Perhaps a better question would be “do I want an agent?” because with the rise of self publishing as a viable method of making a living it’s now coming down to personal choice as to whether a new writer goes for legacy publishing or self publishing. If you still want in to legacy publishing you will almost certainly need an agent to help you get there.

Literary agents get a bad rap from some people in the industry, especially those heavily invested in self publishing, but there is a lot an agent can do for you and I don’t think it’s wise to ignore the idea of getting an agent without knowing what they can do for you. They do charge a commission of 15%* and this commission based payment ensures an agent will always be working to get the best deal for you.

Obviously if you want to see your book printed by the big six publishers an agent is going to be invaluable in getting an editors attention and helping you navigate the contract processes and negotiations.

However that’s not all a literary agent can do for you. Every agent (at least, every good agent) will have a series of contacts in the industry that they can use to your advantage. You may need a specialist to help you with foreign sales of your work and chances are your agent will know one.

An agent can also act as a career coach, and help you with the decision making process when it comes to planning your next career move. An agent will probably tell you your planned 700 page epic about navel lint is a project best left to later in your career.

They will also keep an eye on what trends are developing in the things editors are looking for and may be able to help guide a project as you’re writing it.

If you’re self published an agent may be in your future despite what you might think at first. Let’s say your self published novel does really well and sells several thousand copies (I’ve heard the number was 2000 copies but that may well be higher now) you may want to approach a publisher to see if they’d like to take you on now that you have a proven sales record. An agent can help you negotiate the best possible deal for you, and statistically speaking deals negotiated by agents more than cover the amount paid to the agent.

Also, as above, if a foreign publisher decides they like the look of your self published book and asks to publish a local copy, you’d be foolish to try and negotiate a deal involving foreign law and publishers without the help of an expert. It’s up to you if that expert is an agent or a lawyer, but agents who specialise in foreign sales will have significantly more contacts in the local industry.

Do you have to have an agent? No, there is good money to be made going it alone. That said there is a lot an agent can do for you no matter which path you decide to follow so I would recommend keeping them in mind no matter how you tackle your career.

* You should never have to pay an agent up front. Agents work on commission only, if they ask for your money up front they’re not an agent you should be dealing with.

This pretty much never works. Very rarely you will hear about a professional author writing two books at once, but in my experience what they’re actually doing is writing one book while editing the other.

A big part of why this is a problem is that it seems to work, at least at first, especially if you’re good at story planning. However it always ends up going pear shaped because the human mind gets details wrong. Small bits of each book will creep into the other and it can become very hard to catch the problem until it’s irreversible.

It’s also just plain hard. Writing even one book is a task that can consume your life, and especially if you’re new, you need to be concentrating on making sure your first book sucks to the smallest degree possible.

You can very easily burn yourself out trying this, I certainly did and ended up not writing for two months. Learn from my stupid. Learn from it!

2. Trying to be totally original

This is a noble goal but the chances of you pulling it off without churning out an unreadable pile of dung is pretty much nil. There are reason certain story structures, tropes and characters recur in fiction; they work.

A second thing to bear in mind is that even the most out there ideas have been tried at one point or another, sometimes it goes well, sometimes it doesn’t but if you really think that no one’s tried an unlikable protagonist before then I have bad news for you.

What you can do is take a new spin on an old story. Rather than writing something purely for the sake of making it different, write it because it fits the story and your own unique way of telling it. A good example is the Dresden Files novels by Jim Butcher. The Dresden books are almost an encyclopaedia of tropes, references and allusions. What makes them work is Butcher’s story telling and the original way he’s telling stories that have been around for years.

3. Trying to write to the market

Yeah I tried to write a sexy vampire story. This is not my bailiwick and it was awful. The reason it was so bad is not because sexy vampire stories inherently suck (there are some genuinely good ones) but because I tried to write it because it was popular and not because it was the story I wanted to tell.

I keep a copy to remind myself of how badly this can go wrong.

That’s not to say you can’t write something that’s currently super popular. If you want to write a sexy vampire novel then that’s what you should write. Where you run into difficulty is in forcing yourself to write something you have no emotional investment in.

As with everything, there are exceptions to this but they’re normally provided by professional writers with a faster time to market than beginners. Pro writers can take better advantage of the reading market’s passing fancies but even then no matter how callous they claim to be I suspect that these writers still enjoyed what they wrote even if it wasn’t their normal fare.

4. Not planning

I’m not saying you have to write an outline (hint: write an outline) but not planning your writing in some way, even if it’s just setting aside time to write, is a recipe for disaster.

You also need to plan how you’re going produce, distribute and market your work. You need to know how all of this works before you need to use it or it’s going to be a very steep learning curve when your book is done.

5. All planning and no writing

Yeah, this again. You can spend your life developing the perfect book marketing plan and never write a word of your novel.

If you don’t write your book it will never sell. If you don’t write, you aren’t a writer.

It’s harsh, but it’s true.

