How to Deal with Being a Writer

No matter how good or how awful you are as a writer (and the truly awful ones think they are good, which makes them truly awful), when the manuscript is finished, the publishing and marketing options you have are not even as effective as a roll of the dice… where you throw six of them and have to get six sixes to prove a winner. This is why I will never be a popular and profit-making author. Of course, I might be truly awful and just don’t know it yet.

I started the publishing game with a publisher that paid a dollar for the rights to publish my first publishing attempt. Publish America turned out to be a scam and held onto the rights to my space opera, AeroQuest, for seven years. They have been prosecuted as criminals and sued out of existence since then in 2007. I took my novel rights back in 2014. It was a learning experience. I learned at that point that I was a truly awful writer. The precious few relatives that read it and liked it were not literate enough to recognize awful novelistic garbage with too many characters, a meandering plot, and totally goofball thematic nonsense. After four and a half rewrites, it is still a pretty awful mess.

I tried to get the next one published by one of the major publishers. I landed Catch a Falling Star with I-Universe, a print-on-demand imprint of Penguin Books (at least that was who owned them then in 2012.)

This was, of course, another blunder in the publishing world where no author-friendly options still exist. I got to work with a professional editor who had worked in the publishing industry with McMillan for twenty years. She told me that my book was well done and better than many financially successful but awfully written books. And then she let me in on the terrible secret of publishing in the internet era. The publishers make money by charging the author for everything. And most books make very little money for the author, the royalties being only a small percentage of the price.

Working with the professionals at I-Universe was worth the thousands of dollars I paid them because of all the things I learned about writing and publishing. But when I tried a cheaper publisher, Page Publishing, they were totally not worth the money. Their editor made changes in Magical Miss Morgan that were not merely worthless, but forced me to re-edit the whole thing myself and change everything back. The publishing cooperative I tried, PDMI Publishing, was a much better business model, but couldn’t compete and ended up going out of business before they could publish Snow Babies.

So, it turns out that the option Denny suggested as the Spirit talking to Moitle’s Delicatessan is the only one I can afford. And I am doing everything myself. But as a marketer, I have nothing to work with to make myself a successful author. I have to be satisfied with being a good writer that nobody will ever read.