Ever play King of the Hill as a kid? My clearest memory of the game was a lose dirt mound outside of some youth thing I was attending. The kids all tried climbing with the person on top pushing everyone else down. With over twenty of us on that little dirt pile, no one stayed on top long. We all went home dirty, exhausted, and somewhat bruised.
High ground wins. Every battle strategy is based on this concept. Winners stay winning – but with enough competition, winners will be unseated.
Traditional publishing is a King of the Hill type situation. Inthebook.com put together statistics for “Ages of Authors When They First Publish a Bestseller”: ‘s%20over%207%20years%20longer. (Note 9/20/2023 – Looks like the link has been discontinued.)
The statistics are drawn from NY Times bestsellers through wikipedia articles, breaking things down by genre, age, and decade.
Average age for a FIRST bestseller is 48 for both men and women taking into account 1940-2010’s, with the age creeping up. The age in the 1940’s was 47 and the age in 2010’s is 51. Science Fiction, Romance, and Fantasy genres are mid-stream in age, while Mystery/Crime and Thriller skews older. Horror draws the youngest crowd of first-timers at age 41, and thriller at age 52 has the oldest first-timers.
Interesting women and men have the same age for first-timers on the NY Times best selling list.
The biggest takeaway for this page is the last graph – the number of first time best-sellers. It stayed steady from the 1940s through the 1990s – then the internet took off, and the number of first-timers doubled. More people had access to writing and to submitting for writing. The hill suddenly had a lot more people vying for the top. Which means that people reaching the top are staying there shorter periods of time.
Writing is an older person’s game. Like every profession, it takes time to master a skill, and since writing is rarely anyone’s primary profession until they can master it, that time runs decades.
Secondly, the free time it takes to crack down and work on a manuscript isn’t available to the younger crowd usually – early twenties is establishing and setting up a career, later twenties to mid-forties is raising the next generation. Only mid-forties do people start having free time again and that book nibbling at the back of the head can come out on paper finally. A few other books had starts and jerks before between other action, the stories that helped master the craft. But actual full-attention, best work from a fully-skilled writer, that is after the nest gets empty.
Interesting to think when most people considering life is on the downside, writing careers are just kicking off. Forties to fifties is when the games begin.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Oh, good grief.
Why do I have a prologue for a short story? No – oh, no – why are there prologues for three short stories in this collection someone is trying to sell my publisher – and the fourth short story has a flashback? Do you not understand how short stories work? …. What prologues are for?
I get it. Fantasies have prologues, but not.every.single.time. Especially in a short format where laser focus is needed. Just because (fill in the blank, famous-and-now-dead high fantasy author) used prologues back in their day, does not mean you get to use them now.
Well, this one is an easy decision. My publisher hates prologues. Unless there is a great reason to have it – and I have seen them used properly once in a hundred uses – the submission is a reject. Only six more to read today. (Yes, I want to accept submissions, but I have two slots this year and a hundred submissions. Bad prologues go into the “no” pile.)
For the most part, what I was seeing are prologues used as a big info backstory dumps for lazy writers who can’t figure out how to integrate backstory into the narration (I’ve touched on how to do backstory integration elsewhere). That said, if done right, providing a hint to the story which raises questions instead of just answering questions which haven’t been asked yet, prologues are useful. One example I read was a beautiful pre-story explaining something that affected every decision the point-of-view (POV) character made, but she did not know how this childhood event changed her as a person. The reader sees it, but the POV character doesn’t know and cannot know and therefore cannot share it in the primary narration.
Another good use of prologues is in murder mysteries where you meet the victim and witness the event of the murder before the detective character shows up. In both this case and the previous case, the camera through which we are witlessness the main story does not have access to the information. Also in both cases, the prologue was written like part of the story – action-oriented. In the info dump case, the long history of everything which went before on the fantasy world told by a historian is BORING, and often irrelevant to the story. I love worldbuilding, but not reading it dry. I didn’t like dates and places in history class when I was in school, and I don’t like them now. I do love history though and have been part of a recreation hands-on group for years.
