Putting Yourself Out There

I’m gearing back up to return to the university in the fall. After a heck of a couple of years, I’m resuming my very slow attempt to get a few extra college degrees. Mostly, it’s an excuse to listen to people much younger than myself learn cool stuff, and an excuse to listen to people somewhat younger than myself share their expertise.

I get inspired by all of that.

I’m searching class schedules and realizing that my Spanish has gotten rusty again, so there is probably a summertime online refresher in the complicated tenses on the horizon. Even though, really, using the proper tense is not my problem so much as finding the correct vocabulary word. As in any word that might suit in that circumstance. The vocabulary was the first thing to flee my brain in the hiatus.

The thing that fascinates me the most, though, is watching the theater kids, particularly those who are (at 18, 19, or 20) convinced they’re going to be Actors! (and yes, the exclamation point is there for a reason). Most won’t be, not because they’re not good enough, but because they don’t listen well and they already think they’re God’s gift to the profession.

Mostly, I watch the ones who are insecurely secure in their dreams. These kids know exactly what they want in their lives, but they’re not sure they’re good enough to get there, so they work extra hard to figure out where they should be.

Sometimes it is not where they expect to be. In the theater department in particular, they have to take courses in all aspects of theater, and they sometimes learn that they love a part of theater that they hadn’t expected to like at all.

Surprisingly enough to my younger self, the one who didn’t have the courage to follow her musical abilities into a music degree or to even walk into the theater department at the University of Wisconsin, there are a lot of introverts in theater. Some of those introverts are writers, yes, but many go onstage and perform. Most, in fact, because they like being someone else in front of a group. It’s safer for them.

I get safe. It makes sense. I also get the fear of doing something revealing in front of a crowd. Mostly, that fear is gone for me now. Years of public speaking and talking on panels at sf conventions eased my mind.

Still, I was pretty shocked when I learned that a lot of actors and musicians suffer severe stage fright—people you’ve all heard of. If they have to go onstage, they sit in the dressing room and shake, or, in some cases, puke, because they’re so scared.

Had I known that…well, I doubt I would have done it, because puking is not something I voluntarily do, even for art…but it certainly would have eased my mind about what for me is relatively minor stage fright (in comparison to what these folks have).

Really, though, it’s what they are willing to do for their dreams and their art. They put themselves out there. More importantly, they figure out how to put themselves out there.

Every year, I have a conversation with at least one of my writing students who is terrified for some reason I never probe of putting their work in front of an audience. It always boils down to the fact that they’re afraid of being seen.

Sidebar from a nearly 65-year-old person who has worked in the arts her entire life: You are never seen. Not in your entirety. You may reveal all of your secrets and no one will care. Or they’ll comment on the portrayal of something minor, like the cat, and kvetch about that. It’s disappointing…and freeing.

However, the fear of being seen is a real and crippling fear, stopping a lot of prose writers and poets from following their dreams. Writers, unlike actors and musicians, can hide from the world. You can use a pen name, set up a legal entity that doesn’t use your real name (in an obvious manner), and never let your picture out into the world.

You can hide and publish your work. That’s the great thing about being a writer.

Usually when a writer figures out their own personal workaround, they put their work on the market, whatever it means for them.

I had one of those discussions this past week with a couple of different writers, some in person, one online, and when I photo-bombed the Writers’ Block webinar on Wednesday.

After that moment on the webinar, I spent a few hours thinking about how universal that fear is among writers. I’ve been in this business almost fifty years now, and I’ve seen it every year.

Then Dean and I watched a little bit of The Voice. We often watch something to rest our poor brains, usually at dinner. We’ve moved away from news (since there’s no way that will relax anyone), and gone to documentaries and The Voice.

We usually watch a segment or two and then go back to whatever we were doing. It will take us days to watch an entire 2-hour episode.

So that Wednesday night, we watched two members of Michael Bublé’s team duet on a song he wrote, called “Home.” Most of you know it as a super hit for Blake Shelton, but Bublé wrote the song and released it first.

Before the battle, Bublé talked a bit about writing the song. I can’t find the clip for that (mostly because I’m lazy, but also because it’s not that relevant), but I did find the one that caught my attention.

It got me thinking, and I went up to my office and made a list.

Most people who work in the arts realize that their work has to be put out into the world.

• People who write music must perform that music to sell that song/sonata/whatever. They may be terrible singers. They might be shy as hell. But they need to make, at minimum, a demo tape.

Often they perform their own work, in some kind of concert, and it is that work that ends up catapulting them into whatever level of fame they will reach.

And then, partly because of the vagaries of the (exceedingly complex) music copyright laws, they may hear someone else cover their song. They might be like John Legend, who has said on The Voice that he cannot listen to a cover of one of his songs fairly. Or they might be like Bublé who not only assigned the song, but was honored by the way the singers performed it.

• People who write plays write them with production in mind. What is the point of writing a play if it’s just going to languish on your desk? The problem, though, with writing a play is that when it is performed, there will be an area that the performers cannot do or cannot say.

In early drafts of a play, the playwright will have to be nearby to do some kind of work to smooth out that section. Sometimes it’s because the star is a doofus and can’t say a word with more than two syllables, but mostly it’s because that section of the show, when performed in previews, did not work. Neil Simon deals with this a lot in his autobiography Rewrites.