6. Not checking Writer Beware/Preditors and Editors

This is a mistake I only made once, and I managed to catch myself before anything really bad happened, but it was a close enough call that it’s ingrained this lesson into my brain.

If someone, anyone approaches with an offer or a request for your writing these two sites should be your first port of call. Most scams you will spot a mile away, but there are a few around that are extremely sophisticated and can easily suck you in if you don’t check on them.

The sites you need are: Writer Beware run by SFWA and Preditors and Editors. Check them if you have any doubts about anyone or anything you are dealing with in relation to your writing.

The law of the universe now states that I will fall victim to a writing scam that ends with me selling both my kidneys to a street vendor in Venezuela.

7. Getting into arguments online

Fortunately the fights I’ve had online have had nothing to do with writing, but in the end like all online arguments they were fruitless, pointless and just wasted time I should have been writing.

Just remember this XKCD comic every time you’re tempted.

8. Thinking I knew everything

This is just embarrassing but when I first started writing I thought I knew enough that I didn’t have anything more to learn and I could just go for it on any idea I came up with.

Yes, I was complete tool.

I may still be, but at least I’m open minded enough to know I know very little. Most of what I know has come from learning from my mistakes, and the rest of what I know has come from listening to people smarter than me.

Who you need to listen to is going to vary depending on who you are and what you write but I think you can’t go wrong with starting out listening to these three groups:

Mur Lafferty at I Should Be Writing. You should listen to Mur because she is smart, funny, an excellent writer and one of the few people prepared to tackle the emotional side of being a writer.

Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowhal and Howard Taylor at Writing Excuses. Four of the most entertaining writers in the world (for my money anyway) talk about everything from character development to world building to making sure you bathe before conventions. Always smart, always useful and always awesome.

Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing. There’s a reason Ridan gets a free ad on this site and will do for the foreseeable future and that reason is that over the course of two interviews* Robin taught me more about the way self publishing, indie publishing and traditional publishing works. Her blog is an absolute must for anyone getting into writing fiction.

Start with these three and it will be hard to go wrong. Not impossible, I’m living evidence that no advice is idiot proof, but I guarantee their advice is excellent.

9. Thinking I Could Do Everything Myself

Theoretically you can do almost everything yourself, but there is one glaring exception. You must, must get someone else to edit your work. I’m not talking about grammar and spelling (although it’s not a bad plan to get that checked too), I’m talking about getting someone who knows their onions to check over the story itself.

I recommend hiring a professional editor to do this, even though it costs, partly because they will be better at it than almost anyone who will do it for free and because they can tell you straight up if something’s not working without caring if your feelings are hurt.

Friends and beta readers will try but it’s very hard to tell someone that their story needs a total re write without hurting them.

10. Not Reading Out Loud When I’m Editing

Want to save yourself a ton of grief? Read your work out loud when you’re doing an edit. You will catch so, so much more in the way of odd phrasing and bad dialogue if you do it that way.

Scenes that seemed so perfect in your head will reveal their problems to you when your ears actually hear what you’ve written.

I think the reason this works is that it forces you to read what you have actually written instead of what you think you’ve written. We all read in chunks of words, and our brains have a bad habit of filling in gaps to make things sound better than they actually are.

11. Editing As I Go

I still do this; in fact I’m so bad at it that all I can say is “Go! Save yourselves!” and encourage you to leave me to die in a pile of premature edits.

Changing things as you go means it will be very hard for you to finish anything. Yes some people can do it, but I’m not one of them and I’m willing to bet you aren’t either. The people who can do it are full time authors who can afford to pull things to bits constantly and then rebuild as they write.

It’s very hard to know the shape of your story until it’s actually done. I know it’s a pain to know that a small change you’ll make at the start will necessitate changing things later in the book, but far better that than you never finish at all.

12. Leaping Into Things Too Quickly

A friend of mine asked me about my current book the other day and she asked if I was going to send it to a professional editor.

The answer was yes, but not yet.

The reason is that it’s just not that good yet. I could send it to the editor, pay several hundred dollars (that’s a minimum) and learn a great deal, but I’m not going to get the most out of my money and their time unless the book is as good as it can be first.

These days, especially with self publishing, it’s so easy to be impatient. To be afraid that if you’re not putting out a book a month you’re going to fall behind all the other authors who are churning out page turners seemingly every seventeen minutes.

As much as we all want to be successful right now so we can hurry up and order our Ferrari you will be far better served by waiting a little and putting out something of high quality.

More and more book reviewers are going to be the arbiters of quality when it comes to books both self published and traditionally published. It will pay for your book to stand head and shoulders above the rest when it comes time for the book bloggers to see your work.

* You can see them here and here.

Twitter has worked for me, moreso than anything else I’ve tried it’s allowed me to reach an audience far outside of what I normally would have been able to reach.

I can’t recommend Twitter enough, but if you’re new to twitter, there are some rules to keep it from becoming more of a liability than a boon.