So don’t do info dumps – not for prologues and certainly not in short stories. You might need to write them up during the first draft, but remove them and set them aside during the second draft.
I’ll close with an exchange I had with some editors.
***
Erin Penn: I’ve never realized just how bad prolog-itis is until I started reading slush.
Editor One: LOL
Editor Two: It is an epidemic.
Erin Penn: Affecting over 50% of the population.
Editor Two: We need a vaccine.
Editor Three: It’s particularly virulent in fantasy authors…
Editor Four: And like most bugbears of writing, the infestation of bad ones ruin the possibility for a really good one. Because it is possible to have a good prologue, but almost nobody does.
People want to dump all that exposition in early so they don’t have to worry about it any more – they want the Star Wars opening crawl through space. The thing is, if they can just restrain themselves, they DON’T have to worry about it. If the story matches the exposition, the exposition will come out as the story unfolds.
Length matters when writing. To be marketable a story needs to be long enough, but not too long – fitting the genre and publisher requirements. Small presses make decisions on printing costs and book sizes allowed by print-on-demand companies. Novel or novella? Series, serial, or stand-alone? How much is the editing cost (usually by word count)?
How long can an anthology be and still break even? How many stories are needed to pull in a broad enough audience? How long can each short story be? Should flashes be allowed? How about a drabble?
Drabbles are exactly 100 words. Flashes fall under 2,000, usually hovering between 500 and 1,000. Short stories for anthologies start about 2,500 with 5,000 to 7,000 usually the sweet spot for little known writers and 10,000 to 15,000 for the anchor writers whose names appear on the front cover. Novellas, you are looking at 30,000 to 40,000, plus or minus 5,000 for the extreme ends. Novels are 70,000 for short and sweet genres like urban fantasy, romance, and mysteries; and 100,000 for the heavy worldbuilding speculative fics of science fiction and fantasy. Add 20% to these if a well-known author where a publishing house is willing to risk more editing costs.
The challenge is writing for a length, especially when your natural length is writing more or less than what is required. My natural length is short, really short. I’m naturally a poet – and not Norse Skald epics. I like tanka, a Japanese form of 31 syllables. I think in phrases, partial sentences. I don’t need to string together three to five sentences for a paragraph. My goal is nine to twenty phrases.
Flashes are beautiful.
And not marketable.
I’ve got to write longer. My natural length of 500 to 1,000 words, which means a short story is 10 flashes that need to hang together. A novella is 60 flashes and a novel 100 flashes.
Magical Words have had several episodes on writing to length. Here are some and their take-aways. Most focus on short stories since novel is the “assumed” length:
Coe, David B. “On Writing: A Novelist Takes on Short Stories”. 10/3/2011 –
On Writing: A Novelist – Writing a short story has different challenges than a novel: length, narrative aim, description (level) and method of writing. Mr. Coe states that to him, writing a short story is like writing a chapter in a novel. An internal arc, character growth, the driving of a reader forward, all remain the same. But the Method of writing is much slower. The articles does a good breakdown on the structural differences one finds in short stories.
Coe, David B. “On Writing: Short Fiction and Worldbuilding”. 4/1/2013 –
On Writing: Short Fiction – Sometimes, writing short stories of your characters can help flesh out ideas from your novels. These worldbuilding exercises (while necessary) don’t fit into the novel, as they are usually side stories or back stories, but, after the novel is done, they can be sold to anthologies as a marketing tool to point readers to your novel. They also can be used as special clues given to fans which follow you on patreon or your blog. (If you are one who normally writes large and want to scale down for short stories, David is you guy. His natural length is somewhere around 150,000 words. He approaches the problem of length from the opposite end as me. This is one of the great examples of each person’s writing style is different and what works for one person might not work for another.)
Jaffe, Stuart. “Publishing – Short Story Contracts”. 9/24/2010 –
Writing Scope – Is the story the right size for a short story? Does it have changing viewpoints, and are there subplots? The list goes on about red flags to look for when figuring if a tale which wants telling is a short story or a novel.
