The way some of us writers talk, you’d think agents, editors, and publishers were celestial beings who descend from the firmament at whim to generously bestow grace (in the form of a publishing contract or literary representation) on us undeserving, lumpen creatures.

The way other writers talk, agents and publishers are scam artists and parasites who feed off the blood, sweat, and money produced by writers.

So what are we to think?

Who’s in charge?
When I frame the two perspectives that way, you can probably tell I don’t really subscribe to either extreme. Literary representation ought to be conducted as an equal relationship. Here’s some of my discussion on the subject as responses to concerns I’ve heard about agents.

“It’s the author’s money”
Have you ever run a business? If so, reflect on how money came in: there will have been production (rendering the service, manufacturing the widgets, building the furniture, or what have you) as well as sales, billing, and support.

In an author-agent-publisher relationship, the author supplies the product, but a good agent sells that product to the publisher, negotiates (we hope) an appropriate deal, collects the money, keeps on the publisher to make good on commitments, etc. While it is possible for authors to sell their own books, when the author works with the agent the agent is generally doing the selling, and many authors cannot sell to big publishers without an agent. As such, the author producing the book doesn’t amount to a pile of poo, monetarily speaking, unless the agent sells it or unless the author takes on the agent’s job and sells it.

Production without sales and related services is worthless unless you have a business where your products automatically sell themselves, e.g., you inherit some kind of monopoly.

“The agent chooses the author” – or – “The author chooses the agent”
The author and agent choose each other. Can I go up to Agent X and say “You will now be my agent!”? (Well, of course I can, but I mean the average writer.) No. Nor can the agent come up to me and say “You will now be my client!” (Although admittedly, that’s more likely to work.)

This is what I mean by a mutual business arrangement. Neither party is forced into the arrangement and neither party has sole say in what happens.

“Agents used to get only 10%: why is the norm now 15%?”
When talking to a very successful writer in 2001, I was advised to only ever sign with an agent who made 10% for domestic sales (the percentage is generally a bit higher for foreign sales), but even that far back, almost all agents had already gone to 15% for new contracts: the famous author in question had gotten an agent in an earlier and different publishing environment.

My guess is that the change in percentage is because the real value paid by publishers for books (taking into account inflation) went down and agents couldn’t make a living otherwise. For instance, advances for first science fiction and fantasy novels appear to have been more or less flat from about the 80’s through now from what I’ve read (though some of the information going into that statement is anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt).

If good agents were able to survive on 10%, those good agents would have snagged all the good writers and left none for the 15-percenters, most likely, and though I admit that collusion and other methods could conceivably get around this, I don’t really believe anything like that happened.

My guess at why the value publishers pay for books went down is the rise of word processing: it became easier and faster to produce books, so publishers had more producers and product to choose from and had to spend more time sifting through submissions. If we want to point the finger at one factor that has lessened the power of individual writers in recent decades, the word processor is probably it. And yet, ironically, the word processor has also made us each much more powerful. Ah, the contradictions of technology!

“Agents have become irrelevant”
My personal sense is that agents will continue to be relevant to the extent that big publishing house tradpub continues to be relevant, and while I don’t see tradpub holding onto its dominance in the long term, I also don’t expect big publishing houses to die off entirely, so I think agents will be likely to still have a role. That said, selfpub seems to be taking an ever-growing slice of the pie, and agents are useless for that, so I sure as heck would not want to be starting a career as an agent right now.

It does seem to me that writers often have the habit of giving up their perception of power to agents and publishers when the writers’ work is what the whole publishing industry is founded on and the only particular thing it can’t do without. At the same time, I think it’s misleading to imagine that either party has all the power in an agent-writer (or writer-agent) relationship, or for us writers to imagine that the world revolves around only us.

The power approach
Codexian Jake Kerr has a different perspective on the matter that I think is also worth hearing. He says:

[It’s about] who has more power in the relationship. When you first start out as a writer, odds are that any agent looking at you sees you as a POTENTIAL moneywinner. How much of one depends on their confidence and your track record. In this scenario, I am sure they see you as little more than a calculated risk, and thus playing the “you work for me” card is somewhat foolish. You have no juice.

This changes dramatically as the money flows in. Then the reality is that the author has all the juice, and the agent really IS your employee. The more money = the more power you have over both your agent and your publisher.