• People who write screenplays know that they’re writing something that will be performed as well. I had a very famous writer friend who wrote the wordiest damn screenplays ever and had, in his contract, a clause that said not a word could be touched.

After his early years in Hollywood (when he didn’t have enough clout to have that stupid contract), he rarely sold a screenplay and when he did, it was a charity sale from a friend who would buy the screenplay so that the writer could retain his Writers Guild membership. (And then the charity friend would do a shooting script.)

• Artists know that their paintings or photographs will be displayed or used on covers or put on t-shirts and prints and everything else.

Even the lowest of the low, graffiti “artists,” the ones who deface buildings, understand that their art needs to be seen. (I’m grumpy about graffiti these days since Vegas has a lot of wall murals all over the city—and the freakin’ graffiti “artists” will deface them. Grrr. I hate people who deface other people’s art.)

• Even young poets these days understand that they might have to get up in front of a crowd at a poetry slam and declaim their poem.
• And let’s not talk about comedians, who are also writers, who get in front of a crowd, and risk bombing night after night after night. Dean and I saw one of George Carlin’s shows in his last years, and Carlin was testing material so new that he was holding paper torn from a notepad.

Some of it was funny. Much of it was not.

Fiction writers—people who write novels and short stories—are the only artists I know who expect someone else to publish their work. Fiction writers, particularly those who are traditionally published, believe that all they have to do is write it, and everyone will flock to their feet.

That’s an ingrained attitude, and a hard one to fight. Heck, a lot of these writers are worried when they decide to give a copy of their manuscript to an editor at a book publishing house or (worse) an agent.

Writers do not expect to have their work in the public view, and often fear it.

I’m not sure why this is. I think it’s just part of the culture.

There are movies that show writers at work, and someone else dragging that “brilliant” manuscript off the writer’s desk. Or the writer “gets discovered” in an English class (never happened when I was in school). Or someone else mailed off their manuscript.

That myth goes hand in hand with the idea that writing should be hard and writers should suffer while doing it. That myth also goes with the idea that anything written fast is terrible and anything labored over is brilliant. And that myth goes with the idea that being prolific is a sin. (Tell that to Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare.)

Indie writers have a similar problem, but it’s couched in other terms. I don’t want to learn how to publish. That’s going to be hard. It’ll take too much money or I can’t do covers or…or…

Okay, I want to reply, whatever roadblocks you want to set up for your work, go ahead.

But real artists—be they musicians or painters or (yes) writers—need to have their work seen. They need to figure out how to get on that stage despite their stage fright and put their art in front of an audience.

Otherwise the art will be destroyed when they die, tossed out with the trash or deleted off their computers.

Oh…and let’s talk “covers” for a minute. Blake Shelton’s version of “Home” is very different from Bublé’s version, which is different from the duet that aired on The Voice this past week.

If you’re lucky as a writer, and if you put yourself out there, at some point, someone will want to do make another piece of art using yours as inspiration. Maybe a movie, maybe a TV show, maybe a dramatic reading or an audio book.

That’s a “cover” for lack of a better term. (It really is a derivative work, and it does fall in a different place in the copyright law, but go with me on this for a minute.) Instead of being all protective and saying that you must control all things, say yes…if the contract terms are good.

That’s all.

A singer doesn’t have to get permission to cover a song. I can sing “Home” badly in front of an audience if I want to, but if I get paid for it, I need to let the songwriter know that I’m going to be covering the song. The songwriter cannot say no.

It gets complicated after that. (Okay, it’s already complicated.) But implied in all of this is that the music needs to get in front of an audience. The play will be performed. The screenplay will become the basis for a movie. The painting will hang on a gallery wall.

What makes writer-artists any different? Why should we fight so hard to create something and then be afraid to put it in front of an audience. Particularly since we’ll never see that audience. We don’t have to hear from them either, if we keep our email private and don’t go on social media and don’t read reviews.

What makes fiction writers so dang delicate? Every artist has fears. All of us do. If we want to make a living at our art, we learn to overcome the fear.

It may take a dozen workarounds. It might mean the writing equivalent of puking in the bathroom before stepping on the stage. But if you value your own work and your own dreams, you learn how to get past whatever is stopping you.

Just like other performers do.

“Putting Yourself Out There,” copyright © 2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Picture of Gavin is there because, despite appearances, he’s terrified of putting himself out there.

I have already logged a few blogs in this series. I’m writing them and posting them on Patreon first. The rest will appear throughout the next few weeks on this website. Please note that when I link to the previous essays in this series, I’m linking to them on Patreon. If you’re reading this on my website, you’ll have to search “2020 in Review” to get all of the essays.

Audio has had a mixed 2020. The year started well for audio, with reports coming in that the audio segment of the publishing industry grew 16% in 2019. The audiobooks segment of the industry had grown the previous year as well, so audio was seen as being on a marvelous upward trajectory.

And then…Covid. At first, audio sales went down dramatically. No one was commuting. The regular listeners…stopped. Sales declined. So audiobooks companies became creative. They gave away books to get listeners into the infrastructure.

Early in the pandemic lockdowns, I found myself sharing dozens of links for free audiobooks, especially for kids. Parents who wanted to augment learning could get education-based audiobooks for free. I can’t find most of those offers now, and I don’t feel like going through my social media to find it. As I was researching this, I found them again…and lost them. I had forgotten that side of the early pandemic.