Martin, Gail Z. “10 Reason to Consider Writing for Anthologies”. 3/9/2016 –
10 Reasons – Focuses on why to market to anthologies. “#4. New Sandbox. A book is a commitment. A Short Story is a vacation.” and “#6. Test-driving publishers”, anthologies set up an environment where writers and publishers can see if they are compatible. “#9. Reusable content” – when the anthology rights revert (and be sure to have a time limit built in, industry acceptance is one year), the writer can publish a collection of short stories they had in various anthologies. The list goes on.
Massey, Misty. “Inviting A Crowd to the Party”. 11/5/2015 – http://www.magicalwords.net/misty-massey/inviting-a-crowd-to-the-party/
Inviting a Crowd – Limit the number of characters in a short story. A short story is a love affair; you don’t have to introduce them to the whole family.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Don’t quit the day-job. In the middle of tax season (well, day 58 of 105, so a little over halfway), it is so, so tempting. I love editing and writing and have been doing both consistently – mostly consistently – since this blog started back on November 11, 2011. And even before then. February 2010 I won the short story competition for ConDFW (NOTE from 4/26/2024: ConDFW has been discontinued. It never recovered from the 2020 cancellation because of COVID.) . And looking for that short story, I stumbled across a dense book idea from 2002. And peeling back even further, I’ve been writing something for someone since middle school, publishing something somewhere for most of my life.
Last year about this time, Chuck Wendig wrote an article On Day-Jobs and Starving Artists. His advice, don’t quit the day job. At the time, there had been a “live your passion” Tweet going around urging people to Go-For-It. But Wendig raises a very good point, if a passion is to become a job, then the job needs to be prepared for. It’s not enough to LOVE something. One needs to become skilled at it. Know the industry. Be willing to do it day-in day-out – while sick, or emotionally devastated, or tired. All.the.time. And skilled enough at it to do while sick, tired, lacking heart, just like a day-job (which is what the passion becomes if you quit your day-job). Approach the situation like you would prepare for a new career, making a passion into a career requires preparing for it like it is a new career.
So if you (or me) is thinking of quitting the day-job to Live Your Passion, there is a catch to pulling a sixties-hippy moment.
Be ready to not just Live Your Passion. Be sure to Survive with Your Passion.
Which is why I’ve been working developing the skills and lifestyle for the new career for going on a decade. You’ve seen a lot of my research and skill development in this blog. I’ve gotten things settle in well at this point. Still, it isn’t a true career because it barely pays for itself, let alone the bills like food and roof. Time to look at a few more Cool Blogs with additional advice related to Day-Jobs, Income, and Writing if I want to get to the next level.
Well, just burst my bubble. I want to stick it to “the man”. What do you mean I got to work this like a retail job? Where is the passion of creativity? Ah, there is the rub. You can’t just pursue your passion if you want to eat. Someone has got to provide you money for it. Which means sell the passion. Artists sell covers, writers books, musicians performances.
Her list goes on.
Mr. Ferris has a list as well, “12 Things You have to Give Up to be a Successful Writer.” Wait, I want to Live My Passion, not deprive myself. But I do want to be successful as a writer, not just survive. I like eating! What is on this list?
There is no “participation trophy”. Time, skill, and hard work does not mean success. And for that off-chance at success, you will give up vacations, hobbies, friends, (vial of own blood?), … – that is what the blog boils down. The post was written for laughs but holds a lot of truth.
No participation trophy means no automatic success and, more importantly, no paycheck just for showing up. Not like a day-job.
Going through my bookmarks of saved articles, I’ve found a third list. A nice short one: 8 Smart Ways to Supplement Your Fiction-Writing Income. The blog posts start off by saying “most authors don’t make a living off their writing”, over half of traditionally published and “almost 80 percent of self-published authors make less than $1,000 a year (from writing)… Because of this, most authors stay at their day jobs to support their families.” It doesn’t mention what the author percentages are for a living income.
$1,000 is a stupid breakpoint for “making a living”! To have it be a day-job, you are looking at least $14,000 a year – which is an equivalent to a 40-hour a week minimum wage job – only a writer is more like 80 to 100 hours for a week if full-time.