Cartoon courtesy of Bificus

Codex is an online writing group I founded in 2004 that currently has about 200 active members, most writing science fiction or fantasy and all in the early stages of their careers, from some who have written a lot but not yet made their first pro sale to others who are seeing their third, fourth, or fifth novel coming out from a major publisher. Since the founding of the group, members have won major awards like the Campbell, Hubbard, Hugo, and Nebula, made hundreds (and possibly thousands) of short story sales, gotten top agents, sold their first book (or pair of books, or trilogy), made the New York Times bestseller list, achieved consistent financial and literary success with self-published eBooks, and so on. Some have transitioned to full-time writing careers, though most still write only when they can.

But I love the group not because of the amount of success of its members (which tests my envy tolerance on a regular basis) but because of the flood of wisdom, intelligence, kindness, encouragement, and enthusiasm that wells up every day through posts, e-mails, discussions, critiques, and in-person meetings. And while I can’t share all of that material, I can and will share quotes that have cropped up on our forum, with the permission [I originally wrote “position,” because my mental typing buffer is auditory … but I digress] of the originators.

So with this post I begin a series of Codexian quotes, which I hope you will find as entertaining, illuminating, and/or perplexing as I have. This first set is all from my friend Alethea Kontis, whose work includes a persistently delightful picture book called AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (with illustrator Bob Kolar), the New York Times bestselling Dark Hunter Companion (with Sherrilyn Kenyon), an upcoming fantasy novel, and much else.

Alethea’s Web site and blog are at http://aletheakontis.com.

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Never underestimate the value of Butt In Chair.

[on getting fit] “I’ve decided that every freaking day is just Day One all over again, so why bother numbering them?

I had a great time whipping 16 7-year olds into a complete frenzy. We ended up on the playground, drawing all over ourselves with Sharpies.

We are writers. We are meant to see and feel everything, the good and the bad, the best and the worst. We are meant to cut ourselves and bleed our souls onto paper and share them with the world. We breathe life into impossible cities and create alleyways of escape. We dredge up things that aren’t discussed at the breakfast table and serve them as entrees. We are creators whose purpose in life is to balance out the entropy.

[At the time of this quote, Lee worked for a book wholesaler] 1:30 p.m. — Weekly Staff Meeting. We decide it should be spelled ‘e-books.’

I smile at a baby in red socks and listen to Chris Martin from Coldplay tell me how beautiful I am. I know he doesn’t mean it, but it’s still nice to hear.

[in 2009] Imagine a world with 24356424 bazillion books and no brick-and-mortar stores, because everyone can publish their own grocery lists and advertise it on the internet (and then download it to folks’ PDAs). How will anyone be able to find a good book anymore? How do you find them today? That’s the part the publishing industry needs to focus on.

I FULLY EXPECT YOU ALL TO PARTICIPATE, OR I WILL CRY AND SEND YOU MY TEARS.

In a recent online discussion about dealing with literary agents, Codexian Erin Cashier offered a link to an excellent article on AgentQuery called “When Agents Offer Representation,” which thoroughly answers some key questions about dealing with literary agents. This is highly recommended reading for any writer interested in being represented by an agent, even if, as in my case, you already know a lot about the subject and/or have been represented before. The article covers subjects like:

• When an agent wants to offer representation to me and my book, how will I know?
• What happens if I receive an offer of representation from an agent, but I am still waiting to hear from other agents who also have my full manuscript? What do I do?
• Once an agent has made me an offer of representation, how long can I keep them waiting for my decision?
• Okay, so I understand that I have to alert the other agents who are reviewing my manuscript that I have an offer? What’s the best way to contact them?
• An agent has called and left me a message to call him back. Does that mean he is going to offer me representation?
• THE CALL: when an agent calls to offer representation, what do I say? What questions do I ask? How can I make the best impression possible?
• I have received an offer of representation from an agent, but he doesn’t use a written agent-client contract. Is that a bad sign?
• I have received an offer of representation from an agent, but he wants me to sign an agent-client agreement. Is that a bad sign?
• An agent calls and tells me she enjoyed my book, but she thinks it still needs some work …
• What should I expect from the agent-client relationship?

If you pay much attention to eBook success stories, you’ve probably heard of Amanda Hocking, who began self-publishing her young adult contemporary dark fantasy/romance novels for the Kindle about a year ago and has since made more than two million dollars from them. The burning questions this brings up are: Why her? What has she done right? and Can other writers somehow follow in her footsteps?

I’m only an interested observer, but I have a few thoughts I hope you may find useful based on digging up industry statistics, learning what Ms. Hocking has had to say about her own work, and reading the beginning of her Trylle Trilogy.

