I don’t know that every author goes into the game with idealistic fantasies of what the writing business is like, but when I started as a green as grass newbie a thousand years ago, I was super, super naïve. My first few years as a published author were extremely educational and frequently painful as a direct result. Rather than whining about every totally predictable blow that came my way, which I knew would be professionally stupid, I started a list instead. This list.
To me, writing has always been an amusement park ride and every book you write provides you a ticket. Just one. Some tickets are a climb onto a roller coaster. Some put you in line for the carousel. Bumper cars. White water rafting or the log flume. The Ferris Wheel. The book can tank so hard all you get is a parking ticket, that can happen too, LOL. No matter how smart we old-guard authors like to pretend we are, you never really know which ride you’ll get until you are strapped in and by then, girlfriend, it’s too late. You’re stuck with your ride, baby. Just hang on. Stay in the business long enough and you’ll figure out which ride you like best, but you’ll eventually learn to like—or at least tolerate—them all. That’s just how it is, the name of the game.
But every ticket to ride also includes some pretty extensive fine print and like every TOS in the existence of ever, we usually don’t read that fine print. Some, like me, are so excited to get a ticket, we aren’t even aware the fine print exists, but it does. It so does.
I started writing out my fine print as I experienced it to process the fuckery that can and does happen in the writing gig. I never intended to share it with anyone. Sounded like career suicide to me. I don’t know. Maybe it still is. Maybe I’ve been at this so long I just don’t care anymore. Very possible. Even probable. And maybe—just maybe—there are enough of us old guard around that will glance over my fine print who will nod and think to themselves, OMG, ME TOO.
Some of the fine print below is dated. Very. I got my start in the biz signing with several digital-first publishers, all of whom are gone now. The business model of BookLandia changed, as it always does. But deep down, the heart of the business, where all of us live and breathe and struggle and succeed and fail? That doesn’t change. Not really.
So. 15 years down this road, I’m giving my middle finger to #86 and sharing my fine print. If you are new? This is what a writing career looks like. If you aren’t new? This is what MY career has looked like, LOL.
Screw the fine print. I hope you do what it takes to buy your ticket. And wherever your ticket leads you, I hope you enjoy the ride.
Kari
FILENAME: 35 points included in the fine print of every author
(Kari’s note: Yeah, I started my list with 35 items. I continued adding to the fine print as I went along and never changed the filename. Sue me.)
1. You will be pirated.
2. You will also be plagiarized.
3. Publishers go out of business and keep your royalty money.
4. Vendors/distributors do too.
5. Some colleagues will stab you in the back in hopes of selling just one book or otherwise throw you under the bus to make themselves appear/feel more important.
6. Popularity Club Colleagues (PCCs) will expect you to kiss the ring.
7. Troll reviewers will gleefully rip your book (and just for kicks, sometimes you personally) apart A) to build their reputations, and B) for fun. And no matter what, you will need to shut the hell up about it. Just shut it.
8. Even when you include word count in story descriptions, someone will complain they expected the story to be longer.
9. Some expect your book to be free (or permanently priced as a loss leader) and loudly complain any time it isn’t. Attempts at public shaming may be involved.
10. Peers will look down their noses at you because you write <fill in the blank with anything, anything at all>.
12. Get used to lying about how much you like your book cover.
12. You will be orphaned by an editor you love.
13. You will be judged on your merit as an author based solely on your gender. Which gender you are doesn’t matter. Male, female, or genderfluid, expect to be bitch slapped. Repeatedly.
14. As a self-employed author, you pay twice as much FICA. Tax season is hell. If you’re very lucky, you will endure excruciating panic after underestimating your taxes and owe the IRS thousands. Yes, plural. Your children may come to refer to one of your stories as Mommy’s Tax Book. If you’re not too bright, Mommy’s Tax Book will be the only book in your career to get a sequel.
15. Reviews will occasionally be inaccurate. Wrong character names. Wrong story details, both major and minor. The review might even get your name wrong or be for another book altogether. This shit is normal, totally normal.
16. Someone will suggest your story is recycled fan fiction and deride it as such.
17. Facebook prison and other social media WTFery is permanently on your menu.
18. Regardless of how much money you make, your RL peeps are still waiting for you to write a “real” book.
19. You will stumble over reader complaints about author greed the month you raid sofa cushions for loose coins to buy milk.
20. You will make friends, enemies, and frenemies. You will be wrong about who falls into each of those categories.
21. At some point, someone may claim you have plagiarized somebody else because both works have one detail (out of fifty thousand details) in common.
22. You will discover an author you admired and held in the highest esteem when you were unpublished is a ginormous fuckstick.
23. You will invest significant time into — and pay a considerable amount for — editing…and you will still be criticized for that editing.