Well, what do they recommend? Yep, yep. Okay, three of my nine gigs that I do outside of writing show up on the list.
What do I do? Tax preparation, acting, editing, website programming, politician, product reviewer, newsletter support, long-distance bookkeeping, and summer-camp support. Yes, I did each of these professionally (for pay) in 2019 at least once, thank you for asking. The tax preparation, of course, is the day job paying the majority of my bills. But to free up time for writing, I gig the rest of the year for food. It’s a price I’ve chosen to pay to go after my passion.
It means I am often mentally exhausted before I start working just trying to figure out what I need to attack next.
It means I fall down on a gig sometimes because I have to do something for another gig.
It means no insurance.
I don’t recommend it if you have a family to support, children who depend on you, a spouse you want to stay on speaking terms with. (Return to the list of things you give up to be a successful writer and the fact that there is no participation trophy – no guarantee of success.)
Just how bad is writing income?
Merritt Tierce wrote about “I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim – and Then I Promptly Went Broke.” She quit her day job when her first book was published. She hadn’t start writing the second. One book does not keep a household alive for a year, let alone a lifetime. She goes into the challenges she faced because she bought into the false myth of follow your passion, everything will fall into place.
No, everything does not fall into place.
“The reality is that somehow you have to make money,” Ms. Tierce writes.
Every writer I know, as soon as the first book has been sent in starts the second. One of my authors (who has an amazing day-job AND a husband who supports his efforts), just sent me his 2020 schedule – Book 2 Series 2 finish draft 1 (started over Christmas/New Year break), book 1 series 1 complete the edits and return (the one I am presently working with him on), book 3 series 1 start draft 1, book 2 finish draft 2 and send in, complete proofreading and further edits on book 1, then in April … Yes, working three books simultaneously. Total goal for the year – another three books, just like last year. Again, he has a day-job. He sells well; it pays for his convention travel.
I recently had an artist friend post a meme:
My comment to the FB post? “Hey bub, being healthy is a gift. You should give your salary to charity.” (A couple members of her family are disabled, the types of invisible problems where everyone goes “just suck it up and get a real job,” since they are functional 2 to 3 hours a day. (o_O) You know, the time when they actually function well enough to go into public to shop or make doctor appointments.) She gave my response a heart-like.
Why does following your Passion have no Income reward?
Because it is a passion, people will accept any amount of money to do it. And the people who make money off of artists, dancers, singers, and writers know this.
If throwing an event, the venue and booze isn’t going to lower their prices. The only place to keep prices low is … (wait for it) the feature presentation – the draw for the actual event. So the event producers pay the artist gig level costs and pocket the rest.
Because, as a Duke Study shows, “workers’ passion is increasingly used as justification for their exploitation in today’s labor market.” (Voynovskaya 2019) Our culture embraces the myth of passionate work, telling us to find “our life’s calling at work”, and then turns around and says because we have job satisfaction, enumeration doesn’t have to pay as high. Bosses love passionate people who will work long hours and weekends, for little pay.
Why can’t we be passionate and make a living wage? Who is telling us to “Live Your Passion” and why?
Teachers are told to be passionate, cooks are told to be passionate. Heck, the cashier at the grocery store is told to be passionate about their job.
My take-away to all of this, I’m not quitting the day-job anytime soon.
But Mr. Wendig did have another point.
When should you seek your passion?
Now. Right Now.
Not tomorrow, not next year. Now. Work on it; study it.
You owe it to yourself. Don’t live your passion for others. Live it for you.
Image courtesy of Serge Bertasius Photography at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Just don’t do it full-time.
Until you are ready. And it is okay to never be ready. You don’t need to eat Chocolate Cake every day to be passionate about it. Part-time and holidays is just fine.
I guess I will keep the day-job a little longer. But I still am going to Live My Passion.
I hope this blog helps you figure out how to live yours. Flip through the Bibliography below for more details.
It’s been a long time since I covered types of editing on my blog (Editing Rant: Choose a Color ). I thought defining the types will help get the video ball rolling in the new year.