1. Tweet. Interact.

Twitter isn’t much use if you just lurk around in the background, reading tweets as they fly by. It’s fun, don’t get me wrong, but for Twitter to positively impact your writing career you need to get involved. It’s also a lot more fun to actually be having conversations with the myriad of people you can find on Twitter.

It’s that personal interaction with people that is going to make twitter worthwhile. It doesn’t matter what the ineraction is as long as it’s friendly. Talk. Participate. I’s worh it, I promise.

2. Don’t just tweet about your products

It’s tempting to relentlessly pimp your stuff, I know. Believe me I know. Especially where there is a direct correlation between your fiction sales and your ability to eat that month.

But on Twitter you just can’t do it. There is no faster way to get ignored or even blocked than to do nothing but tweet “BUY MY CRAP” over and over again.

You actually need to make a connection with other people in order to get them to pay any attention to you when it comes to sale time. A number I’ve heard is that you can afford to make somewhere between and 1 and 3% of your Tweets self promotion. If you can, err to the lower end of that scale.

3. Positive balance man

A very easy mistake to make is to follow thousands of people in order to build up your Twitter following. This sort of works because most people and especially companies, will follow you back. You can build a twenty thousand person following in a week or two just by following everyone Twitter recommends to you.

And it will be both meaningless and next to useless.

Something everyone, consciously or not, look at when they are deciding to see if you are worth interacting with is your twitter balance. In short this means the balance between the number of people you follow vs the number of people who follow you.

If you look at my twitter account @ajackwriting you will see that I follow 561 people, and that roughly 731 people follow me. I’m in positive balance because the number of people following number is higher than the number of people I’m following.

This is so important, because being in negative balance will warn everyone that the only reason you’re on Twitter is to market your stuff and that you don’t really care about interacting with other Twitter users.

4. Fewer ham sandwiches

Blame my Uncle for the title. It was his way of referring to the very human habit of jumping on Twitter to tell the world about your latest ham sandwich.

I’m not saying you can’t say silly things on Twitter, hell that’s half of my day sometimes, but you do need to think of the way it looks to people who are following you. If the only thing followers ever see from you is tweets describing your boil in excruciating detail you might find yourself with far fewer followers than you’d hoped*.

You need to tweet about interesting things, share other peoples links and generally try to be as interesting as possible.

5. #hashtags

If you’re new to Twitter then you may be wondering what the strange people are doing putting what seem like random words at the end of their tweets with hashtags (#) at the start.

A hashtag is a way to get a tweet out into a kind of Twitter community group. These groups spring up all the time, and they’re a great way to get your work out there. If you are talking about writing, whether you want to brag about writing two thousand words in an hour or you’re posting a link to a great writing article you found online** it ensures anyone keeping an eye on that hashtag will see it.

Personally I’ve found the best hashtags to follow are #amwriting and #pubwrite. You can learn a lot just by clicking the links that come through.

6. Don’t forget you have a book to write

This advice is for me as much as it’s for anyone else. It’s so easy to just stay on Twitter, reading links and talking to other authors and feel like you’re writing. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to build a plat form on Twitter but in the end, if you don’t write a book (or a story, or whatever sort of fiction or non fiction you write) you’re ultimately wasting time.

7. One liners

This hasgtag gets a special mention: #wiplines. For some reason once I started posting on liners from whatever I happened to working on my number of followers and their interaction with me skyrocketed.

If you’re going to put some of your one liners onto Twitter, bear in mind that they have to be one of three things (assuming you write genre fiction): sexy, funny or creepy.

Personally I get better responses from the funny lines than I do from anything else. Some people have success just posting what amounts to the most awesome/action packed/sexy one liners they can manage, but for me you can’t go past making people laugh.

Possibly they are laughing at me rather than with me.

Tempting as it is, try not to give away plot details in your one liners. Instead go for the feel of your novel and try to get across why it would be fun for people to read.

8. You are your brand

While some get away with being utterly impersonal on Twitter they tend to be those who are offering things other than themselves as a brand. When you’re an author, you are your own brand, which means that the people who interact with you want to know about who you are and what you think.

Yes you need to maintain an air of professionalism, and no matter how tempting it’s never a good plan to cut loose with abuse on someone else, however you also need to give your followers a sense of who you are and what you’re about.

If you love steampunk…talk about it. Post up pictures of awesome steampunk stuff you’ve come across online or in real life.

Try to stay away from political or religious arguments if you can, simply because you will never, ever convince anyone online that your point of view is correct and you can make enemies needlessly.

If you want to debate about sports…or really anything else then go for it, just make sure you remain polite and logical even in the face of John Gabriel’s GIF Theory (sort of NSFW).

9. Networking

I’ve had a bit of a rant in the past about networking. The short version of it is this: make friends rather than contacts. If you set out just to network for your own selfish reasons you will get exactly nowhere. There are just too many social media douchebags*** out there already doing the same thing.

Instead, do favours for people and have no expectation of being repaid. Help promote books that you love and writers you respect. Sometimes people will return the favour, sometimes they won’t, either way keep doing nice things for people and eventually people will do nice things for you.