But others hadn’t, and apparently, that early giveaway encouraged parents and students to start buying audiobooks. I searched and searched for U.S. numbers, which are hard to find.

The big traditional book companies reported losses in their audiobook revenues, which is not a surprise. Their marketing is extremely old-fashioned. Penguin Random House did do some early freebies, but their own site for audiobooks is counter-intuitive and not user friendly.

Audible doesn’t report its numbers to anyone because it’s an Amazon company. I had private confirmation that Audible’s sales were down well before audiblegate, which we will get to in a moment.

Sales figures from overseas are a little clearer. According to The Guardian in the UK, sales of “consumer audiobooks” in the UK “surged” 42% in 2020. According to a report by German digital distributor Bookwire and Austrian industry consultant Rüdiger Wischenbart, audiobook downloads increased by 109% during the first European lockdown. Those downloads were “bolstered by targeted marketing campaigns by publishers and discounts” (including the freebies I mentioned above). Those downloads decreased once that early lockdown ended.

Even more interesting, I think, is that audiobook subscriptions in Europe were up 37%. The subscriptions continued to grow even after lockdown, showing that once customers encountered audiobooks, a solid percentage of those customers remained.

I don’t know if audio will continue to grow in the post-pandemic era at the amazing rate that it was growing pre-pandemic. We don’t yet know whether people will resume commuting, at least at the levels they were commuting during the pre-pandemic era, so we don’t know if the growth in audiobooks will continue at the pre-pandemic levels.

Even if audiobooks level off for a year or more, they’re still doing better than they did five years ago. And the markets are growing. There’s a lot of innovation in audiobooks and audiobook retailing at the moment, things I’m only beginning to understand.

Rather than try to blog out of my partial understanding, I’ll do a longer audiobooks piece sometime in 2021.

But speaking of new markets…

A lot of writers have terminated their relationship with Audible in 2020, after something dubbed #audiblegate. For an in-depth look at #audiblegate, read this post from Susan May. It’s well written and shows what a lot of writers have been up against, even before the pandemic hit.

Audible controls most of the market in the U.S., which has led to some awful practices on their part. Full disclosure, I left Audible in the summer, not because of #Audiblegate, but because my treatment from Audible Studios (not ACX), which has published my audiobooks for about 15 years, deteriorated when my main editor left. The next editor was terrible (so bad he got fired) and then the next was worse, and the new guy, well, I couldn’t take it anymore.

So I finished out my contract, and will move on to other venues, something I’ll discuss in a future post. (Don’t worry, audio fans. You’ll be able to get your favorites in audio, no matter what.)

Figured you should know that I’m not happy with Audible either, so keep that in mind as you read this.

Anyway, #audiblegate. In a nutshell, Audible allowed audiobook returns for a year after purchase. Which means you could listen to and relisten to and listen again to a book you purchased…and still return it for full credit. Those “sales” would be deducted from an author’s royalties. Again, as much as a year after the book “sold.”

Not only were listeners taking advantage of that, but Audible was promoting that feature as if it was a good thing.

Indie writers, traditional writers, and writers organizations rose up in protest. Audible responded…by changing the return window to seven days. Authors are still unhappy, not just because of the return window, but also because the transactions are difficult to follow, the clawbacks of income hidden. Some organizations are asking Audible to grant the writers restitution.

The problem is ongoing, and will probably have an impact long in 2021.

One fascinating aspect of #audiblegate is that indie writers are terminating their relationship with Audible as quickly as possible and moving to other venues, like Findaway Voices. Anecdotally, the exodus from Audible seems substantial. I can’t find any real numbers though, and don’t expect to know what the real numbers are until we can see the growth in these newer platforms at the end of 2021.

Speaking of other platforms, they’re growing and innovating.  Findaway Voices is adding new distribution partners almost weekly, it seems. And Findaway is global, as opposed to Audible’s ACX which is only in certain territories. Findaway has also made it easier for authors to sell their audiobooks direct to their listeners.

Bookfunnel is also adding a direct-to-listeners feature. Bookfunnel has been working on audio for more than a year now. First it was small files, and now, they’ve expanded so that they’re doing Bookfunnel of audiobooks.

Right now, it’s in beta, and only available to existing Bookfunnel authors, but by next year, it’ll be available to anyone.

Findaway’s and Bookfunnel’s innovations would have happened anyway, even if 2020 had gone differently. (And why, why, didn’t it? Oh, never mind.)

But other innovations are happening because of the pandemic. I’m going to showcase some here, not because they’re relevant to writers, but because I think it’s important that we keep up with the other arts and how they’re trying to survive in this pandemic economy. I’m sure there are other places to add this, but it feels natural here.

First, because of the shutdown in the entertainment industry, performers are doing their best to figure out how to perform. That’s leading to a revival of one of my favorite forms, the audio drama. (Or as we called it in my day, the radio play.) Right now, they’re at the beginning of their renaissance, but with luck, they’ll grow into something bigger.

Then, this week on The Voice, Keith Urban and Pink performed their duet properly distanced—from everyone. The performance was lovely and innovative, and I can imagine more performances like it post-pandemic, particularly when artists are not able to be in the same place at the same time during a live show like the Grammy’s.

Because I had just seen that, I paid particular attention to this article in the Las Vegas Weekly. “Musical HQ” explores a new rehearsal space for local musicians. (Local musicians here are often…um…famous musicians worldwide.)

