the work for them.

Too many writers—most of them, in fact—are paying some “professional” as much as 50% of that 70% to do the work for them. Work that will take the “professional” a few hours, and that professional will keep earning a profit on that work for years, maybe even decades.

The difference here is that the writer hasn’t learned business, and refuses to. He’s giving up on himself, and in doing so is costing himself thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands over decades.

That frustrates me to no end.

Musicians, who’ve been struggling with this ten years longer than writers, have learned to have multiple platforms. They make sure their music is available in vinyl, CD, and MP3. They license usage rights to radio stations as well as television shows and commercials. They do more concerts than they used to, just to get the music heard. The big recording studios still exist, but they are more selective than ever about the artists they back. The difference is that the artists who have the shot at the bigs and fail to achieve a studio’s numbers now have something to fall back on, and a way to rebuild.

Actors no longer have to choose between stage, screen, and small screen. They work in short video, live-action films, YouTube stories. They work on basic cable and premium channel films. They take television shows, even though that would have been the kiss of death to a movie career twenty years ago, and they do a lot of international work. The markets, in all of the arts, are changing.

But the changing markets shouldn’t be an excuse for failing to try hard. It’s pretty easy to see why an actor isn’t getting work if he posts his latest homemade video on YouTube, and it’s filled with too much emoting and not enough emotion. Anyone can spend days watching singers on YouTube attempting to become the next Justin Bieber. Most of those singers are out of tune and have no performance skills at all. It’s hard to become a professional musician. You need a certain level of skill, not just a pleasant voice.

Sadly, it’s the same for writers. You need a certain level of skill to succeed on an international level, and now the only way to know if you have that skill is to trust the readers. The readers will find your work. If it’s good, it’ll sell—not at huge numbers per month, but a few copies here and there. If the sales remain consistent or grow, you’re doing a good job. If you sell five copies in July of 2012 and only one copy in the next six months, then there might be something wrong with the product.

Should you figure out what that something is? Should you rewrite the book to death? Heck, no. You should practice—keep writing new material, and learn, learn, learn.  After a few years, come back to the book that’s not selling. You will see it differently. You will know if the cover is bad or the blurb fails.  You’ll know if there is no opening hook.

Provided you’ve been learning and growing and getting better.

All freelancers succeed because they persist. They try, they fail, they learn. They try again, they fail, they learn. They keep trying, keep learning, until they get a glimmer of success. Success rarely comes overnight. It comes after years of hard and often thankless work.

People who go into business for themselves expecting it to be easy are bound to fail, and fail in a spectacular way. Working for yourself is hard. You have a lot of decisions to make, a lot of assessing to do.

How does all of this publishing/artist talk apply to those of you who don’t work in the arts? Simple, really. There are things that you can do for your business that look like get-rich-quick short cuts. You’ve probably tried them. You know that they don’t work.

What works is learning the ropes and becoming the best at what you do.

Sometimes that means going on a limb with a project no one else believes in. But if it’s early in your career and no one has believed in you yet, then perhaps the problem isn’t that the project is too new or too innovative or too different for other people to appreciate.

Maybe the problem is that you haven’t learned your craft yet. You don’t know how to run the most efficient business possible. You haven’t learned the tricks to your trade.

When you always take the easy route, you’re giving up on yourself. Take that ego of yours and remind it that you need to be the best at what you do. And the best never takes the easy route.

Then take that insecurity of yours and tell it that you need to work harder to get better. It’ll take over from there. And it’ll balance out the ego that seems to think it should be rewarded just for trying.

I know. I know. It’s not always easy versus hard. The answers aren’t always clear-cut. How do you know when you’re giving up on yourself versus being innovative? What if there’s no clear path?

I also know that it’s different for other types of freelancers. The digital world isn’t one-type-fits-all. For example, retail stores with unique inventories are actually hurting themselves if they don’t have a significant online presence. Same with real estate agencies. Doctors are starting to investigate the benefits of e-mail “appointments” for minor matters.  Every type of business is different.

So if they’re all different, then how do you figure out where you stand? Are you working hard enough? Are you giving yourself enough credit? Are you hurting or helping yourself?

How do you know if you’re giving up on yourself?

First, recognize that giving up on yourself isn’t black and white. Just because something is easy doesn’t make it wrong. Just because something is hard doesn’t make it right. To know if you’re giving up on yourself, you first have to figure out who you are.