10. Never respond to critiques on Twitter

If someone bashes your book on Twitter, just stay quiet. It doesn’t matter how awful he review, how monstrous the reviewer or how great the book you don’t get to respond.

By barking back on Twitter you will do yourself ten times the damage a bad review can. Not responding to bad reviews (or any review for that matter) is good advice for any platform, but it goes double for Twitter.

One stroppy tweet from you can blacken your name around the world faster than you can imagine.

If you find yourself about to attack a reviewer on twitter, contact someone you love and have them punch you until you no longer feel the urge.

11. Tweets never die

As above, things you say on Twitter theoretically last forever. A tweet expressing your hatred for pants you made two years ago can come back and haunt your current pro pants campaign.

Don’t feel like you have to sensor yourself too much, but bear in mind how you’d like to appear to the world and consider how the tweets you’re putting out there match up with the image you want to display.

Chuck Wendig of Terribleminds.com is a good example of this. Despite being a foul mouthed beardy lunatic, Chuck manages to come across as intelligent and professional despite managing to take curse words to all new places. It fits the brand he’s set up for himself and it matches his image.

12. Have fun

This is often the last piece of advice I have about anything to do with writing. People will be able to tell if you are simply enduring Twitter for the sake of sales, and those sales will be few and far between. There is a wealth of people on Twitter who know more than you do, plumb them for information.

There are also a huge number of potential friends on there too, be friendly.

Enjoy using Twitter as the unique tool it is, because if you have fun with it the marketing and promotion side of things will be a side benefit that will all but take care of itself.

What are your twitter tips? Have I missed anything?

* Or possibly more. People are sickos.

** I don’t necessarily mean mine of course. <cough>

*** I can’t find who coined this term, if anyone knows let me know and I’ll credit it

The only real problem is that it’s very easy to get wrong, and the trap everyone seems to fall into is the temptation just isn’t very tempting. I’ve done, writing a scene where the main villain offered the hero a vast some of money to betray his friends.

The thing is that the vast majority of people (and thus readers) can’t imagine betraying their friends over money. Of course those same people might actually do it if presented with the opportunity, but almost no one can actually imagine betraying people they love for any amount of money.

What we can all imagine being tempted by is the impulse to save someone else. It’s easy to imagine a hero version of ourselves standing up the bad guys when they’re threatened…but if someone threatens a child to get the hero to back off, that’s a far harder decision and makes for a tense scene.

Consequently if the villain offers the protagonist the ability to save or protect more people than they would have been able topic they stayed on the straight and narrow, then the reader can more easily imagine it being a very tempting offer.

Jim Butcher does this well in his Dresden Files series, his protagonist Harry Dresden is often tempted by the many offers of corruption he’s offered because the bad guys actually seem to know what they’re doing with the temptation shtick. I won’t spoil the actual ins and outs of the books but they are well worthy read to see how Butcher handles this side of the story. That and Harry uses magic to blow a lot of things up.

My kind of books.

How would tempt your characters to the dark side? Let me know in the comments.

Maybe it’s time we made some resolutions that we can stick to.

Now, we’ve all made resolutions we haven’t kept; I will lose some weight, I will stop scaring my neighbour, I will stop talking to my invisible friends in public.*

I’ve put together a list of resolutions that I wish I’d taken up years ago, and tried to make them achievable goals that aren’t impossible to integrate into your life. If you’ve got an ideas you’d like to add tot hese I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

1. I will set time aside to write every day

The wording on this one is important. Telling yourself to write every day is a fine goal to have, but sometimes life gets in the way. What I would rather have you do is plan time to write every day (and of course do your absolute best to spend it writing), however if the kids are sick or possessed don’t beat yourself up for not writing anything that day.

Obviously it’s important to actually write when you can, but wording it this way avoids what I call resolution crash.

Imagine you want to lose some weight. You wouldn’t tell yourself that you’re going to work out six hours a day and eat perfectly from now until the day you die. That’s setting yourself up to fail, and if you fail once it becomes very easy just to give up your resolution as a bad idea.

2. I will make time to read

If you want to be a writer, you have to read. Not only that you have to read a lot and you have to read both in and out of your genre. At the very least you need to know what your contemporaries have already done so you don’t unconsciously produce a copy of something that’s already on the market.

For example if you’d like to write a novel about a teenage girl with no sense of self preservation and her largely sexless relationship with a disco ball vampire cradle snatcher…then I have bad news for you.

Reading also teaches you about writing. You will pick up tips and tricks almost by osmosis. If you read a particularly good book, you will be amazed how much of what he author did will stick with you when it comes time to write.

3. I will finish things

If you don’t finish things, you can’t edit them. You can’t send them to agents and you can’t publish them yourself. Almost all new writers have this problem because we aren’t experienced enough to know when something is good, and we end up lost in endless rewrites, restarts and recrimination.

This is my big thing for this year as I appear to be the king of unfinished writing projects (there’s a crown and everything; it’s made out of shame).