Feeding a need
The heart of the matter, if you ask me, is that Ms. Hocking is successfully providing something that a huge number of readers want. Her Trylle books feature a slightly misanthropic, beautiful teenage girl who discovers she is a troll changeling princess when she returns to the troll enclave where she was born. The premise has some obvious similarities to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books, which are about a disgruntled, beautiful teenage girl who discovers she has unusual status among a small, benign group of vampires. Both series feature a tension between the paranormal world and the normal world, multiple potential boyfriends, family conflicts, life-or-death obstacles to love, paranormal creatures who are more beautiful than ordinary humans, and dramatic, no-holds-barred romances that become literally more important than life to the main characters.

At the same time, Hocking doesn’t seem to have just traced Meyer’s books and filled in the outlines with her own ideas: the Trylle Trilogy seems very much the same kind of thing as Twilight, et al, without being a revamp. Hocking’s plots and premise have enough of her own invention to set them apart from Meyer’s work while still appealing strongly to the same kinds of readers. I think Hocking benefits enormously from Twilight’s audience being a large, book-hungry, self-aware group. Now that they’ve read Meyer’s books, they know what they want and are looking for more of it. Hocking appears to be deeply in tune with these readers and to intuitively want to deliver the right mix of danger, romance, strangeness, and angst. Anyway, that’s my theory.

Mistakes that don’t matter?
What’s very interesting to me, too, is what Hocking doesn’t do well. Her grammar is not great. She uses “alright”–a colloquialism that nearly any editor in New York would rapidly correct to “all right”–in narration, along with many other similarly dubious constructions. There are places in her books where a key word or phrase has accidentally been left out. She makes a huge number of small-scale writerly “infelicities,” and there are very often several grammatical and writerly issues on a single page.

In other words, she sorely needs a copy editor–or at least, that was my reaction when I saw her work. But apparently more than a million readers don’t necessarily agree, because poor copyediting has not gotten in the way of her tremendous success. What surprises me is that after she started bringing in all that money–and presumably started hearing about errors in the books–she wasn’t interested in engaging a copyeditor to spend a little time cleaning them up. With eBooks, cleaning up the current edition is simply a matter of doing the edits and uploading them. Admittedly, Hocking must have a lot going on at this point–for instance, a new, 2 million dollar, 4-book deal with St. Martin’s Press–but would this have been so hard?

Then again, a lot of major publishing houses put out eBooks plagued with formatting problems. I guess this is what happens in the Wild West phase of a new business environment.

But in a way I’m grateful she hasn’t done this cleanup work, because it demonstrates something very basic and very important about writing: it’s about delivering a story people care about, and if it does that, it can succeed regardless of trappings, presentation, or the opinions of pundits. It doesn’t matter what people who don’t buy her books think about them if she has a large enough audience of people who do buy her books, and it doesn’t matter much if the people who do buy her books notice errors if they still enjoy the story.

Books for teenage girls that aren’t for teenage girls
One more surprising thing about Hocking’s success is that it’s happening on the Kindle. The reason I say that this is surprising is that the official target market of her books seems to be teenaged girls, yet according to a recent Nielsen poll, only 12% of Kindle users are under the age of 18, and users are about equally balanced between males and females. Were the majority of those one million plus book sales to the 6% of Kindle readers who are female and under age 18? Probably not. Harry Potter and the Twilight series had huge adult audiences, and the people reading about teenage paranormal romance in this case seem to be mainly adults, and presumably mostly female. This begins to shed more light on both Hocking’s and Meyer’s success, because to the best of my knowledge, English-speaking, adult, female romance fans are the most prolific readers on the planet. It’s a damn nice audience if you have the kind of imagination that naturally taps into it.

So what can we other writers learn from Hocking if we want to see success in finding an eBook audience? Well, a few things come to mind: Find your natural demographic. Write a lot. Get your work out there. Work tirelessly. Make your story yours even if it taps into an existing readership. Worry more about connecting with a good story than about publishing method, presentation, or promotion.

For what it’s worth, the authors I know personally who have done fairly well with eBook novel sales are also people who seem to be following these kinds of approaches, except that in the cases I’ve seen they are much more polished in their presentation than is Hocking.

That’s about it for light I can shed on the subject at the moment, but there’s probably much more we can learn from Hocking, and links to posts that delve into that would be welcome in comments.

About 7 years ago, I started an online writing group called Codex by bringing together friends who were graduates of Orson Scott Card’s first Literary Boot Camp with other friends who were fellow Writers of the Future winners. Since then, we’ve grown to nearly 200 active members, each of whom has sold fiction professionally and/or completed major, by-audition-only workshops.