Sonic Rodeo Studios will open in the Arts District here in 2021, because of things learned in the pandemic, and the changes that may be permanent because of COVID. A lot of musicians received new audience members because of live streaming. But…

(Larry) Reha (of Sonic Rodeo) says that while livestreams have helped bands get their music heard this year, quality can be an issue. “Like, if the video was good, the sound wasn’t good, and if it sounded good, the video was boring,” Reha says. “So we’re gonna try to combine those to have great lighting, great sound in really good video with multiple camera angles and stuff like that.”

So, he innovated, and birthed Sonic Rodeo Studios.

He’s not the only one innovating in this town. I’m talking to artists every day who are doing something they never expected to do. And in that same issue of Las Vegas Weekly, Leslie Ventura spoke to Nevada Ballet Theater Artistic Director Roy Kaiser about the lost revenue of this year’s Nutcracker. Usually the Nutcracker earns 15 million dollars for NBT. This year, the theater is dark. No new Nutcracker.

So they innovated. Rather than re-air an old performance, NBT partnered with a local TV station to air three programs—one on the history of the Nutcracker and NBT; the second a behind-the-scenes; and the third the Nutcracker through the eyes of a child.

Those programs will also be streamed online. And, because NBT is not using its costumes this year, it has partnered with the Discovery Children’s Museum to have a Nutcracker Exhibit, featuring the props and costumes.

I know, I know. Dance is about as far from an audiobook as you can get. But I wanted to pull this quote for you from NBT’s Artistic Director:

Even when the pandemic eventually ends, Kaiser says, the new NBT element will likely continue. “[COVID-19] has forced all of us in the arts to reimagine how we work and how we create and how we maintain a connection to our public,” Kaiser says. “So I think things like these broadcasts will continue. Even once we’re back, full force onstage, a lot of the efforts that we’ve made during this time will continue, because it gives us another touch point and opportunity to be connected to our audience.”

I think we will see a lot of changes in 2021 and beyond that were born from the wreckage of 2020. All of us will have changed some habits and expectations.

As for audio itself, it’s not going anywhere. It will continue to be a small percentage of the overall book market. But it will be a worthwhile part of what many authors do, depending on how they use it. (Beware the time sink of audio production.)

I think what we’ll take from 2020—all of us in the arts—is an ability to rethink what we accepted to be The Way Things Are Done. It’ll take a year or two for all of these changes to shake out. But you watch: a lot of them will come from this destruction. In time, we won’t even realize how much we’ve changed.

Only that we have.

*****

I have a lot of topics to cover as I try to grapple with this earthshattering year. I’m going to try to write all of these posts in the same week or so. You’ll be able to read all of them on my Patreon page in the next few weeks, or one per week here on the website.

I will probably put other posts in-between some of these, particularly if there’s truly important industry news, or I feel we need a break from the memories of this unreal year. But as I sketch out this series, I’m realizing there is a lot of ground to cover. Not just in what we lost or what changed, but on what might be coming ahead of us.

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If you feel like supporting the blog on an on-going basis, then please head to my Patreon page.

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“Business Musings: Audio (2020 in Review),” copyright © 2021 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / studiostoks

There’s been a lot of spin in the press about Levine’s departure, some of it having to do with the advertising Upfronts the week before. But if you’d been watching the show, as we had, Levine’s dissatisfaction with the new format went from I guess I’ll put up with it to That’s not what I signed up for.

The comments slipped out sideways. He started talking about the show as a music show rather than a competition. Levine and the early judges were all about the music: heck, that was why they did blind auditions, so they could hear the purity of the voices singing with nothing else—no package, no spin.

This season the show introduced a new round, called “The Cross Battles,” in which an artist from each team sang against an artist from another team. They were picked to sing against each other on the live show, and then fans voted overnight.

Overnight votes (and the Twitter saves, which were introduced a few years ago) reward the coaches with the biggest active Twitter following, and that’s Blake Shelton. Country music radio also does a get-out-the-vote campaign, which none of the other coaches benefit from.

Sure enough, Shelton’s artists almost swept the Cross Battles, while the other coaches barely hung on. Fans barely hung on as well. Ratings for this season of The Voice were down 20 percent over the previous year.

That’s huge, but NBC doesn’t seem anxious. In fact, the network seems to like Twitter saves and overnight voting. Active fan engagement: proof that the fans exist.

I already had some context for The Voice debacle (okay, that’s my personal opinion, which I suspect I share with Levine). I had gone to most of the film and TV discussions about the future of programming at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and every major executive was talking about numbers.

The upshot was, they said, it’s impossible to figure out who is watching what when anymore. The problem with that, particularly for network television and cable TV, is that on-air advertising is still based on the 1960s model of measurable eyeballs on the screen. It used to be counting the number of people who watched the show live. Then it was live+1 (watching it the next day). Then live+7 and jeez, I have no idea what it is now.

But streaming has come into network and cable as well, with their apps that are available on Amazon TV or a Roku device or on a phone or on a computer. And streaming is a whole different count. Not to mention buying the entire season on DVD, which some people still do. (I watched some guy buy an entire season of Westworld at a discount department store the other day.)