Oh, yeah, that’s simple. Take a lifelong task and figure it out in the next twenty minutes. Not.

What I mean by that is this:

Figure out what your dreams are. Write them down. Figure out what your goals are. Write them down.

Once you’ve figured out what your dreams and goals are today, right now, this instant, honestly assess if you’re on the right road to attaining those dreams and goals. Only you know what your dreams and goals are, and whether you’re really on the right path to achieving those dreams and goals.

I stress that only you can figure out if you’re on the right path because sometimes—to an outsider—it looks like you’ve given up on yourself when you really haven’t.

For example, my husband has a degree in architecture and three years of law school. He quit in the last week of his last semester of law school because he realized he did not want to be a lawyer, and if he had graduated from the University of Idaho Law School, he would automatically have had most of the responsibilities of a lawyer, even if he never wanted to practice law.

So one week before graduation, he became a full-time bartender and school bus driver. To anyone looking at him from the outside, it would seem like he had given up on himself.

Instead, he focused on his writing career. Becoming a full-time professional writer isn’t something you can do overnight. It takes years, and he had just embarked on that career. But think about it from the point of view of his friends and family: he was a thirty-something former professional golfer and professional skier, who had given up “guaranteed” careers in architecture and the law, to what? Spend all his time in bars? Noodle on his computer?

It seemed like he had given up on himself when, for maybe the first time in his life, he had actually started to take himself seriously. Now he’s a bestselling writer, with more than ninety novels published. In hindsight, he made the right—the obvious—decision. But only in hindsight.

What did Dean have that many people do not have? He had a firm belief in himself and a willingness to take risks to achieve his goals. Those risks often made him go against common wisdom, and to fight against the beliefs of others.

That’s tough. But that’s what people with non-traditional professions, freelancers in other words, have to do.

So how do freelancers know when they’re giving up on themselves?

Here’s where it gets tough, because sometimes (often!) the act of giving up on yourself is by degrees. It’s subtle. It’s settling for a little less than you want. It’s slowly moving off the path until one day you wake up and realize that, not only have you left the path you wanted to walk, but you’re not even going in the right direction any more. And you got there by varying your course by half-inches instead of making hard right turns. Sometimes you didn’t even notice as you went off course.

To keep from giving up on yourself, you must:

1. Believe in yourself.

I know, I know. You’re insecure. You’re uncertain. We all are. And sometimes, articulating those big dreams out loud just sounds ridiculous, especially if you haven’t had any achievements in your field yet.

So how do you gain a belief in yourself when you really have none? I take a tip from the training that actors receive. Pretend. Pretend you have the belief. Act as if you do. Figure out how people who believe in themselves would act in that situation, and then mimic them. Eventually, it will become habit. And somewhere along the way, you will realize that you actually do believe in yourself. To be otherwise would feel odd.

2. Stop the negative self-talk.

If you hear yourself saying, “I’ll never be able to do that,” add “if I don’t try.” Give yourself little pep talks. Keep your focus on what you can control. Remember that your goal is a hard one, and will take a lot of effort. So reward yourself for the small steps.

A corollary to this is: stop talking to/listening to the negative people around you. For every person who thinks something will work, there are five who will tell you the flaws in your plan. First, look at the source. If the person who tells you the flaws hasn’t done anything with his life, realize that what he’s telling you is what goes on in his head every single day. Those negative words are the ones he lives with, and the ones that have prevented him from achieving his dreams. He thinks he’s being helpful. And he is. He’s giving you an example of where you’ll be if you listen to him.

You can cut the negative people out of your life, but that isn’t always productive. I have some marvelous friends who can be very negative about any dreams or goals. I just don’t discuss my future plans with those people. (I often don’t mention my successes to them, either.) I enjoy their company on a casual level, and I keep the relationship on that level.

3. Perform a daily gut check.

Make sure you’re on the right path each and every day. Seriously. Your gut will twist slightly if you’re making a poor decision. That feeling is different from the feeling you get when you make a risky-but-good decision.

Let’s see if I can describe the difference. If you’re making a risky-but-good decision, you’ll feel a bit lightheaded, a bit breathless, and a little frightened. You know it can go wrong, but you’re willing to risk it.