24. Working your tail off to strengthen a writing weakness clears the field so you recognize other writing weaknesses. Rinse and repeat. Forever.
25. You will make promo mistakes that ultimately embarrass you. If you’re lucky, it won’t cost you readers or a ton of money too, but don’t hold your breath.
26. Some will hope you are desperate enough to give them a bounce because you write erom. Strangers, yes, but it’s worse when the perv on the prowl is an old friend. (“I bet you’d be great at sexting.” No. Just no.)
27. Posers pretend to be your pal only as long as you’re useful to them and discard you like a snotty tissue the moment you aren’t. Sometimes you recognize posers right away, but other times, you won’t.
28. You will mistake a business relationship for a friendship.
29. Ego monsters (colleagues with a puffed up head over a hit book/series) will slight you or even slap at you.
30. Porn outsells you. By a lot. Some will insist, despite your bank balance, that what you do is porn, anyway. (I wish, buddy. I wish.)
31. Feast or famine — your income stream varies wildly. Low months will leave you despondent…and paranoid. Because there is no guarantee you’ll see a high month again.
32. Amazon can crush your career. Literally crush you. Whenever it wants.
33. The longer you’re in the business, the more people will quit and you may never know why. One day, you look up and pffft, they’re just gone.
34. No matter how much time you sink into social media or how many social media platforms you’re active on, it isn’t enough. Even if you spend every waking moment on social media. Srsly, you coulda scheduled overnight tweets for the international audience, dude. Social media guilt is your new BFF.
35. You are one misspoken word or asshat moment (we all have ‘em, right?) from provoking the social media outrage machine. Brace yourself. If your turn hasn’t popped up yet, you’re due.
36. As a writer, you are a public person. Private people are free to do, believe, and like whatever they want. Public people are not. Every opinion you express, decision you make or action you take, everything you do as the Public You can and will influence your career and ultimately your paycheck. Feel free to check your freedoms as a private person at the door – exercise those freedoms at your peril.
37. You will make mistakes. You will fail. Enemies and colleagues who consider you solely as The Competition will celebrate those mistakes and seek to capitalize on them.
38. Intentionally or otherwise, someone will “steal” your title. Intentionally or otherwise, you will “recycle” someone else’s title.
39. A stubborn core of Professors will generate saga-length blogs and status updates schooling Teh World on what they deem acceptable to: write, feel, believe, like, and how you should spend the money in your wallet. What you write, feel, believe, like, and how you choose to spend your money will agree with the dictates of the Grand Poo Bahs only by wild coincidence. This has zero bearing on the Grand Poo Bah’s sense of self-importance.
40. An author you respect will publicly criticize your book, your brand, or both.
41. Someone working the production end of the business (cover art, editing, format/conversion, promo, etc) will take advantage of you.
42. You assume none of your colleagues are reading you…or that all your colleagues are reading you. Either way, you’ll be startled when you discover you’re quite mistaken.
43. You will struggle with and regularly question where to draw your privacy line.
44. A colleague you bent over backward to help will bitch slap the shit out of you.
45. You will be screen-capped.
46. The dramaz! Oh, the dramaz! A month (week?) can’t go by without a new scandal circulating in this business. If you’re lucky, you and people you consider yours won’t be directly involved. Participation in kerfluffles can and frequently does convince readers you are a knob who should be blacklisted so choose your battles wisely, grasshopper.
47. Readers might attack when they perceive another author has wronged you. You probably won’t be aware this is happening. You might be blamed for it anyway. By the time you realize something is awry, months have passed and it’ll be too late to contact the author to tell him/her you never felt wronged and apologize for what that author went through that, again, you had absolutely nothing to do with. Years after the fact, you’ll still feel bad that happened, though.
48. Your publisher will make a mistake that embarrasses you.
49. By their fruits, you shall know them and by fruits, I mean the attention and glory that crusaders draw to themselves instead of their purported causes.
50. Your cover will be mocked and/or a price point heavily criticized when you had zero control over those decisions.
51. You will be criticized for fetishizing gay men (M/M only).
52. You will sign a contract you regret.
53. A publisher or editor will ask you to include more sex, make the sex happen faster, or write in some spanky pants.
54. You will discover the cover model you loved so much has been used on two thousand covers in the past week alone.
55. You will toss good money away on swag nobody wants with the possible exception of you. You may not even want it, frankly.
56. You will write a story that bombs. This will probably be your favorite. If you’re extraordinarily fortunate, you’ll write a story that hits and squint at it for years because you can’t figure that shit out. At all.
57. Some ABBs (Authors Behaving Badly) will continue producing work, that work will sell, and you won’t be able to figure that shit out either.
58. Some confuse high (and usually heavily padded) word counts with assurances of quality and sneer in self-righteous disdain at shorter, though tighter, prose.