Then there’s social media. If there’s buzz, it counts as well. This all got reinforced, oddly enough, as I read an article in my university alumni magazine, On Wisconsin. The magazine decided to interview a lot of the alumni who are currently active in TV and TV production. They spoke to everyone from the presidents of AMC and CBS Entertainment to producers and showrunners on projects that air on Netflix and ESPN and beyond. Some of these folks have decades of experience, and others maybe ten years, but they’re all fascinating to read. [link: ]

Buried in these interviews were some observations on numbers. First, there was this from Justine Nagan, who works as as the executive director for American Documentary and an executive producer for POV and America ReFramed.

In answer to a question on storytelling, she said this:

POV is 31 years old this year. For many years of POV’ s existence, the broadcast was the highlight of a film’s release and now it’s a highlight. We are really focused on broadcast, streaming, and community engagement.

A highlight. Not the highlight. Community engagement. Those two comments are quite telling. She didn’t answer the storytelling question at all. She answered the question as if it were a ratings question. She’s looking at engaging the audience, not just through the first broadcast, but on streaming services and on social media.

Then there was this from Jennifer Carreras, Vice President of Comedy Development, ABC. When asked how she knows if a show is successful, she said this:

Ratings are still a discussion, but not nearly as important as they were before. Part of it is what the ratings are, but also viewer engagement across social media. There are a lot of different ways to look at things, to see how the audience is responding.

That last sentence describes The Voice. They look at ratings, yes, but are working very hard to gin up audience involvement in real time. And that apparently means something to the execs at NBC, or The Voice producers wouldn’t do it.

Here I am again, discussing television in a fiction writing blog.

But we have some of the same issues, and we have had those issues for more than a decade now. With all the different ways readers can consume books, how do we know if a title or even a byline is successful?

It really does come down to how we measure success.

For one of my writer friends, success is a million-dollar advance. Another knows, as close as he is able, how many readers bought his novels since the beginning of his career. Yet another friend wants great reviews. And one of my friends wanted to be award-nominated for a particular industry award that had meant a lot to him as a child.

For some indie writers, success is the number of names they have on their newsletter. For others, it’s how many reviews they get on Amazon in the first few months after release. For still others, it’s how many five-star reviews they get (even if they have to ask people to write those reviews).

For me, I have and always will say that I want to make a good living as a writer. That’s not a guaranteed thing, by the way. Freelance income goes up and down, which is why these blogs are often about money management. A writer who manages her money well can handle the gusher of money followed by the lean years. Or the lean years that slowly morph into a steady income. Writers who expect consistent money and spend like their income is as consistent as a salary always end up broke and disillusioned.

Once upon a time, we used to all agree on what constituted success. We had to: traditional publishers mandated it. The books had to have some kind growth trajectory, and had to sell within some kind of set lines. Or, rather, not sell per se, but ship. If the book shipped well, and other books by the same author shipped well, it might take years for the traditional publisher to realize that those books didn’t sell well. They would have huge returns that trickled in, and ultimately the book lost money.

Even then, even when everything was based on copies shipped versus copies sold, returns and all kinds of games that publishers played to keep as much money in their pockets as possible while hanging onto (or hemorrhaging) writers, no one knew what the actual numbers were.

Just like in television back when the ratings system developed in the 1960s. How did they know who was watching what? Nielsen sent out paper booklets to random homes. My family got one during those years, and my mother filled out our viewing habits like it was her sacred duty. Then she sent the booklet back in the prepaid envelope, and some poor schmo tallied up the results coming in from across the country. That schmo or a different schmo would then apply the numbers received from the booklet households to some kind of algorithm, figure out an average, and from that would declare what the viewing audience was that week (or that month) for various TV shows.

Computers took Schmo Two’s job before taking away Schmo One’s. Cable boxes eventually sent back numbers to various data collection places. And now, Netflix and Amazon and other streaming services know what we watch when we watch it and how we watch it.

The first time I accidentally left my streaming device on Netflix freaked me out. I came back to the TV to see a floating message: We note that you have not been active for three hours. Are you still watching or should we shut down the stream?

Yeah. I shut down the stream. But I went back the next night and finished what I was watching.

This long elaborate point, though, was only to show you that the numbers are ephemeral and, in some ways, meaningless.

Unless we writers give those numbers meaning. And it’s up to us to figure out what’s important to us.

I think what happened on The Voice this past season shows the changes in a nutshell. Levine has always been about music purity. When it came his turn to save an artist who got eliminated by the so-called popular vote, he would invariably pick the true musician who was in his stable. Not the prettiest person or even the person with the best voice, but the person who had a great love for and ability in music itself, who maybe played a lot of instruments and who was often a songwriter. In the early years, Levine’s enthusiasm for that type of contestant would translate into a slow build for that person, and they would often place in the top five at the end of the season.

There is no slow build now. There’s Twitter saves and jockeying for votes. And even that doesn’t always work. At the end of this past season — SPOILER ALERT!!!!!— all three of Shelton’s contestants in the top four split the Shelton fan vote, and John Legend’s contestant won. She had a lovely voice and she was a great performer, but did she win because Legend has a good Twitter following and his wife Chrissy Teigen has an even larger one? Or because Shelton’s contestants split the vote, and Legend’s contestant barely edged above the others?

Impossible to know, because NBC doesn’t release the actual numbers. Much like traditional publishers of old.

Levine left, I think, because the pure musicians have no place in the latter half of the show. He wasn’t having fun anymore. He has gone on to produce Songland which is sort of about true musicians. It’s actually about songwriters and collaboration and tailoring songs. But it is about music, not about who has the most Twitter followers. So I have no idea if the show will survive.