If you’re making a mistake, veering ever so slightly off the road toward your dreams, you might feel lightheaded and frightened, but you’ll also feel just a little sick. Often, if you’re paying attention to that voice inside your head, the one that gives you advice (good and bad), you’ll hear it say, “That’s okay. I’ll be all right. I can live with that.”

4. Watch out for that evil phrase, “I can live with that.”

“I can live with that,” is often accompanied by “for a few weeks, for a year.” But add “forever” to that phrase. Can you live with it now? Can you live with it forever, if you know it means you’ll never achieve your dream?

Sometimes, you have to live with something. Several of my friends have been taking care of their elderly, very sick parents. My friends have volunteered to live with financial hardship and emotional difficulties so long as their parents are alive. My friends also know that this will lead to some deferred goals. But they’re willing to make that choice—and they know, by the very nature of the task they’re facing—that they won’t have to live in this situation for the rest of their lives.

Dean has a great way of analyzing the “I can live with this” part of life. He asks—quite pointedly—“Do you want to be doing this in one year? In five years? In ten?”

If you answer those questions honestly, you’ll know if you’re making too many compromises. For example, I would hate to have to go back and wait tables to finance my writing. But I’d do it, if the writing stopped earning money for me. I’d do it for the rest of my life if it meant I could keep writing.

But I wouldn’t take on another profession. I never could imagine myself being a news director forever or even a journalist forever. Nor could I imagine myself editing magazines and books for the rest of my life.

While those professions seem close to professional fiction writing, they aren’t professional fiction writing. In fact, they get in the way of professional fiction writing.

For a while, I was better known as an editor in the field of science fiction and fantasy than I was as a writer. I was an acclaimed, award-winning editor, and if you look at the circulation figures, the years I edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction were the years of its highest circulation in its entire existence. In other words, I was good at my job. Very good.

I liked the job at first, came to hate it by the end. If I had remained as an editor (and I had dozens of editing job offers after I quit. In fact, I still get editing job offers every now and then), I would have been remembered, acclaimed, famous—and I would have given up on myself. At that point in time, most people believed I was a better editor than writer, and that I was making a huge mistake giving up the editing career.

It was one of the best decisions of my life.

But editing was very seductive. It wasn’t easier than writing for me. It was harder. I had to work for someone else. I had to fit myself into a mold that wasn’t comfortable for me.

However, editing gave me great acclaim and respect. I had achieved, by the age of thirty-five, fame in my chosen genre (science fiction and fantasy) and I was at the pinnacle of my editing career. I could have stayed at that pinnacle for decades, if I had chosen to do so.

It would have been close to a writing career. In fact, it mimicked the writing career in all but the production of stories. I even wrote a lot of words—editorials, interstitial materials, essays. But I didn’t write fiction.

I had been writing fiction since I was seven years old. Giving up on fiction for a career in sf would have been giving up on myself.

And yet, waiting tables—even now—wouldn’t be. Waiting tables would enable me to concentrate on writing during my off hours. I would put in my time for my paycheck, come home, and do what I love. And that’s extremely important to me—more important than being remembered or being the center of a certain genre or being a big shot.

I am a storyteller at heart. And I am happiest when I write down my stories and try to get them published. So long as I do that, I am staying true to myself.

5. Watch out for “good enough.”

I hate that phrase, “Good enough.” The thing that got me to work hardest on my fiction was a comment Frederick Pohl made about my writing at a writing workshop. He said he would have bought a story of mine—not because it was memorable or brilliant, but because he had a 3,000-word gap in his magazine and my 3,000 word story was good enough.

Ack. Kiss of death. I never want to be good enough. I want to be the best.

“Good enough” is settling. And I never want to settle. Not in my fiction (“Oh, my writing is good enough. I don’t have to learn any more.”) or in my life (“Oh, this job is good enough. I’ll get by.”) “Good enough” is as deadly as “I can live with that.”

Only, “good enough” crops up in other ways. Like this:

•       I’m good enough to do something as a hobby, but not good enough to do it as a profession.

•       This is good enough to get by.

•       I’ll never be good enough to achieve my dream.

All three are deadly thoughts.

Let’s take them one at a time. “I’m good enough to do something as a hobby, but not good enough to do it as a profession.”

That sentence has a whole bunch of levels. First of all, who decides what “good enough” to do something professionally is? And let’s say there are standards; who says you can’t improve? Who says you can’t get better?

Why are you afraid to try?