When the Nebula award nominations were recently announced, I found many friends on it. (For those not familiar with it, the Nebula is one of the two top awards in science fictiondom.) This year, Codexians have garnered no fewer than eight Nebula nominations (15% of the total). The list follows, with Codex members in bold. Thanks to Vylar Kaftan (nominated for her short story “I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno,” which has a title I greatly envy) for the bolded list. Winners will be announced at the Nebula Awards Banquet in May.

Short Story
“Arvies”, Adam-Troy Castro (Lightspeed Magazine 8/10)
“How Interesting: A Tiny Man”, Harlan Ellison (Realms of Fantasy 2/10)
“Ponies”, Kij Johnson (Tor.com 1/17/10)
“I’m Alive, I Love You, I’ll See You in Reno”, Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine 6/10)
“The Green Book”, Amal El-Mohtar (Apex Magazine 11/1/10)
“Ghosts of New York”, Jennifer Pelland (Dark Faith)
“Conditional Love”, Felicity Shoulders (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine1/10)

Novelette
“Map of Seventeen”, Christopher Barzak (The Beastly Bride)
“The Jaguar House, in Shadow”, Aliette de Bodard (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 7/10)
“The Fortuitous Meeting of Gerard van Oost and Oludara”, Christopher Kastensmidt (Realms of Fantasy 4/10)
“Plus or Minus”, James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 12/10)
“Pishaach”, Shweta Narayan (The Beastly Bride)
“That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made”, Eric James Stone (Analog Science Fiction and Fact 9/10)
“Stone Wall Truth”, Caroline M. Yoachim (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 2/10)

Novella
The Alchemist, Paolo Bacigalupi (Audible; Subterranean)
“Iron Shoes”, J. Kathleen Cheney (Alembical 2)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang (Subterranean)
“The Sultan of the Clouds”, Geoffrey A. Landis (Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 9/10)
“Ghosts Doing the Orange Dance”, Paul Park (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 1-2/10)
“The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window”, Rachel Swirsky (Subterranean Magazine Summer ’10)

Novel
The Native Star, M.K. Hobson (Spectra)
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
Echo, Jack McDevitt (Ace)
Who Fears Death, Nnedi Okorafor (DAW)
Blackout/All Clear, Connie Willis (Spectra)

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation
Despicable Me, Pierre Coffin & Chris Renaud (directors), Ken Daurio & Cinco Paul (screenplay), Sergio Pablos (story) (Illumination Entertainment)
Doctor Who: “Vincent and the Doctor”, Richard Curtis (writer), Jonny Campbell (director)
How to Train Your Dragon, Dean DeBlois & Chris Sanders (directors), William Davies, Dean DeBlois, & Chris Sanders (screenplay) (DreamWorks Animation)
Inception, Christopher Nolan (director), Christopher Nolan (screenplay) (Warner)
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright (director), Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright (screenplay) (Universal)
Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich (director), Michael Arndt (screenplay), John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, & Lee Unkrich (story) (Pixar/Disney)

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy
Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper)
A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)

I’ve been discussing the relative merits of traditional publishing compared to self-publishing with writer friends for some time now. Self-publishing would not have been something I gave any real thought to a couple of years ago, but the game has clearly changed now that eBooks have kicked into high gear. While eBook quantities sold are still a fraction of physical book quantities, they represent such a different approach to publishing and so much more profit per volume–even when sold at lower prices–that they have become rule-changers both in terms of the economics of publishing and in terms of writing itself. eBooks can easily accommodate varied forms, lengths, and sub-genres; slow sales; and small niche audiences in a way that physical books generally are not able to do to.

But there are many advantages to traditional publishing as well, by which I mean the process of writing a book that can be marketed in bookstores, getting an agent (usually), and selling the book to a publisher, who then produces the book and gets it out to distributors, who in turn get them to bookstores.

“Tradpub” and “Selfpub”
We haven’t needed a special term in the past for traditional publishing, but since the need to distinguish has arisen, I’ve found “traditional publishing” the most comfortable and easiest to communicate. An alternative I like for its brevity is “tradpub.”

A writer friend pointed out that apparently, PublishAmerica has used the term “traditional publishing” in a pejorative way and suggested that “commercial publishing” might be a better term. However, PublishAmerica has some serious credibility issues, and using the term “commercial publishing” for large publishing houses kind of implies that selfpubbing isn’t a business, which in many cases it very much is. Perhaps this argues further for the relatively baggage-less “selfpub” and “tradpub.”

