writing

I'm a part of a writers group that meets twice a month. In that group there's an older man named Lee who write police procedurals, either novels or short stories. He spent much of his life as a cop in the area, so he knows the exact voice of those stories, and even draws on personal experience to make interesting or often fun little cop adventures. I got into a conversation with him after our group meeting recently, and we talked about the general unhealthiness of fiction publishing in recent years, if not recent decades.

"We're in a game of ego," he told me. And I wasn't entirely sure what he meant by that at the time.

Lee told me, "When I was younger, there were eight magazines that published police procedural stories. Do you know how many there are now?"

I expected, given the size of the internet, that he was going to say a truly gigantic number, but the didn't. He said it was two.

"Everybody else flocked to the internet. And on the internet, they don't even have to pay you."

There was a time, long ago, when people got magazines in the mail full of short stories and novel excerpts. Sometimes I when I read interviews from my favorite authors, the older ones will talk about their early inspirations, reading sci-fi magazines in the 60s, or short story collections of all genres. The authors of those times could mention specific magazines that were their favorites, and the writers who found fame and recognition by first being discovered because of the shorts within those pages.

I was born in the 90s. I'd never heard of such a thing. I don't think I've even seen any such magazine. There must be some in print, but nobody I know reads them. They just don't exist anymore.

If I wanted to be discovered as an up and coming author, my choices are, first, to attract a publisher without any past writing experience to my name, or second, to get my name out there via online journals, or third, to publish indie and hope that my writing is so wildly successful that a publisher asks me to team up with them.

That first option is like winning the lottery. To get the attention of a major publishing house, which are the only ones that could sell more than a hundred copies, you first need a literary agent. Literary agents receive thousands of query letters from aspiring authors and only take on a handful each year. If agents say yes to 10 in 5,000 authors, that is 0.2% of queries. Even if your writing is in the top 10% of quality, you still have a 1/50 shot of being selected. And that's just getting an agent. Getting representation from a literary agent does not guarantee that a publisher willl pick up your book. It's harder to find data on how many authors get through this next layer, but it's yet another cut into your already abysmal odds.

The second option, building a resume out of online journals, is futile. There are hundreds of these journals online who also receive thousands of submissions a day, and even if you are lucky enough to find a journal that accepts your work, hardly any of these journals are noteworthy enough to impress a publisher. I personally had two short stories published in small online journals back in 2017, when I thought this was a viable route. The only reason I won the numbers game here was because they were journals nobody had heard of, and both ceased to exist within two years, essentially deleting those lines from my writing resume. Writers might also feel tempted to win contests, which implies more prestige to the winners, but the majority of these have entry fees often over twenty dollars, which makes this only viable for somebody willing to throw hundreds of dollars into a lottery. Again, this is a lottery, because even if your writing is in the top 10%, there's still hundreds of others writing at the same level of quality.

The third option, being an indie author and praying for success, is a fucking hellscape. Since COVID in 2020, everybody suddenly wanted to become an indie author and use it to make money on the side. The largest of these markets is self-publishing on Amazon, and it's largest to the point that nobody can realistically expect to see sales without using Amazon as a publishing platform. This market is bloated and toxic. There are so many people fighting over scraps that it's even more of a lottery than finding a literary agent.

I've self-published on Amazon. It was a waste of my time. First of all, the only way to get noticed above everybody else it to pour money into ads and ad services. You're essentially guaranteed to spend more on ads than you're going to make in profit. Second, the market is toxic. When I self-published my first novel on Amazon, there was some asshole going around leaving one-star reviews on every new release in an effort to "weed out the competition." So my first release was instantly met with a one-star rating and zero sales. It was unsellable from day one. I took it down and put up a different book. Same result. Now we get to the third problem of self-publishing. Fake reviews. You can pay people to review your book for you. You can drop a hundred bucks, and a group of people will leave reviews without even buying your book. It's incredibly easy, and I'm sure every success story started by buying fake reviews. It's so easy to buy reviews, I did it by accident once. I paid an advertising service a couple hundred bucks, and they claimed to "market my book toward people who have a tendency of leaving reviews." A week later, I had six reviews with four- or five- star ratings, all of whom wrote reviews that made it obvious they hadn't actually read the book. One of them got the gender of the main character wrong. And then a few days later, somebody else left a one-star review, claiming that a few of the character motivations were unrealistic. Now, I've seen indie books on Amazon that were nigh unreadable and scraped by with two-star reviews. A one-star review because of clunky characters, though? Really?

So self-publishing is, like the writing contests, only a viable route if you have a ton of cash on hand to spend, like an investment. Even then, you're gambling. So how did we get here?

There are fewer major publishers than ever before. They just keep merging, creating a monopoly. But let's ignore the economics of monopolies and mergers and such for a moment. Let's return to my friend Lee and do a simpler experiment.

Lee claims that, since his youth, the number of procedural police magazines has decreased from eight to two. That means it is now four times harder to get your story published, simply because there's less room in the market. Not only that, given Lee's age, I imagine his youth is referring to the 60s or 70s. The population of the United States has doubled since then, and assuming that new aspiring authors are born at an equal rate across the population, the number of aspiring authors has also doubled. So now we have to cut our odds of success in half again, because the competition has doubled.

It is now eight times harder to publish a police procedural than it was fifty years ago. Rather than increasing the number of magazines in this genre, to account for the rising number of submissions, the magazines have dried up, preventing perfectly good authors from breaking into the scene.

There are one eighth as many authors in that genre as there could be.

"We're in a game of ego." Even if you are literally the greatest writer on the planet, the odds of getting published are shockingly slim. That's the game of ego. You can keep improving your craft, and improving, and improving, but you will be told no a thousand times no matter how good you think your writing has become.