“This is good enough to get by.” Why are you settling for “getting by”? Why aren’t you striving to do your best?

“I’ll never be good enough to achieve my dream.” Here’s a secret: people who achieve  their dreams are never “good enough.” They’re always trying to get better. In fact, they never believe they have reached a plateau. “Good enough” suggests there is one.

And here’s a final one. If you’re constantly satisfied with “good enough” in your field of endeavor, ask yourself this: Are you in the right field? Because if you’re not willing to constantly improve, if you’re willing to settle, then you are not enjoying your work.

There are a bunch of reasons for failing to enjoy your work. You might be burned out. You might be overworked. Or you might not like the work itself.

Many of us have had dreams that have proven wrong for us. I love music, but when it comes to being a musician, I always settle. I never strive. I practice until I’m “good enough” to get by. And no matter what I do, I cannot break myself of this habit.

Which is why my career in the arts is as a writer, not as a musician. I never got to “good enough” as an editor, but I could feel it looming on the horizon. I moved on before “good enough” became part of my editing vocabulary.

This is why I tell you to do a gut check daily. Because you’ll be able to chart the progress of what you do and how you’re feeling. Honestly, it’s okay to discover that a dream you’ve had is not for you.

But here’s what’s not okay: it’s not okay to give up on yourself because you’re not worthy, or someone else has told you the task facing you is impossible.

I have a quote on the bulletin board next to my desk. It’s from Thomas Carlyle: “Every noble work is at first impossible.”

And another from Judy Garland: “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, rather than a second-rate version of someone else.”

That’s what we’re talking about here. You need to be a first-rate version of yourself, and only you know who that person is. You’re living your life, not your mother’s life or your best friend’s life. Only you know what you’re capable of.

Don’t do what everyone thinks you should do. Do what you think you should do.

And don’t give up because others tell you you’re not capable of success. Prove them wrong.

6. Be tenacious.

Cling to your dream. Work for your goal. If you step off the path, climb back on the moment you realize you’ve veered in the wrong direction.

You will make mistakes. You will take the wrong path. The key is to come back to yourself, and come back to the right road for you.

I can’t tell you if you’re giving up on yourself. Only you can know that.

Dean has one other question, and it’s a big one: when you’re on your deathbed, what will you regret?

Will you regret not striving hard enough for your dream? Will you regret lost years while you were succeeding in a profession other than the one you love? Will you regret being “good enough?”

Only you can answer those questions.

And you should. Daily. To keep yourself on track.

To keep yourself from giving up.

“The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Giving Up On Yourself” copyright © 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

You can now order either an e-book copy of the Guide or a trade paper copy of the Guide. It’s in slightly different format and has been organized, so that related topics are in an easily accessible place. To get a copy with this updated article, make sure you have the second edition (which will be available in December 2011)  or a later edition.

You can get the print version here.

For those of you who’d like to buy an ebook, here’s the Amazon link as well as the Barnes & Noble link. The e-book will also be available on all the other e-book sites. If you want it in your favorite format, and the book hasn’t yet been uploaded to your favorite site, try Smashwords. You’ll be able to download in a variety of e-book formats.

I’m also including a donate button here for a short time while I work on the revised issue of the Guide. If you feel so inclined, please add a few dollars to the pot. Thanks.

 

The Business Rusch: Playing To Win

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I keep teasing my husband, saying he should write a how-to book called Think and Grow Thin. Seriously. Because that’s how this man loses weight. He lost 40 pounds this year on the Think and Grow Thin method. He sets his mind to losing weight, and voila! he does it. Of course, there’s some effort involved. He says the book should be titled Eat Less and Exercise More.  But that’s not as sexy as Think and Grow Thin.

Besides, my title is an accurate reflection of what he does. He thinks about every bite he puts in his mouth and then he loses weight. Because he’s focused on it.

That title could probably be modified for anything: Think and Grow Rich (Didn’t Napoleon Hill already write that?); Think and Grow Confidence; Think and Grow a Pair. Seriously. Because you can do anything you put your mind to.  At least, that’s how I was raised.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Unexpected Gold in Self-Help Books.” I’d been looking at self-help books written for women and took out the word “woman” and inserted the word “writer” you might have an accurate portrait of most writers today. Then last week, I talked about the way that modern writers were trained in the old world of traditional publishing, and how that training influenced the way they approached their business.