“Self-publishing” is a term that has a bad taste for many professional and aspiring writers, as self-publishing in the past has been a refuge for many, many books that were simply not good enough for traditional publishing, along with a small minority of good books, often ones written for small, niche markets. Again there’s a short version I like, in part because it doesn’t carry all of the baggage of the longer term: “selfpub.” Some people use the term “indie publishing,” and while I find this perfectly acceptable, I don’t often use it myself because it feels like a euphemism, in part because “indie” movies and music tend to involve a group of people, whereas “indie publishing” is generally just a single person publishing his or her own work. As much as I like the idea of an indie author being like an indie filmmaker, I don’t think the comparison is quite apt.

Choosing tradpub or selfpub
These days, the difference between tradpub and selfpub could easily be mistaken for the difference between physical books and eBooks, but thinking this way is misleading, since of course many traditional publishers are beginning to embrace eBook editions (or at least to permit them), while selfpubbers have access to POD (print on demand) services that make their books competitive with other physical books.

Here are some of the advantages of each approach to publication, all from the writer’s point of view. Note that the tradpub section refers to large publishing houses; small press publishers are a bit different.

TRADPUB

1. Often some promotion is provided by the publisher, including access to review venues, bestseller lists, awards, etc. that won’t include selfpubbed books
2. Professional design services at publisher’s expense
3. Sales and fulfillment done by publisher
4. Book is more reputable with review venues, booksellers, the small percentage of readers who care, etc.
5. Better pricing and availability of physical books
6. Sometimes, editing at publisher’s expense
7. Gatekeeping–the traditional publishing process at its best can prevent books of yours that aren’t ready from being published prematurely, while validating books that are ready.
8. Sometimes, other rights sell (foreign, film, etc.)
9. Assured of making a minimum amount of money
10. Library distribution
11. Sense of accomplishment and validation
12. Externally-imposed deadlines helpful to productivity for some writers

SELFPUB

1. Much quicker time to market
2. No long period of waiting to see whether or not the book will sell
3. No agency 15% taken off writer’s income
4. Much higher royalty rate paid to writer
5. Accommodates unusual and niche books well
6. No need to connect with some specific agent’s and editor’s tastes (as well as the marketing department, management, etc.)
7. Control over process: no covers you hate, no misreporting or non-reporting of royalties from publisher, no unnecessary publisher delays, etc.
8. Stay in print longer
9. Rights not tied up or snatched by publisher, as can sometimes happen in non-writer-friendly publishing contracts
10. Ability to update book after release
11. Much quicker payment and possibility of steady, comparably reliable income
12. Much better reporting on sales and money earned
13. Books can be commercially viable with a significantly smaller readership and/or much slower sales
14. Satisfaction and confidence arising from self-reliance
15. No risk of series being canceled before they’re completed
16. Don’t have to sell the idea of the work; can focus on selling the actual work
17. Selfpub (especially self-ePublishing) seems to be on the rise, whereas tradpub’s future is uncertain and not rosy: in theory, some publishers might even go out of business between the time they buy your book and the time they intended to publish it
18. No danger of agent having rights to something they didn’t sell (as happens with certain kinds of unfavorable-to-author agency contracts)
19. Not constrained or rushed by publisher timelines

I’d offer the caution that the fact that there are more items in the selfpub list doesn’t necessarily mean that selfpub is better; I believe strongly that this depends on the individual writer’s circumstances.

Another caution I’d offer, one that will bear repeating, is that simply because a book is ePublished doesn’t mean anyone will buy it. Based on numerical analysis writers I know have been doing on Amazon, for instance, the great majority of ePublished books are selling very few to no copies. There appear to be a huge number that have never sold at all. In this arena, the confidence of a publisher and the strength of the traditional marketing route offers almost a guarantee of at least a small audience, while selfpub offers nothing at all like a guarantee.

Kelly Barnhill is a teacher, mom, and writer from Minneapolis. Her stories have sold to magazines like Postscripts, Clarkesworld, and Weird Tales, and she has written thirteen nonfiction books for kids. This Codex Blog Tour interview delves into where she finds time, focus, and inspiration to write, and how her writing complements the other parts of her life.

So you have a new novel for middle grade readers called The Mostly True Story of Jack coming out from Little, Brown in August, but you have a lot of prior experience writing science books for kids (e.g., Sewers and the Rats That Love Them). Does the nonfiction writing help you in writing fiction for kids of the same age group?