4. I will allow myself exactly three minutes sulking time about other people’s success. Per year.

Nothing wastes your life faster than jealousy, but it can be very hard not to feel it all.

So give yourself three minutes a year and then go back to writing so other people can be jealous of you.

5. I will take social media seriously…because my career depends on it

Social media is a dividing line. On one side of the line are authors who don’t/won’t/can’t deal with social media and on the other side of the line are the authors who have incorporated Twitter, Facebook and blogging (for example) into their career plan.

Only one of these groups of people, statistically speaking, has a chance of having a career as a writer.

 I say statistically speaking because there will be exceptions. If you write a Hunger Games or Harry Potter you can probably get away without a twitter account…but those kinds of phenomenon aren’t something that can be planned for**. Don’t get me wrong, if you are that person who manages to make a monster out of your writing, awesome.

For everyone else, we’re left with the task of building a career the hard way, and regardless of whether or no you self publish or traditionally publish the biggest arbiter of success is going to be your ability to get word out about your book.

Enter social media. If you can get the word out onto the internet in a major way, then you’re in with a shot. If you can’t, then your chances of success dwindle to almost nothing.

The publishing world is too big and changing too fast for you to cling to the old way of doing things. Even if you get in with a traditional publisher your career will be infinitely improved by you getting a presence online and starting to build an audience.

If you truly can’t bear to make your own online presence, then pay someone else to do it for you.

6. I will not spend all my time on social media….because my career depends on it. 

So, despite what I just said above, social media can just as easily kill your writing career as much as it can make it.

You still have to write a book in order to sell it, and more often than not you have to write more than one book.

Writing comes first, then promoting your work.

7. I will invest in my health, because if I die no one will write my books

This is a big problem for writers. We get so invested in our imaginary worlds that we neglect the one that we have to live in.

If you are unfit, or overweight, then you are almost certainly sick of hearing you need to do something about it. Chances are, you know, but getting the impetus to do something can be difficult, especially if you’re on the verge of a breakthrough in chapter 19.

And, if you’re young, you might just get away with it. Do you just want to be getting away with it though? Every writer I’ve spoken to who has taken better care of their physical health has reported that their writing has improved as well.

Of course this is just anecdotal evidence, but if there’s a chance to improve your writing and your health you owe it to yourself (and your future fans) to give it a try. As always talk to someone who knows what they’re doing before taking up a new exercise program.

When I talk about looking after ourselves I just don’t just mean our physical health. Writers seem to suffer a higher instance of depression than most people. It may just be that we’re more aware of what depression is, or it may just be quirk of creative personalities. In fact the why doesn’t really matter. What matters is that if we are unwell physically, emotionally or mentally we seek help.

If a problem is serious enough for you to worry about, it’s serious enough to talk to a professional about.

I’m not against alternative medicine as such, and I’m not saying that the medical establishment gets everything right…but most of the time the best first point of call for a physical or mental issue is your GP.

If that doesn’t help then try alternative options, but talk to your family doctor first to see what they think.

Emotional problems are harder to deal with, but the same principle applies; talk to someone who you trust to help you.

8. I will approach being a professional writer from more than one angle

Ask any writer what they want from their career and sooner or later most will express a desire to leave the office behind and make a living writing.

If that’s your goal it can seem like there’s only way to get there: get published, get famous and laugh at the world from on top of your enormous pile of royalty money.

Looking at your goal like that making a living as a write can seem impossible. Advances are small for most first writers, and the vast majority of first timers don’t earn out their advances. Despite what your hear not every self published author is on their way to indie riches, and most at least have a part time job.

So what can you do?

First take a look at your overheads. A modest income can suffice if you are able to change the way you’re spending money. Will you be happier making less but doing what you want to do?

Also investigate other forms of writing or work in publishing. I make some of my living helping authors who have no experience with social media or online self promotion get their books out there on the web. Could you do that? Or could you do some freelance non fiction writing for a website or other company?

I’ll do a whole post on this later in the month, but for now start thinking about alternate paths to your dream.

9. If I want to be a professional I will act like one

This will mean different things to different people. For me it means that I will plan my career the way I would with any major project, and I’ll invest in myself and my writing in anticipation of future returns.

For others it can mean taking a new attitude to negative reviews. If someone trashes your book the best thing is usually to take note of what they say just in case they’ve made a valid point, but to otherwise shrug it off. You can also thank the reviewer for taking the time to read the book…but that’s it. No moaning that they didn’t get it (even if they didn’t) and no attacking reviewers.

Think about your writing career purely in terms of a business. What do you need to do to present a professional image to your fans, agents, publishers and the world at large? Start by putting on pants.

Trust me.

10. I will remember that I started doing all this because it’s fun

 It’s so easy to forget that writing should be fun. We get bogged down in rejections, or bad reviews, or writers block and we forget that the whole reason we began writing is because we enjoyed it.