Jim Franz in the comments mentioned that psychology has moved beyond finding what caused the behavior to figuring out what causes a person to continue that behavior in the present. If you’re participating in some kind of harmful behavior, what are you getting out of it? Are you getting anything at all? Or is it inertia? Maybe there is a root psychological cause, but better to dig out the problem in the present than deal with whatever caused it in the past. The past is immutable. The present is not.

So with that in mind, I separated out my list from two weeks ago into a whole new series of lists, with subheadings like:

• • Money
  • Fear
  • Playing To Win
  • Being Powerful (Not a Victim)
  • Believing the Worst
  • Prince Charming to The Rescue!
  • Defending the Writer
  • Volunteering to Get Screwed

Then I put the pertinent items from my long list into the subheadings, figuring there would be some crossover. There is, but not as much as I expected. So I’ll deal with the subheadings and their various lists in the next few weeks.

This week, I’ll deal with the one I find the most fascinating: Playing To Win. Because most writers I know—hell, most people I know—do not play to win. The difference between people who are truly successful and people who are not is that winning attitude. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s true.

I’m not talking about the winner-take-all attitude that we sometimes get taught in gym classes and that movies like Wall Street are about.  I’m talking about the attitude you bring with you to any situation.  No coach in college football—where the stakes are high, and money comes into the program based on a good record—tells the team as they’re headed onto the field, “See if the other team will let you get one touchdown. One touchdown, and maybe a few extra yards. That’s good enough. Just one touchdown.”

The coach does his best to get the team to win.  Some coaches cheat to do it. Some destroy their players to do it. And some teach their players how to play effectively with the eye on the prize—a win at the end of four quarters, with no injuries and no cheating and a lot of hard work.

Imagine me as the coach who wants to teach you how to play effectively. The first thing you have to do is learn how to win.

Sounds silly, no? But it’s not. And the whole idea for this topic initially came from a self-help book written by Mika Brzezinski called Knowing Your Value. Mostly, the book has recycled ideas from other self-help books (which is why it’s not in my recommended reading list). But the fascinating thing to me about this book is the reason that Brzezinski wrote it in the first place.

This internationally famous woman, daughter of a former National Security Advisor, longtime broadcaster with years of success in her own right, realized she was underpaid and undervalued at her job. It took years of fighting to get a salary on par with the other men in her office, and she actually had to make a case for herself, a case that none of the  men had to make.

I find this fascinating because I always assume that someone famous, someone who works as hard as Brzezinski does, has already learned her value. The fact that she hadn’t, that she had to claw her way up from an unequal position that she believes was partly caused by her own attitudes (and, after reading the book, I agree), is an open window into a private world. This kind of behavior happens all the time to people who are obviously successful and those who are not.  It leads to unhappiness, burnout, and midlife crisises. In some ways, failing to understand your own value is like a football team going onto the field hoping for and being satisfied with a single touchdown.

People who don’t know their own value can’t play to win.

So here’s the list of pertinent items from two weeks ago that belong in the Playing To Win category:

• Writers don’t play to win
• Writers strive for survival, not wealth
• Writers don’t have financial goals
• Writers don’t know their worth
• Writers don’t get rich because they don’t envision themselves rich
• Writers refuse to learn when and where they have power
• Writers lack a sense of entitlement
• Writers listen to naysayers
• Writers rarely speak up for themselves
• Writers give up too easily
• Writers fail to negotiate
• Prince Charming will ride to the rescue. (In a writer’s world, Prince Charming is an agent.)
• Inheriting wealth is an investment strategy (or in writing world, counting on a bestseller is not an investment strategy).
• Learn to say no.
• Risk is not a synonym for loss
• There are no secrets
• Learning takes time and dedication

Of course, the first item on the list gives the list its name.  We’ll let that one just float out there for the time being.

But these items fit together:

• Writers strive for survival, not wealth
• Writers don’t have financial goals
• Writers don’t know their worth
• Writers don’t get rich because they don’t envision themselves rich
• Writers refuse to learn when and where they have power
• Writers lack a sense of entitlement

These items fall in the Think and Grow Thin category. Writers never think of themselves as powerful. And they are, particularly now, in this new world of publishing. Writers hold all of the cards, but they refuse to recognize it.