Oh, absolutely. My work writing nonfiction for children was something I actually never set out to do. I had written to Capstone Press a year earlier, hoping to do some curriculum work. They came back asking me to write them a couple of books – and very specific books indeed. These books needed to appeal to both boys and girls, they needed to be informative, factual, and funny. They needed a strong voice, smooth readability, short sentences, chunked information, and high interest. I had insanely strict word counts – not only in total, but I had limits as to how long my average sentence length could be, how long my paragraphs could be, how many words could be on each page. It was like nonfiction haiku. But funny. Hardest thing I ever did.

The thing is, that work – that painstaking, back-breaking, soul-crushing work – was probably the best thing I ever did. I became ruthlessly economical. I became much more concerned with voice. I learned to see the humor in everything (now, granted, when you’re writing a book on the history of the sewer system, the humor just, um, flows, but when you’re writing a book on famous hoaxes, or weird rituals, or horrifying medical practices, you’ve got to be pretty flexible and open to humor). My work as a nonfiction writer built me into the writer I am now. And really, it convinced me that I really could write for children. And then I started my novel.

What do you hope kids get out of reading your fiction? Is the most important thing that the story be fun, or are there lessons to be learned, or is the goal something less concrete than that?
I guess I never really thought of it that way. I think, in a lot of ways, people who write for children are secretly writing letters to the person we were as children. I write about loneliness because as a child I was lonely. I write about characters who struggle with anger and disillusionment and the mercilessness of hope because as a child I was angry, and disillusioned – and I knew that hope, while redeeming and sustaining, was also merciless. Hope makes requirements on a person. I write fiction because I want to tell the child that was – the lonely child, the struggling child, the hurting child – that friendship is possible, and love is possible, and hope doesn’t always hurt.

I write fiction to give gifts to the child I was: strong legs, clear eyes, quick hands and wings – wings made of ink, wings made of paper, wings made of pencil shavings and eraser bits. And I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure she received them. I’m pretty sure she stepped out, scanned the skies, ran, leaped, and flew.

What has been the biggest obstacle to your writing so far? Have you had to take any special steps to deal with it?

The biggest issue for me right now is time. I teach; I parent; I write. Unfortunately, those three occupations spring from the same place in my heart – which is a bit of a strain. For a lot of years, the entirety of my writing time happened between the hours of four and and six in the morning. At six, the children woke, and my day followed the rhythm of my children. Lately, things have gotten easier – all three kids are in school, and I have the great luxury of working during the daytime. Even still, it is now the rhythm of the story that I have to contend with – and that is a rhythm that is not my own. Because I don’t outline – and I approach story writing in the same way that I approach story reading, that same sense of wonder, expectation and excitement – I often wander down trails that I later have to abandon. Characters emerge, flourish, and disappear. Stories are written, then re-written from memory. It’s a messy process and an unpredictable process, but it’s mine, and I’ll keep it.

In a discussion of eBooks on Codex, an online writer’s group I started seven years ago, the subject came up of market saturation: with more and more eBooks hitting the market as the readership expands, will there come a time when there are too many books out there for many of them to make more than a little money? In response to that question, here are some predictions about the eBook market over the next decade, based on thinking about social and technological trends.

One reason I’m as interested as I am in this topic that I have friends on Codex who are beginning to see real success (measured in hundreds or thousands of dollars) through eBook publishing, primarily for the Kindle, especially Judson Roberts with his compelling and exceptionally well-researched series of Viking novels and James Maxey with his inventive and emotionally complex novels about dragons, dragon hunters, and superheroes. (See also Jud’s Web site at judsonroberts.com and James’ at jamesmaxey.blogspot.com.) Also fascinating is the POD success of Maya Lassiter with her free audiobook, Conjuring Raine, which to date has been downloaded more than 2,000 times.

Many more eBooks coming
I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet in terms of number of eBooks available: people who are putting out eBooks now are still early adopters, but before long publishers will be putting out every last book they have rights to, many more writers will take books out of the submission cycle of traditional publishing and try to get some juice out of the eBook market instead, and the majority of authors (and authors’ estates) who have rights to their backlists will make those books available as eBooks too. Why leave money on the table, after all? Most things that have gone out of print ever will reappear, along with many things that were written over the past few decades but never made it into print, making the field much more crowded.

By the way, I’m suspecting there will be at least a few amazing finds among books that have been lost in slush–along with lots and lots and lots of garbage.