Of course not every day is going to be cupcakes and puppies, but if you find that you’ve managed to go a year without enjoying even one part of the writing process maybe it’s time to reassess why you got into writing in the first place.

So, what are your New Years resolutions?

* Your list may differ from mine.

 ** if you’d like to know more about one off events like Harry Potter and the Twilight series, check out a book called The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Every month or so it seems like the self publishing vs traditional publishing debate flares up in some new and interesting way. Then four million writers jump on the band wagon and start calling each other dicks for having one opinion or another.

I’m guilty too, of sticking my oar in where it wasn’t needed.

I haven’t posted much of late because of my insane current schedule, but I wanted to put this up because I see so many people needlessly doing themselves and others harm because they’ve gotten invested in one side of this debate. I can’t guarantee you any facts because all I have is opinions, and you should all take them with a pinch of salt.

However before you jump on anyone and call them a house slave, an idiot or an amateur I’d like to consider these questions before you do:

Question 1: What Do You Think You’re Doing?

I think a big part of the problem with the traditional vs self publishing debate is that we’re all trying to help, but some of us (me included at least some of time) get it wrong in the way we go about it.

Do you really want to help other writers out? Keep an eye out for scams and tell Preditors and Editors about it. Or collate some data and present it for writers to make up their own mind. Hell make a blog and present, in a non sensational way, the facts as you see them.

Guess what doesn’t help, in any way shape or form?  Calling them names. Not just because it’s rude, but because the chances of you converting someone to your side of an argument by calling them a (for example) “plague bearing immoral husk” is pretty close to zero. If you are really looking to help other writers out, whether you’re on the side of self, legacy or hybrid publishing, your best weapon is facts, closely followed by charm.

Calling someone a twat is not charming.

I intend to self publish, hell I have self published…but I also want to pursue a legacy publishing deal. I’d like a literary agent, because I think they’re a worthwhile thing for an author to have if they want a publishing deal. However I will be able to cope without a publishing deal or an agent. None of these things make me a fanatic, a chump or a slave to anyone. Nor am I total amateur with delusions of granduer (actually maybe I am that, but not because I’m prepared to self publish).

Question 2: When Do You Think This Is?

We’re closing in on the end of 2011, possibly the biggest year of upheaval in publishing ever. 2012 is going to be even bigger. We are literally in the middle of a seismic shift in how publishing works.

Saying either: Self Publishing Is The Only Way!  or Self Publishing Is For Idiots! shows a lack of appreciation for when we are in the proceedings. There will always be people on the fringes of any society who like proclaiming doom, and they get very annoyed when you contradict them. The rhetoric in the self publishing vs traditional publishing argument is getting ridiculous and again ignores the fact that the argument is far from settled.

For my money I think legacy publishing will always be around, and I think print books will be too, at least for some time. However I can’t tell you what form they’ll be in. I think (and I’m guessing) that most people will self publish first and publishers will pick up proven titles/writers to promote. I think (again, guessing) the vast majority of books will be sold as ebooks, but that paperback and hardbacks will stay around as souvenirs of the experience of reading a particular book.

Are there bad deals in publishing? Of course.

But as time goes on and self publishing becomes a more and more viable option, those deals are going to get fewer and fewer because writers won’t have only one way of making a career. That’s the biggest boon that the ebook revolution has given us; the ability to choose how we build our careers.

Question 3: Why Are You Doing This?

You know what you could be doing while you’re calling your adversaries on the internet fools?

Writing.

I know abusing people on forums can be more fun, but no one will pay you for that.

Why are you so invested in forcing people around to your way of thinking? Why do you care if someone else thinks they have a better way? They can’t force you take their path, so instead of trying to change their journey to having a career why don’t we focus on forging our own paths through the wilderness?

Question 4: Who do you think you are doing this to?

The people you present yourself to online matter. Make an utter ass out of yourself by abusing others online and sooner or later one of the people watching you is going to be someone you wished you hadn’t narked off. Be it a  reader, a reviewer, a blogger, a publisher or an agent.

I’m not saying you can’t have an opinion, or even that you can’t argue, but there is a huge difference between calling a spade a spade and calling someone a jerk because they’re a spade or they support a spade of some kind.

I hope you know what I mean, I feel like I lost control of that metaphor somewhere.

For example…

This is good: I believe in self publishing, I think it’s the way of the future for authors everywhere.

Less good:  Traditional publishing sucks, you’d have to be crazy not to self publish.

Not so much:  If you have a publishing contract you’re a _____ (fill in your favorite expletive or insult here).

Question 5: How is this helping?

Is this helping your career?

Honestly speaking if you get your rhetoric right, it might win you some fans. But even if you get it right and you get a bunch of people following you, singing your tune, if your rhetoric induces abusing others you’re going to end up with just as many other people hating you. That might not matter now when your sales are good, but sooner or later it’s going to cost you something.

Maybe you’ll never know what it cost you.

To sum up; we’re all going through something. Every person even tangentially associated with publishing is going through the turmoil that’s rippled through the reading world since Amazon brought in the Kindle.

