It’s an innocent enough phrase but in my house, “I’m going to listen to some music,” roughly translates to “I’m frustrated and/or pissed off with work and I’m going to sit outside alone with my earphones plugged in, blasting excessively loud music, and trying to ignore everything, including you, so please, unless someone’s dying, just leave me the hell alone.”
Across the board, writers are listening to a lot of music lately.
In order to find a solution, we first have to acknowledge the problems. One, the selling. If you’re a freelance writer or journalist, you’re having to sell piece by piece, which while fun and exciting in the beginning is an awful way to make a living, especially if your family’s income depends on it. If you’re an author or an aspiring one looking to publish the traditional way, you’re dependent on a publisher’s understanding of the market, their budget, and their sensitivity to readers to be able to bring your work to your audience.
Second, the waiting. Oh my God, the waiting. Forget books, even articles can take weeks if not months to even get accepted, let alone published. Today, when blogs and daily websites are publishing within hours, if you’re waiting weeks for a magazine editor to get back to you, you’re sitting on your ideas far too long and missing the scoops. In the best case scenario, your story gets published a year too late, but at least it’s published. In the worst case scenario, it gets killed for not being “timely enough” and you get a measly 20% of the money owed to you. If you’re writing books, you’re still waiting for that coveted book deal while your hot book idea is being self-published by those who didn’t care to wait. Your readers are moving on.
Which brings me to, third, the money. My clips, my credits, my experience, my knowledge of the industry, everything says that my income should be increasing. I am not only working harder than ever before, but I have contacts at some top publications, I have a lot more experience under my belt than I did even four years ago, which means I know how to write, how to pitch, how to sell. And I’m working smarter because I’ve learned from ten years of full-time freelancing and have found ways to make life easier for me. But my income is stagnant and next year, if I continue on the same path, it will inevitably decrease.
It doesn’t matter how many queries I send or how hard I work or how much I ignore my family to write another article because soon I’ll have to write 30 articles a month and it still won’t be enough. The money’s drying up. Editors who once paid $1 a word before the magazine even went to print are now paying $200 for 1,200-word stories six months after they’ve been published. It’s simply not a feasible business model any more.
The same is true for traditionally-published books as authors are getting lower advances and increasing workloads as they scramble to build platforms. (Traditional publishing has its advantages and my agent and I are working towards a traditional book deal but these have to be conscious choices, not your only options.)
So, those are the problems. Solutions? There is only ONE.
I’m not going to go into a spiel about the industry as a whole, but as a working writer who has made a living for the last ten years and is watching that living drying up pretty quickly due to factors beyond my control, I’m looking for ways to boost my income, to continue doing what I do, and to create new avenues for my work. So I’m going to talk to you, a writer, about the solution to your problems. Like I said, there’s only one. And you’re not going to like it.
It is this: Build your readership directly.
There are a number of doors open to writers now that will enable you not only to make a good income, but to make a fantastic income with your writing. You can write and self-publish books and e-books, you can publish a Kindle Single, you can go on Kickstarter and launch a campaign to fund research for a nonfiction book or a novel, you can publish a blog and sell ads, you can create information products and sell them on your website, you can write for magazine and newspaper blogs that pay you per click, or you can find another creative way to package work you’ve already done.
But there’s one thing common in all of these things: You need to build that audience first and you need to bring it to your website, your e-mail list, your blog, NOT a publication’s website, e-mail list or blog. When you begin a new Kickstarter campaign, you need to be able to e-mail your readers and say, “Hey, is this something you’re interested in?” If you don’t have that list of people who care about what you do, your Kickstarter campaign is dead before it even starts. Because there’s no one, except your family and friends, who cares. There’s no one who’s excited about your new ideas. You haven’t yet created and built that trust with your audience.
I will talk, next week, about why you should still be querying publications and writing for those top magazine and newspaper markets in addition to building your own readership. But there is only one way for writers to stop being dependent on the market, on publishers, and on magazine editors for their income. And that is to go to readers directly. Even in traditional book publishing, you can’t get a book deal any more without at least something of a platform or the ability to convince a publisher that you’re working towards building one.
The money is not in magazines or in newspapers or in e-books or whatever new thing is now grabbing everyone’s attention. It’s in readership.
What are you going to do to build yours?