Just like I don’t know if some of my writer friends will continue on. There’s been a lot of number comparisons and social media follower comparisons and newsletter comparisons going on in the past ten years. It’s hard to keep your head on straight through all of that.

I even get wrapped around it sometimes, when I’m tired and vulnerable. I have had a lot of talks with myself about the writing being about what I want to do, and about building a fan base slowly, without noticing that I had been continuing to build my fanbase.

I don’t use the velocity (selling books fast) metric, and I don’t read reviews. I have grown my Twitter following organically, and I bifurcate my newsletter into a bunch of newsletters that focus on particular projects. People have spoken up more lately about Free Fiction Monday, but even then it’s only a comment or two, or maybe an emailed thank-you for putting up a particular story. I used to go online and obsessively watch the sales numbers as the indie world grew, because I couldn’t quite believe we were in such a great position—that writers actually could control their own careers.

So back in those days, I could have charted what sold best or quickly or consistently. I didn’t, except to notice trends. Such as the Free Fiction stories selling better the month they were up for free than they had previously. And the way that new books in a series goosed previous book sales. And how some forms of advertising worked while others didn’t.

But I slowly got away from that, because watching the numbers can make you insane. Or make me insane, anyway. Because ultimately, they don’t mean much.

For example, this week, at least six new books came into the condo. I finished one book that arrived the week before. My TBR shelf, whittled down in our move, is about 100 books strong. And those are the paper books, which I can keep track of. I have ebooks as well on my various devices, but I tend to forget about the ebooks. They don’t nag at me that way that paper books do.

So all of that is to say that while I’ve bought the books, I haven’t read them yet. And I know I’m not alone in this. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be an accepted acronym for the phenomenon. (My TBR pile.) Which means that just because people buy your books doesn’t mean they read your books—at least right away.

So the sales numbers aren’t the actual reader numbers. And buried in the actual reader numbers—the unavailable actual reader numbers—are the library books that get read repeatedly or the number of times a person loans out her favorite book to someone else.

We can never really know how many people read our books. Our newsletters sign-ups don’t tell us. Our social media doesn’t tell us. Our sales figures don’t tell us.

The readers themselves do, though, sometimes in startling ways. I was really humbled and surprised by the Diving Universe Kickstarter. I set the ask at $2000, figuring that readers who wanted The Renegat early would take the $5 reward, and readers who really wanted more of the series would also take the books of extras at $15. I didn’t think that there would be a lot of readers who would go for that stuff, which was why I put the ask at $2000. And hit it within hours.

I had no idea so many folks were waiting for the series—to read the next book—and I also had no idea that so many folks wanted the next book early. That’s really neat. As is the number of people who backed it the Kickstarter.

Here’s the thing about Kickstarter numbers. They’re like social media numbers. People who are active on Kickstarter think everyone is active on Kickstarter (just like people on Twitter think everyone is active on Twitter). But most people don’t go on Kickstarter. Most people have never backed a Kickstarter. Just like a lot of people (I’m not looking at this year’s statistic) haven’t read an ebook.

We get all caught up in our various favorite delivery methods and forget that it’s a subset of a subset. That such a large subset of Kickstarter backers and my readers came together in May was a pleasant surprise for me. And one that fits into one of my personal definitions of success.

Not only am I writing things I love to write, but people like to read those things and are willing to invest in them. That’s amazing, and makes me one lucky writer.

For the past ten years, I’ve been saying that the changes in publishing have given writers a real shot at doing what they want to do. We can write what we want, publish what we want, and make more money at it than we can in traditional publishing.

But, with those changes has come yet another upheaval on the ways we measure success. And I use the word measure on purpose.

I’ll wager that, if you ask Adam Levine, he’ll tell you that Twitter saves and overnight live votes, stirred up by social media accounts, aren’t the way to measure what makes music successful. I don’t know what he considers as successful. I just know how frustrated he got with the way that someone tinkered with The Voice. It wasn’t what he had signed up for, so he left.

Clearly it’s not about money for him either, or he wouldn’t have left $30 million on the table. He would have (grumpily) stuck it out until the end of the new contract.

But television, like music, like publishing, is trying to find a new metric, one that everyone will agree measures the audience in a way that we all believe is accurate. The key word in that sentence, by the way, is believe since we never had accurate measures in the past.

As artists, we can continue our search for a new metric or we can just tell our stories and put them out there, letting them build organically, and finding the audience in their own sweet time.

Eventually I’ll read all the books on my TBR pile. I have some books by new-to-me writers there. If I like those books, I’ll buy more from the same author. But it might take me two or three years after I bought the first book to do so. And by then, no metric will be able to track that first sale as something that led to the latter ones.

Maybe we should stop trying to find the perfect way to measure, and focus on our writing. After all, that’s what we love. That’s why we got into this business. And, I assume, that’s what we all do best.

******

I’m writing some of these blog posts in advance of the Licensing Expo, so that I have a few posts in the bank while I go over what I’ve learned at the Expo. Those posts will follow in mid-June and beyond as I process everything.

Thanks for supporting this weekly blog. It wouldn’t exist without readers like you. If you had told me fourteen years ago that I would be doing a weekly blog, I would have thought you were nuts. Now I wonder what I would do without this routine, and the interaction with you all.