Now more than ever writers need to be supporting one another, because who else is going to?

If someone wants to self publish, good for them! If they make that’s one more tick in the box that says you can make it.

If someone else scores a publishing deal that works for them (even if it wouldn’t work for you) then again, woohoo! It’s another person who has made it as a writer when the odds were against them.

So why are we punching one another in the face? If the internet was a series of pubs and bars then the one for writers and publishers would be the one with sawdust on the floor and chalk outlines outside. The one that no one else wants to go near because there are always fights.

I think we can do better.

* Confession: I had to go and look up whether I meant each other (apparently you use this when you mean two people) or one another (which means more than two). I may still be wrong.

That last one’s optional, but for my money you haven’t really freaked out until you’ve managed to screw up putting on underpants.

Why am I telling you this?

Because right now there’s a lot of panicking happening amongst the ranks (hordes?) of aspiring writers. The line that goes with it (and I’ve said this to myself many times) is this:

“If the publishing industry is in turmoil then I won’t be able to get an agent, but I can’t self publish either because no one will notice me amongst the thirty million other people publishing their autobiographical spiritual memoirs. I’ll never be a writer!”

That wasn’t getting me anywhere.

So, after crawling out from under my bed and correcting the underpants situation, I went searching for reasons not to panic.

Publishing Is Changing, Not Dying:

I’ve said this before, but it bears repetition. The industry is definitely in turmoil, and there’s going to be a whole lot more turmoil in years to come…but turmoil is just that, turmoil, not death.

The major publishers are going to have to change the ways they do business or go out of business. The advent of e-books is the major driver, but so is the current ease of self publishing and the general move towards a more digital life for the western world.

But they can and will change, or they’ll die and be replaced, but I still think the big six publishers will be around in twenty years despite the predictions of their demise. Publishers have always been the arbiters of quality, and as the ebook and self publishing markets grow, readers will begin looking for ways to find quality books.

I think that’s where the publishers will come into their own, that and they are still marketing juggernauts. It will be interesting to see how they make the change from people who sell bundles of paper to people who sell a standard of quality.

I have no idea how they’re going to do it but there are smart, motivated people out there working on it right now.

Self Publishing Can Work

We’re seeing more and more people making a go of self publishing. Pretty much everyone knows Joe Konrath’s name, and Amanda Hocking’s*. They’re at the sharp end of self publishing, making serious money, but there are others not quite making the big bucks who are still making a living.

So, if getting an agent/publisher doesn’t work for you, you could be successful at self publishing… if you’ve got what it takes.

And what it takes is that as well as having a really well written book, and serious marketing skills, is the ability to know when you’re out of your depth.

For example: I can’t draw. Seriously, not even stick figures come out right. I have no eye for art beyond knowing the things I like to look at… I have no business designing a cover.

I can plan one, but when it comes time to design (different from planning), create and tweak a cover I have no business doing it. For people like me just launching ourselves at photoshop results in terrible things happening. Do a random search on self published books on Amazon, you’ll see what I mean.

I’m a half decent editor, but I’m not a professional so if the time comes that I need to self publish I’m going to pay an editor who edits books for a living to do it for me.

There are a great many other things in the book making process that I don’t know, and if I need to self publishing I only have two choices:

1.Take the time to learn it properly and well

2. Pay a professional

There are some things I can do, and there are some things I can learn, but cover design and editing are two things I’m prepared to pay for to make sure they’re done right.

Look at your book and figure out what you need to outsource to make as good as anything from a bookstore (hopefully you don’t say “the whole book!”). If you’re prepared to outsource the stuff you aren’t good at, then you’re in with a shot.

There Are Still New Writers Making A Living

Keep an eye on Twitter, or the internet in general and you’ll see new writers getting signed/selling a decent number of self published ebooks. You’ll also see that number growing.

The fiction marked will always need new talent to satisfy its desires. The amount of new talent and the nature of the desires will fluctuate, but they’ll always be there.

Agents Are Still Taking On New Clients

Agents make their money by getting a percentage of a writer’s advance and their royalties. Usually 15%. If an agent wants to eat they need to keep getting new clients and they need to make sure their existing clients keep producing and selling books.

Yes, some agents are going to go out of business, but there are still plenty of agents out there who are actively looking to take people on.

This is a good sign, because it means that there are still agents out there whose clients are making them money.

They will be choosier, because there are more aspiring writers than ever and less places to sell new work (for now) but good agents with skin in the game are out there and keen for new people.

I hope to be one of them.

Don’t Panic

So, instead of panic stations, let’s try battle stations instead. This isn’t the end of writing as a career or publishing as a path to success…but it is hard out there and for awhile it’s going to keep getting harder. Your prose will need to be better, your editing more precise, your dialogue snappier and your ideas more fully realized than ever before.

Panicing never helped anyone. Just throwing up your hands and saying it’s too hard is taking the easy way out. Yes, things can change but the only way we can take advantage of that change is by keeping writing and being in a position to move when we see an opportunity…no matter what that opportunity is.