Refusing to recognize that fact makes sense if you go back to last week’s essay and you realize that throughout all of their careers, writers have fought to simply have a career. So now that the world has changed underneath us, we don’t recognize where we stand.

Without writers, there are no publishing companies, no game companies, no comic book companies, no movie companies, no record labels. Without us, most of the entertainment industry will collapse.

In some of those other related fields, writers have taken the power that they have and used it collectively. In television, the head writer (often the creator of the show) has more power than anyone, including the star of the show. And that, my friends, is how it should work.

Because without the writer’s vision and voice, there is no product.

Think I’m kidding? Look at it from a reader’s perspective—and please, no cheating here. Think about your favorite author of all time.  Then tell me who publishes her work.  Tell me who published her first novel.

Then tell me who first published Little Women. Or A Christmas Carol. Or Hamlet. (Scholars, pick something outside of your expertise.) Now, tell me who wrote Little Women, A Christmas Carol, and Hamlet. See how easy that is?

The publisher gets the book distributed to the readers. Or did, once upon a time.

That time has changed. Now all of us can download books on our e-reader or via our computer direct from the writer himself if we’re so inclined, and if that writer has enough foresight to have the book available. The distribution networks have changed and now the writer can access those networks easily.

Mark Twain published his own work. So did Edgar Rice Burroughs. In fact, the only reason we’re familiar with Tarzan today is because Burroughs self-published.

For  years, publishers told writers that we were interchangeable. If one writer is difficult, the publishers would say, they’d find a different writer to take her place. Which was just straight hypocrisy, and any writer should have seen it. Because if J.K. Rowling became “difficult,” publishers would have jumped through hoops to satisfy her. They wouldn’t have told her that any writer who could craft a story about a boy wizard in a magical school would do, because any writer would not do.

It was Rowling’s storytelling, her voice, and her vision that made her unique. It’s the same with all of us. Not all of us sell at Rowling’s level, but if we’re published writers, we have fans and followings who know the difference between Richard Kadrey’s urban fantasy novels and Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy novels. And the difference isn’t just in the details, it’s in the way the stories get told, which is all about the writer and not about the genre at all.

In the past, writers stepped onto the field and hoped for a touchdown. They got satisfied with a single good play, with maybe making it to the 50-yard line. For the most part, writers believed the crap fed to them by those who made a fortune off them and gave the writers a pittance. Writers stopped playing to win, if winning ever really crossed their minds.

Now, when a writer approaches her work, she needs to do it with the attitude that she will do the best she can possible do in all areas of her career. Not just write the best stories.  She must also do the best in her business dealings for herself and her family.

She must—without cheating or injuring someone else—play to win. That means this behavior must stop:

• Writers listen to naysayers
• Writers rarely speak up for themselves
• Writers give up too easily
• Writers fail to negotiate

The writer needs to believe in herself first and foremost, believe she’s even worthy of being on the field. Because no team on any field—from middle school to high school to college and beyond — belongs on that field if the team doesn’t think it can win. Whether it wins or not is immaterial. What matters is believing that a win is possible.

So if you believe you can win, then you must have confidence, you must defend yourself if need be, you must try and try again, and you must push forward.

The first step in a negotiation in the new world of publishing is to have confidence.  Confidence is reflected in this question: Do you even want to be in that negotiation in the first place?

I often get e-mail from indie-published writers who recently have been approached by agents. And always, the indie-published writer includes this sentence, “Last year (or two years ago or three years ago), I would have been thrilled to hear that an agent wants to represent my work. But  now I’m wondering what an agent can really do for me that I can’t do myself.”

Exactly. That’s the right question. What can the agent do for you that you can’t do yourself?

I just asked the same question of a publisher of mine. He blinked, then gave me a sheepish smile, and said, “Can you afford the cover artist?” We both agree that the covers are spectacular, and honestly, I might be able to afford the artist. So my answer to his cover artist question was a shrug. But when it came to marketing, distribution, and all the things that traditional publishers used to do better than writers, the answer to my question was a resounding no.

We parted ways after a few back and forths. But the truth of the matter is that had that conversation not been mandated by the option clause in my contract, I wouldn’t have had the conversation at all. Because I knew that this particular traditional publisher wasn’t doing anything on my books that I couldn’t do—and do better (except maybe pay that spectacular cover artist his fee up front).

Do you want to be in the negotiation at all? Should you be? Will it help your career, make your writing better, get your work to the most readers over time? Because that’s the other thing writers forget now. Playing to win isn’t about the short term.