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“Business Musings: Vexing Numbers” copyright © 2019 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / lucadp.

“I bet you’re sorry you rejected me, aren’t you?”

Then he bounced away from me before I had a chance to answer him. How would I have answered him?

I would have said, “Congratulations on your win,” and I would have meant it.

But had he obnoxiously pressed the point, I would have added, “I still don’t like your story.”

Editing is about taste. We reinforce that lesson every year at our anthology workshop. The writing quality in the workshop is incredibly high. We open the workshop to professional writers only—folks who’ve published a lot, whether fiction or nonfiction, indie or traditional. Some writers come back every year, partly to test their abilities to write six stories to order in six weeks, partly to see old friends, and partly to see the editors bicker.

And the editors do bicker. A lot.

Mostly, we bicker over our points of view. What happens is this: Generally one of us will think Story A is brilliant, and some other editor will think it tragically flawed. We’re editors and writers and opinionated as hell, so we argue our positions. But we respect each other, and we know that some of us have an affinity for stories that the rest of us don’t like.

When it comes down to choosing between two stories that are not to our taste, we six editors have learned to rely on each other.

In fact, we always agree on one thing: the editor who purchases the story is the final judge of its quality. That editor has to love the story to buy it.

Which I’m sure the editor who bought that Hugo-winner loved the story. I didn’t. But even then, I knew that editing was about taste.

The writer didn’t.

He also thought his shit didn’t stink.

Is he still writing? I don’t know. Is he still publishing? I don’t know. But I do know this: He’s not being published in science fiction. In fact in science fiction, his career didn’t last beyond a few years of short stories. (I’m not sure if there was a novel or not: I didn’t pay attention.)

Over the years, I’ve run into a lot of writers like this guy. One of those writers wrote one of most unintentionally funny letters I’d ever read to Dean. As editor of Pulphouse: A Fiction Magazine, Dean had rejected one of the writer’s short stories. The writer wrote back to say that he had just sold his first novel and that Dean didn’t recognize the quality of this writer’s work. In fact, the writer added, Dean should eat that writer’s manuscript for the “only words of substance” Dean would ever have inside him.

I do remember that writer’s name because Dean tells that story with great delight (as an example of writer ego/idiocy). The writer’s book appeared and vanished that year with no follow-up. I just Googled the writer’s name, and discovered that for about 2 years, he self-published a few other short stories. Nothing since 2012, though, which does not surprise me.

Why doesn’t it surprise me? Because I think this guy is a bad writer? He’s not. He’s eloquent, particularly when he’s pissed off. But his I’m-better-than-anyone-else attitude ensured that he will never have a long-term career in the arts.

These egotistical writers still exist. One book sale to New York, one major traditional honor, and the writers will believe they’re better than every other writer.

But there’s a new twist to the old breed. It’s an indie twist. I’ve seen it at some conferences and workshops in the past few years. It’s the indie writer who, after receiving constructive advice which the writer asked for, dismisses that advice by saying, “Well, I sell thousands of books per month.”

The writer usually is selling thousands of books per month. Obviously, the writer is doing something very, very right. Readers like the books and buy more.

When such writers come to me for advice on craft, I always think they’re asking about future projects, what they can do to improve their craft. When I tell them what I think they need to work on (remember, the advice was solicited), they respond with that sales thing.

So why did they come to me if they’re already doing well? These writers come to me (and others with traditional publishing experience) to be validated. They want us to tell them how very brilliant they are. In fact, they want us to understand that brilliance can happen outside of the traditional framework.

I know it can. I read a lot of writers who are indie published. I love their work. I watch a lot of my friends do exceptionally well with sales, often at thousands per month, while publishing their own books.

Those writers continue to learn. In fact, several of them came to the anthology workshop (and have come to past workshops). I’ve seen these indie writers continue to grow in ability each and every year. These writers are improving. They’re augmenting what they do well, and working hard to improve their weaknesses.

They’re succeeding.

If I already know that writers can have thousands of sales per month outside of the traditional framework, why do I say that the writers who ask for advice and then dismiss it with their sales figures are like the guy who wanted me to admit I was wrong when I rejected his one short story?

Because—honestly—I worry about those indie writers who only cite their sales numbers. All writers can improve, even those of us who’ve been in the business for thirty years.

Generally speaking, writers who have such great sales figures early on have one skill that’s very hard to teach. They know how to tell a good story. Even if there are other problems in the writing—clichéd characters, non-existent setting, poor grammar—the writer’s superior storytelling skills shine through.

It’s almost like looking through a dirty window at a badly decorated house. Yes, you’ll be comfortable there, but the house could use a good cleaning, some paint, and new furniture. If the home owner made those improvements, the house wouldn’t be a good house: it would be the best house in town.

Here’s the attitude that those writers—from the award-winner to the word-eater to the sales-figure folks—don’t have. They don’t understand that if they want to grow as writers, they need to look at those awards, traditional book sales, or high volume of indie book sales as a starting platform, and improve from there.

John Grisham did that. He felt like he had a lot to learn as a writer, even as The Firm hit every bestseller list in the world, and he set out to learn even more. His craft has improved tremendously. His latest novels are amazing. His short stories are breathtaking.