So, no matter what, keep writing and be ready.

What are your thoughts on where publishing is going? Do you want to self publish or are you going to try for an agent?

Let me know in the comments.

* Incidentally, Amanda Hocking just got a great publishing deal.

The short answer is, if you can.

I’m sitting here in my house, which is still a wreck (a structurally sound wreck thank goodness) and wondering if I should keep writing. For awhile I thought it would actually be wrong to post up anything on writing while my city is going through so much turmoil.

Now I don’t think so. I’m doing what I can to help others, but I still have downtime and now, power.

So when I can I’m going to keep writing, and I’m going to write about the Christchurch earthquake. As writers we have unique ways of describing what’s going on around us, getting our thoughts and feelings out into the world. One of the dangers of our world, with news being piped into our living rooms every second, is that we can forget important things that happen, lost in the wash of information.

By writing about what’s happening to us, we can make sure there’s a record, no matter how slight, of the things that happen to us, and provide a more personal account of the world as it happens.

This applies to fiction as well, real life bleeds into fiction as much as fiction bleeds back into the real world. A great story can use the unreal to give us a new look at the real.

For anyone who would like to make a donation to help Christchurch city, please head to the Red Cross website.

There are (at least) three reasons to help other writers as much as you can:

1. Karma When you’ve put a book out, you’d appreciate all the support you can get, right? Whether you believe in metaphysical karma or not, there does seem to be a correlation between how helpful someone is online and how much help they eventually get.

It’s not a one to one arrangement. The people you promote are under zero obligation to help you back. But you should still do what you can to pimp other’s work; expecting help when you’re not willing to give it is just plain rude.

2. Good For One, Good For All Fiction is a bit of an odd industry in that authors rarely compete with each other for sales. Of course there is some competition in the economic sense, but it tends to be between retailers rather than authors.

Because of this, if you can promote a book and get someone reading, that can only be good for you too. The more people are reading and enjoying genre fiction the more potential customers there are out there for everyone.

On a more macro level, the more sales there are overall in the industry the healthier publishing will be when you you’re ready to unveil your book to the world. I know, publishing is going through some turmoil at the moment, but it is far from dying and the more we can all do to support the industry and each other, the better.

3. Make Friends, Influence People You should never try and help someone purely for networking purposes. It’s like making friends with someone only for what they can give you.

Not only is it just plain wrong, anyone who’s been in the game for a while will be able to smell the insincerity on you like cheap perfume.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to network; we all do it to some degree, but there is a big difference between actually getting to know people online and just using them for whatever you can get.

One way to do this right is to keep an eye out for people who are already helping you out by linking to your blog or re-tweeting you on Twitter. If someone does something nice for you online, and you can help them in some way, do so. You’re not obligated of course, especially if promoting them will damage you in some way (if you write Middle Grade children’s fiction, promoting erotica on your site is not a good plan).

What other reasons are there to help other writers (other than the nice warm feeling you get in your tummy) that you can think of? Let me know in the comments.

In the interests of practicing what I preach, sometime in the next 24 hours I’ll select a commenter at random and buy them an e-copy of their choice of either Matt Wallace’s story Killing Jars* or Chuck Wendig’s Irregular Creatures**. If you can’t wait and want to buy your own copies, just click on the links.

* They don’t call him Matt “F’ing” Wallace for nothing, if you’re easily offended then this probably isn’t the story for you. Also if you’re claustrophobic you might find this one unsettling.

** Chuck doesn’t have a nickname (at least not one I can print here) but Irregular Creatures does feature violence, sex, swearing and a toothy demonic vagina.

*******UPDATED WITH WINNER********

Congratulations Joel Bancroft-Connors, because today has been an excellent day, I’m going to send you both Irregular Creatures and Killing Jars. Expect an email from me later today.

Thanks to everyone who entered.

 But it helps.

 I first heard the advice about short stories in Stephen King’s excellent book On Writing. Inside, King suggests that budding novelists strive to get short fiction published to give them a leg up on their competition.

 After spending far too much time online I can tell you that this advice still holds true in some ways. While no agent is going to ever turn away an excellent manuscript because the author hasn’t been published in the short story ezines, it will make your query stand out amongst the other thousand queries the agent has seen that day.

 There are some other benefits too.

 For one it gives you practice at finishing projects, and this is an important skill to have. It also forces you to practice your craft away from the comfort zone of your main manuscript.

 It also gives you plenty of practice submitting, querying and dealing with rejection.

 So even if you only spend an hour a week writing short fiction instead of long, it will be an hour well spent. Who knows, one day you may be able to print a collection of short stories and sell them for cash money.*

 I’ve mentioned this before, but if you want to read a good example of what a book of short stories should be, then you can’t go wrong with man/beard hybrid Chuck Wendig’s Irregular Creatures. It’s three bucks, and it’s a worthy investment.

 Do you write short stories? Let me know in the comments.

 * Beats selling body parts.