Many more readers coming, and not just the ones we already write for
At the same time, over the coming decade the market for English language eBooks will continue to expand, not only as eReaders are adopted by an ever-increasing percentage of the public in English-speaking countries, but as eReaders and smartphones reach more and more of the world’s population. In the past almost all English-language writers have been writing mainly for native English speakers. As China and India and the Middle East and the rest of the world adopt eReaders, barriers to books from here reaching English speakers in other countries will fall. How many of your books are available in India, for instance, a country that has very nearly as many English-speakers as the United States? Or Nigeria, where English-speakers number almost 80 million? Or even in Australia, for that matter?

Further, as English language materials become more widely available, and as communication across national boundaries continues to expand, especially over the Web, many more people will learn English than have in the past. If you live in Mongolia, for instance, ten years ago English would have been of little use to you. Today if you know English and have any kind of Internet access, you have access to the largest  single-language collection of information and entertainment ever in the history of humankind.

So even though there’s going to be more competition, I think it’s still going to be boom time for English language writers for the next decade or so, and with the continued spread of English, some growth for another decade or two after that, and possibly even longer.

This growth in number of readers will not be matched by writers from those same areas. If you speak English well, you can be a reader of English-language books–but to write a good book in English, you have to speak the language like a native, which most readers from non-English-speaking countries don’t. Writers who write in English are likely to benefit from all of this at the expense of writers who work in other languages.

More readers means yet more eBooks
This in turn will lure more people to writing as more and more writers begin making a living through self-published eBook sales. Writing has always been alluring to a lot of people, but most would-be writers are scared off or beaten down by the process of repeated rejections, or else stuck in a decades-long pattern of submit-and-be-rejected. Lifting the barriers means not only removes practical obstacles to getting published, but also emotional obstacles. No longer will you have to be the kind of person who persists in the face of depressingly horrible odds to get your work out. (It could be argued that self-publishing has been an option for a long time, but I’d argue back that getting someone to print your books isn’t the same as having the opportunity to actually get them in front of readers.)

With an influx of less experienced writers who don’t have to get past editorial obstacles, there will be a lot more bad writing available. This, together with the increased use of eReaders and the overall rise in number of eBooks, will create a powerful push for better eBook finding and selection tools for the Web, eReaders, and smart phones. Exactly how these systems will work is a crucial question for writers, because it will determine whether or not our works can be found, the context in which they’ll be considered or compared, and ultimately how well they’ll sell.

In a near-future post I’ll make some predictions about how people will be finding and choosing eBooks, and about what that will mean for writers.

Photo taken in London by DG Jones

Tricia Sullivan is an American science fiction writer living in Britain. Her latest novel, Lightborn, will be published by Orbit Books UK in October 2010.  Her website is www.triciasullivan.com and she also administers the martial arts site www.morrisnoholdsbarred.com.

From Luc: The following is a post recommended by a friend last week; it does a great job of capturing the frustrations of competing priorities and competing parts of life. Having read and enjoyed it, I asked for (and received) permission to reproduce it here. You can see the original at http://triciasullivan.livejournal.com/97143.html.

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One of the big frictions in my life arises from the antipathy between the damn Buttheads.  Butthead #1 is the creative bit and Butthead #2 is the bit that actually gets me by in the world.   These two posts, poles, blockheads, cannot seem to be in the same place at the same time.  They butt heads.  They’re Buttheads.  Either/both, as needed.

When Butthead #1 is in charge, I’m writing well.  There is cotton wool between me and the world.  I go glassy-eyed.  I cease to care about trivia like laundry, the bank balance, the calendar, anyone else’s problems, world affairs, or the clock.  If a thought about any of these things intrudes, I push it away, because thinking about anything real is a sign that Butthead #2 is gaining control.  Butthead #2 is always trying to steal my writing mojo so that my family can have clean socks.

Before I had a family, when in deadline mode I’d accumulate masses of laundry.  I’d eat whatever I could find, usually toast and canned soup and chocolate (of course) and I’d put everything else on hold while I wandered around in a thinking fog.  It was wonderful!

Now I’m responsible for a family of five.  Laundry, dishes, cleaning, meals, all have to be done every day without fail as an absolute minimum.  Business stuff with Steve goes on in the background constantly.  So Butthead #2 threatens to take over my life every day.  I keep her in her place in two ways.  First,  I do all the routine household work that I can on autopilot, in zombie-mode.  Second, I procrastinate.  Anything I can put off until school holidays, I put off.  Because during school holidays, I’m not going to be able to write much anyway.

When I’m writing, procrastination is my friend.  During the school year, I let Butthead #2 note down things that need doing on a list.  This list becomes the Epic List.  I save it up all year, and then in the summer I execute it.  This is quite brutal.