59. One-trick ponies drop dead eventually.
60. Colleagues who talk about high sales numbers in public are A) trying to let newbies know what the market is like, B) braggarts, or C) trying to make themselves seem like a BFD. What category a numbers talk falls into is usually transparent by context. Proceed at your own risk.
61. A personal tragedy could disrupt your work and you won’t have a single clue about how to handle explaining the disruption as the public you. The stresses of whatever personal issues are weighing you down intensify with the fear that readers will forget or give up on you.
62. A colleague you consider a friend will be sucked into the pit of a publisher asplosion and there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it except hurt for him/her.
63. A newbie will pull some outrageous stunt that will prompt you to shake your head and think “damn, was I ever that stupid?” Yes, you were that stupid. Zip it, skippy. Just zip it.
64. You will blow a deadline.
65. You’ll seriously consider quitting. Even though your rational self will eventually prevail, your irrational self will be heartily fed up and, for a short while, make you forget why you love what you do. If you’re smart, you’ll stay off social media until you pull your shit together, but nobody’s ever accused you of being a genius so…
66. You will suspect someone of catfishing and you will be proven correct.
67. You won’t suspect and once revealed, the catfishing incident will rattle you to your core.
68. You will work through an expensive vacation. Your family will give you grief about it even though royalties from work paid for the trip to start with. Then you’ll feel guilty for being a bitch, an over-scheduled bitch, but a bitch nevertheless. A bitch who needs a vacation.
69. Your family and real-life peeps will mistake attending a conference for the vacation you need so much.
70. You will decide a day off social media is kind of like a vacation.
71. You will burn out.
72. You’ll happen upon a scathing review of a colleague’s book and pray like you’ve never prayed before that your colleague doesn’t see it.
73. Two words: blog tour.
74. Someone who dicked you over will be hired by one of your publishers and/or added to the author roster. Every time one of their emails streams through the publisher’s loop, you will lose your shit. Get used to this feeling because the person who dicked you over will reply to every GD thread and never STFU.
75. Cliques develop in this business too. We just call it networking. If you enjoy social posturing and gamesmanship, rock on. If you don’t, pretend.
76. The nanosecond you think you might finally have a grip on current market conditions, the market will flip, tank, or explode.
77. You will share a secret and/or private info with someone who fucks you over.
78. You will consider hiring an agent and/or a personal assistant, even though maintaining a high overhead is supremely unwise.
79. You will agonize about whether you should tell your real-life peeps what you do or what your pen name is.
80. If your real-life peeps know, you will be asked to edit college application essays and trunk books. Lottsa trunk books. The fact you pay a proofer significant coin because you are dumb as a brick when it comes to proper comma usage is beside the point.
81. You will fail to back up your work and lose a book or a significant portion of your book during a computer crash or other technical WTFery.
82. The first one-star review you see of your work will stab you in the gut. You might learn to lie about it and you might eventually realize one-star reviews can be useful to you. But the stab-to-the-gut of a bad review never really goes away.
83. One of your real-life peeps will sign up for your newsletter, leave a review, or comment on a blog post and that will weird you right the fuck out.
84. The death of a writing peer will break your heart.
85. If you are very fortunate, you will one day realize you’ve become a seasoned/veteran author, which will make no sense to you because you were a green as grass newbie, like, ten seconds ago.
86. You will be tempted to write a non-fic how-to book on writing. RESIST THIS TEMPTATION AT ALL COSTS.
87. Authors measure success in different ways: royalties, reviews, productivity (high word counts), awards, personal popularity…Be aware of your measure of success. Prepare to never understand anyone else’s. Some of the measures that differ from yours will probably piss you off.
88. You will helplessly watch colleagues (some of whom may be friends) repeat mistakes – silently watch because they don’t genuinely want to hear what those mistakes are and/or are wholly disinterested in correcting those mistakes. And they didn’t ask you, anyway, Madame Smartypants. Shut yer trap unless you want everyone else pointing out the mistakes you keep repeating that you probably won’t listen to advice about, either.
89. Colleagues will approach you about doing joint promo, which can be useful if the involved authors have a readership overlap that can be realistically expanded for both authors, but this will probably be a complete waste of your time. Odds are pretty good the author who approached you will expect you to jump through hoops to even do the joint promo because, hey, risking your readership costs the other author nothing. Don’t be a fool. As flattering as being approached is, nothing is worth alienating your core readers. Stick to your guns. Guard your readership zealously.
90. You may receive invitations to submit your work from publishers. Also wildly flattering. Research the publisher as you would any other publisher before deciding to partner with that publisher. Would they benefit from the relationship more than you? Pass.
91. Green as grass newbies will take it upon themselves to give you career advice. Resist any and all urges to laugh at them and getting pissed about it isn’t helpful either. They’ll eventually find a clue or they won’t. Ignore, ignore, ignore.