Playing to win in publishing is about what will happen a decade from now, when it used to be about what will happen in the next six months. Quite a change in thinking, and one writers need to make.

Which brings me to another point about playing to win. Because the traditional publishing game was rigged in favor of the short-term gain over the long-term build, writers got into what I call magical thinking. If I have the right agent, I’ll succeed. If my publisher puts the right amount of advertising dollars behind my book, I’ll succeed. If I go on a book tour, I’ll succeed.

But remember that William Goldman’s axiom about Hollywood also applies to publishing: No one knows anything.  And what that means is this: none of the magic above will guarantee success.  Which means that these two items—

• Prince Charming will ride to the rescue. (In a writer’s world, Prince Charming is an agent.)
• Inheriting wealth is an investment strategy (or in writing world, counting on a bestseller is not an investment strategy).

—constitute magical thinking. Wipe those thoughts from your brain and realize that success in the new world of publishing comes from years of hard work and planning, learning craft, learning business, and learning how to approach your career with the idea that you will do well.

Once you make that leap, these last four items become a kind of touchstone, a bit of a to-do list:

• Learn to say no.
• Risk is not a synonym for loss
• There are no secrets
• Learning takes time and dedication

I said no to my traditional publisher, because to do anything else would harm my career. (And honestly, from the perspective of someone who spent 30+ years in traditional publishing, that sentence still boggles my mind.)

But I also believe in taking calculated risks. I’ve written about how to take risks before, and I suggest if you don’t understand by what I mean by calculated risk that you look at this post in my Freelancer’s Survival Guide on risk.

Realize too that the information to help you succeed is out there. Just because someone else is successful doesn’t mean that she knows a secret handshake that no one ever taught you. The difference is this: She’s learned how to be a successful business person, and you’re just starting on that journey.

If you don’t know how to do something, ask. I know that sounds really basic, but it’s that easy (and that hard). Sometimes the answers are in a blog like this one. Sometimes they’re in books. Sometimes they’re standing in front of you in the form of a person whose career you would like to emulate.

When I give talks, I always open the last part to questions, and sometimes no one asks a thing.  I get told that I’ve covered all the bases, but I know I haven’t. Sometimes people are afraid to ask or embarrassed by their own ignorance or worried what others will think of them. And we’ll deal with that in a later post.

But I say at the beginning of my question sessions that there are no stupid questions, and I mean it. If you don’t know something, then ask. Seem stupid for a minute or two. You’ll get your answer that way, and you’ll have a greater chance for success.

Finally, remember learning does take time and dedication, just like it says above. I’m still learning. If you’ve been reading this blog for the past few years, you’ve seen the trajectory of my learning, as I realized things I needed to know for the new world of publishing or as I gradually understood that what I had learned for the old world of publishing doesn’t apply at all in this world.

Playing to win is not about crushing an opponent. If you’ll notice, I never really mentioned an opponent at all. Because that’s where the sports metaphor breaks down. In a football game, one team wins and another loses. In writing and publishing, if one person succeeds, that person’s success does not force another person to fail. In writing and publishing, unlike a football game, the rising tide truly does lift all boats.

The key here is attitude. Think like a winner and you will succeed. It’s a variation on Dean’s Think and Grow Thin method. He thinks about each bite he puts in his mouth and that enables him to lose weight. If you think about your writing career from the perspective of success rather than constant failure, then you will succeed over time.

Does Dean manage to eat right every day? Nope. But when he doesn’t, he knows it and gets back on the right track a day or so later. Likewise, you won’t succeed at writing and business every single day. You will fail. But no one wins without losing. Failures teach you how to be a success. In fact, the biggest successes always have a slew of failures behind them. Failing is how we learn. (Again, I dealt with this in the Freelancer’s Guide.)

So change your attitude. Go at everything in your writing career from the perspective of doing your best. Make sure you do your best work. Make sure you negotiate the best deal. Make sure you do the best you can for your family and friends.

And if you do that, you will be playing to win.

The success of this blog has surprised me. Once I committed to it, I decided to the best work I possibly could. I also decided that I would do this as a reader-funded project, which has worked so far. So, if you have gotten anything out of the blog, please click on the donation button. And thank you!

“The Business Rusch: Playing To Win” copyright 2011 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.