Butthead #1 pretty much gets executed for this time, too.  She’s shoved underground and told to be quiet.  Theoretically she is resting, but it never feels restful in my life because Butthead #2 has me running around doing the Epic List.

The interesting thing about the List is how every item on it glows with the energy of procrastination.  This year, some of the items were very minor tasks, but because I’d treated them like radioactive waste and refused to touch them while Butthead #1 was playing artiste, they began to acquire a creepy sort of power.  You know, they loomed.

And there develops an over-riding sensation that casts parenthetical arms around the whole list, an ozone smell.  It’s the humming power of procrastination.  With every act of procrastination, the List and every task on it become bigger, more difficult to surmount.  The List begins to whisper evil things.

I’ve been doing battle with this bloody list all summer.  At first I’d look at it and feel tired, faintly sick.  The items ranged from physical chores to administrivia to phone calls to big projects to shopping, and because its fields of control ranged from Steve’s business to my own to our household affairs to our kids, I felt like my entire life was somehow trapped in the power of this List.  Stuff seemed to be coming at me from all directions.

Every long-deferrred chore that I confronted provoked some kind of anxiety.  Resistance.  But then, when I started pushing through and seeing that I could get this stuff done and struck off the list, there came one zing after another: the release of trapped energy.  The list became like a video game.  Each task was another opponent, with energy crystal rewards.  Once she gets going, Butthead #2 loves this shit.  She’s been going medieval on the List all summer.  I think she’s a bit swollen with power, actually.

And that’s the problem with Butthead #2.  She doesn’t know when to stop.  I don’t like the person I become when my life centers on getting this stuff done.  I don’t like how I think or feel.  It’s all too…organized and efficient.

The writing has suffered, too.  Butthead #1 is getting bored and weepy, underground.  So, in a week, when the kids go back to school, I’ll start building a new list of stuff that I’ll refuse to do because it kills my work.

Being an artist is a lot like being a janitor.  Make a mess; clean it up; make a mess.  Procrastination is my friend in one part of this cycle, and my enemy in the other.  But the upside is that, once Butthead #1 gets back in the driver’s seat, she will be the procrastinated-upon one.  She will have the pent-up power.  Or so I hope.  Because September’s coming, and I’m getting increasingly agitated as I realize I’ve been procrastinating on my writing for several weeks now.

How about you?  What kinds of things make you procrastinate?

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Some Willpower Engine articles that touch on  subjects in Tricia’s post:

• 6 Steps to Overcome Procrastination
• Are Creative People More Likely to Procrastinate?
• Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated
• 7 Tricks for Starting in on an Unappealing Task
• Self-Motivation Techniques for Starting (or Restarting) a Big Project You’ve Been Avoiding
• Getting Rid of the Little, Distracting Tasks
• Why Tasks Lists Fail

In other posts on this site, I’ve talked about ways to stop having a bad day, for instance through music, idea repair, and emotional antidotes. In their recent book Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, Tom Rath and Jim Harter of the Gallup Group (the organization whose research on strength psychology I talk about in my recent post “Should We Maximize Our Strengths or Minimize Our Weaknesses?“) offer a way to greatly increase our chances of having a good day: increasing social time.

According to Gallup’s research, socializing matters. Six hours a day of social time, according to Rath and Harter, greatly increases our chances of having a good day–that is, feeling happy and thriving. “When we get at least six hours of daily social time, it increases our wellbeing and minimizes stress and worry … each hour of social time quickly decreases the odds of having a bad day. Even three hours of social time reduces the chances of having a bad day to 10%.” (Emphasis is theirs.) Social time seems to have a powerful effect on stress levels, even for introverted people.

Six hours seems like a lot, but apparently what helps us in terms of social time is to simply interact with other people in some direct way. Among kinds of social time available to reduce stress, Rath and Harter include talking on the phone and exchanging e-mail. Time spent communicating with other people at work seems to count just as much as time at home or elsewhere.

This may not necessarily be good news for those of us whose work tends to be solitary. For instance, full-time writers or computer programmers may find it difficult to find six hours a work day in which to communicate and be social, since only a small amount of the time in either of those jobs (especially non-book research for writers and meetings for programmers) can be social. Most of the work in those and many other jobs gets done alone, and communicating with other people while doing it makes it next to impossible to be productive.

This suggests that it’s especially important for people whose work is solitary to go out of their way to find social time if they want to be happy and reduce stress. Living with someone you like rather than living alone seems an especially important step. Other possibilities include dinners with friends, exercising in a social setting, having lunch with others instead of alone, and increasing communication with family and friends.

Photo by MorBCN