Wait For It by Eric Beetner

 What would you do differently if you were starting your career in today’s publishing landscape?

I’ve thought about this a lot over the years. My first book came out in 2009. Far enough away to earn me veteran status, but still feels like yesterday. Since then, I’ve published 35 works and over 120 short stories.

Step one would be to not publish as much.

That first novel I still believe in, but we never should have published it then. That one was co-written with another author who invited me to collaborate with them and I did just to keep writing and I thought it would be fun. It was. We wrote four books together, three of which got published. But we fell into that trap of being young (ish) and eager and we took the first offer given to us with a tiny indie press.

Back then it was so amazing that anyone would want to put out a book, and we didn’t have agents then, that it seemed foolish not to take advantage of the offer. I learned quickly that a bad offer is worse than no offer at all.

What started for me then, I believe, was a growing list of books with zero publicity leading to poor sales numbers which adds up over time and makes me a hard sell to bigger publishers.

The hard lesson learned over the first decade of publishing is that it is not a meritocracy. I believed that hard work would pay off. I wrote more than most people, I organized readings, I volunteered with organizations, I worked hard to promote other authors. I gathered an impressive list of accolades. I finally got that agent. I made friends with many authors both big and small. None of it mattered in the face of small presses unwilling to invest in the books beyond crossed fingers and a bi-monthly social media post.

I wrote whatever people wanted when they came calling. I wrote under other names, in other people’s series. I wrote short, novella-length when powers that be convinced many people that short form was the future (it was not). I listened to friends and colleagues when they told me of new ventures in ebook publishing that would catch fire (they did not).

I wrote shorts for anyone who would take them. I wrote novels and watched as small presses died one after another like it was my own words infecting them with a fatal disease. I’ve had seven publishers go out of business while publishing my work. You read that right - seven. I’ve had a few novels orphaned multiple times. I’ve been kicked in the teeth again and again by this business and I wish I’d had more patience to let the process play out at the start. Do the querying, find an agent, wait for that first deal to be the best deal because you're only a debut author once. 

I guess I’m impatient by nature. I’m prolific because I love writing. I learned the business doesn’t reward that. It’s too much for readers to keep up with at some point. I needed to slow down and not take every offer I was handed.

The temptation was that people were responding to the work. Someone saying they like your book and want to put it out is intoxicating. And it was just sitting there on my hard drive. Why not release it?

I’ve slowed down now. I try to let the process play out. My agent right now has 4 finished manuscripts and I have several that have fallen out of print that I’m waiting on getting back out there because I want to do the books justice this time. I’d hate to think poor publishing has killed some of my best writing. But I can wait.

Through it all I’ve kept on typing and somehow not given up. When I look back at the writers I was coming up with around the time my first novel was published, very few are still in the game. Other bad deals, poor sales, the frustrations of the business all got to them and they faded away. Even writers who had big 5 deals and sold tens of thousands of books eventually hit a wall and saw decline sales, dropped contracts and eventually walked away from ti all. My plan has always been to relentlessly stick around until I wear down readers by just being a constant presence and make them stop fighting it and just read something. Not a solid business strategy.

For my next book, my first with a pen name, I get a do-over. I’m going to try different strategies, different approaches and see what happens. I’m lucky I get that chance.