92. Writing is a smaller community than people think. At one point or another, everyone will be presented with an opportunity to help someone else…or not help that someone. If that someone has dicked you over and you are fine with not helping them as much as possible, TELL NO ONE. Insiders will figure out you are not an author to be fucked with all on their lonesome. Bragging about it just lessens the effect. It’s always better for the ones who have fucked you over to wonder what you’re going to do to them, anyway. Let them sweat it out.
93. Someone may compare their work with yours as a marketing gimmick.
94. Authors game Amazon’s system in a thousand ways and many times, the gaming pays off for them. This has nothing to do with you or your sales. Repeat after me: GAMING HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU OR YOUR SALES. Readers like your work enough to buy/read you…or they don’t. Getting outraged at gaming authors might make you feel better, but will do nothing to improve your bottom line and complaining about gaming in public will just reflect poorly on you and your brand.
95. Colleagues will nominate themselves (or orchestrate their nomination) for an award and campaign for votes to “win” that award. The fact that readers don’t give two shits about awards is immaterial.
96. A reader will (astonishingly) nominate you or one of your books for an award against one of these campaigning authors. Enjoy the satisfaction of being legit nominated. Remind self that most readers don’t give two shits about awards and go on with your day.
97. You may win an award. This is super unlikely to help your career at all, but hey, still nice. Add a reference to the award to that book’s page on your website and go on with your day. Resist any and all urges to add “award-winning” to author bio/description. Because it bears repeating: readers don’t give two shits about awards.
98. Because Amazon breaks down bestseller lists to a minute degree, you will very likely make one of their lists. Unless it’s a main hub list (paranormal, romance, erotica), it isn’t worth bragging about. Adding “bestselling” to author bio/description won’t impress anybody until and unless you are at the very least a main hub bestseller. It’s like being beautiful. If you are beautiful, you never need to say so. People look and see for themselves. If you have to say it, you aren’t as beautiful as you think. Same goes for being a bestseller. If you have to point this out to readers, you probably aren’t as big a deal as you want to believe.
99. A peer will launch a crusade against you, talk shit about you, encourage others to talk shit about you, push nasty rumors around the community, urge readers to leave horrible reviews, the whole ball of wax. (See #92 in the fine print.) Those of us who have been in the business a while see venomous authors for what they are. Few will help them and you won’t get far in this business without help/support. Their time is coming. Feel free to anticipate the venomous author who is currently the bane of your existence becoming a nobody within a few years and in the meantime, keep it classy. Nicely contrasts with the banquet of ugly the venomous author is serving up and hurries their downfall.
100. A friend will ponder writing pro and you will trip over yourself warning them what a sweaty fuckball of disaster pro writing is, no matter how much you love it and can’t imagine doing anything else.
101. You will be tempted to end your novel with an apocalyptic meteor strike, zombie plague, and/or your star-crossed lovers becoming lunch for a random T-rex. You will entertain yourself endlessly with the idea of distributing files with a collection of your favorite alternate endings to as many piracy sites as possible.
102. A gaming author (or posse of gaming authors) will come after you with random, troublesome bitchery and a raft of dirty author tricks.
103. Once you’ve been in the business long enough and/or produced enough work, one of your later books will share basic similarities with an earlier book. This is because every author tends to be drawn to exploring specific themes and tropes that comprise that author’s core story. If readers are on board for that core story, rock on, but be aware that pushing a product with too many similarities with others in your backlist will turn you into a one-trick pony. Make every effort to bring something new and fresh to your core story every time or suffer the consequences.
104. You will be told that you can’t succeed unless you write a book every month. Welcome to the tension between quantity and quality authors. If you enjoy producing a lot of work at a fast clip and have chosen the quantity model for your career, go for it. Just be aware that churning out books at a rapid pace is no guarantee of success, same as investing months of your life in a work is no guarantee of success. Both business models – quantity and quality – make viable careers, but neither model guarantees success. Only producing a story that readers desperately want is.
105. Writing to current market trends isn’t selling out unless the hot trend is something you have previously mocked. Readers may never know of your secret disdain and contempt, but if you shared your ridicule back channel…that shit never dies.
FINAL ITEM, 2024:
You will make friends, true-blue friends. Not just other authors, either. Readers, editors, cover artists, bloggers, and reviewers. Super fans too, if you’re lucky. There are a lot more good people in this business than the fuckwit baddies. Stick around. Your tribe will find you and when they do, cherish every single one of them. That’s real. The rest? It’s just fine print bullshit. One day, a thousand years down this road, you’ll finally understand the ticket to ride was never the books you wrote. Not really. It’s the friends you made and they are worth way more than any stupid fine print.