Yes, the storytelling chops are still there, but they’re even stronger. Grisham always had a can’t-put-it-down quality, but the books were “thin” and not always memorable. Now, the books are not only memorable, but achingly so. Look at the storytelling chops from A Time To Kill (his first written novel) to Sycamore Row (using the same characters). In A Time To Kill, you can see the furniture move as Grisham sets the bits of his plot into motion.

In Sycamore Row, the furniture is part of the story, and when the furniture moves, we don’t see it until the author wants us to. A completely different level of skill. Both books are readable, but one is masterful—and it ain’t the first one.

J.K. Rowling also grew as a writer after her first novel sale. The first chapter of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s (Philosopher’s) Stone has no setting except a cupboard and a street (and maybe a street lamp). Look it up if you don’t believe me.

She continued to learn her craft even though she had already sold millions of copies of her books.

Looking back over what I just wrote, I realize you can misunderstand what I mean by the writers’ attitudes. Do I mean that because writers diss gatekeepers that the writers will fail?

Not at all.

I mean that writers who believe that one publication, one award, or some other kind of early success means that they’re God’s Gift to Literature will always vanish.

Early success is a minefield. I write this as someone who had a lot of early success. I won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1990. That’s hard to do, not because of the talent involved, but because a writer has to be noticed in a two-year time frame to win that award. My rise as an sf short story writer was meteoric as are the careers of most Campbell winners.

Unlike many of them, though, I survived that early success. So I’m speaking from experience here when I talk about the perils of early success. I’ve watched more writers who had success right off the bat vanish than writers who struggled for years to achieve success.

Like the beginners who win a lot of money at a poker table or hit a home run their first time at bat, writers have beginners luck as well. And it can be just as harmful.

These writers end up believing that writing is easy, and learning business is unnecessary. Writing is easy compared to, say, fighting fires or a myriad of other jobs that require dedication, intelligence, and courage. But continually telling stories and going back to the desk each and every day can be difficult.

And not everything a writer writes—I don’t care who she is—will work. Sometimes a writer has to try again and again before a story bends to her will.

I’ve written a lot about the way that a lack of business knowledge can ruin a writing career. Quite frankly, the writers who get destroyed fastest from a lack of business knowledge are the Gods-Gift writers.

Or it used to be that way.

Indie publishing has allowed a lot of business-minded people to enter the publishing industry in a way that traditional publishing discouraged. I suspect these folks will make it through the business ups and downs.

But there’s a craft up-and-down cycle as well that will eventually trip these writers up, and they won’t know why.

Readers tire of the same thing from the same writer over and over again. I know, I know. A bunch of you are getting ready to tell me that your favorite writer tells the same story over and over again, and you’re not tired of it.

And I’ll bet you cash money that writer continues to study his craft and strives to improve.

There’s a career arc for writers who don’t improve their storytelling skills. They publish many good-enough books in a few years (fewer years now than before, thanks to the short-publication time for indie books). After a while, the readers can see everything that the writer does, and after starting a novel, will see exactly how that book will end. (Or, worse, the ending will come out of left field with no warning, pissing the reader off.)

Once a reader figures out everything in a writer’s bag of tricks, the reader will move on to other writers, often without thinking about it. The reader might buy a few more of the writer’s novels, but will eventually realize he’s not reading those novels. The sales will taper off, even of the new work.

And the writer will have no idea why.

Careers in the arts are cyclical. Writers are popular for a while. Then they’re less popular. Trends are hot for a few years, and then they are out-of-date and considered stale.

Genres rise in popularity, and then the popularity falls.

Now that traditional publishing has less involvement in trend-making and genre popularity, I suspect that the downs won’t be troughs.

What I mean by that is this: once a genre becomes popular, it will gain more readers. When the popularity drops off, some of those new readers will remain. So the low part of the cycle will be higher than a previous low part of the cycle.

(In the past, traditional publishing just plain old stopped publishing the “unpopular” genre except for a few bestsellers, guaranteeing that the genre would die off. Right now, trad pub is trying to do that to urban fantasy. More and more writers tell me that they can’t sell the next book in their series or a book in their new UF series because trad pub says “urban fantasy doesn’t sell.” Yet indie writers are seeing urban fantasy sales grow.

(What trad pub is saying is that UF doesn’t sell at blockbuster levels any more, so trad pub is no longer interested. Indie is picking up the slack, and UF indie writers are doing very well indeed.)

The cyclical nature of the arts isn’t just in business and genre, but also in interest over a writer. A new writer has a brand-new, never-before-heard voice, and readers flock to that. Once the voice becomes familiar, some readers will abandon that voice for other new voices.

Surviving that familiarity trap requires more than writing the same old thing. It requires the writer to step up his game.

And the Gods-Gift writers don’t believe they need to step up their game. After all, they’ve been winning. They’re like the poker players who watch poker on TV, sit at a table, and make thousands of dollars during their first week.

Poker is a game of skill, as I’ve learned watching the career of my professional poker player husband. Like any game, there is chance involved, but the true professionals mitigate the luck factor and try to take it out of the equation as much as possible.

Beginners who don’t understand much more than what hand of cards defeats another rely on the luck factor.

And we all know—every single one of us—that luck runs out.

Gods-Gift writers are often lucky bastards, with the right book at the right time. Or with a competent short story on a topic that excites readers. Or with a series of indie books with a compelling narrative told by someone with enough skill to hold the reader’s attention—for now.

But what keeps a writer in the game over the long haul—what keeps an artist in the game over the long haul—is a genuine humbleness combined with a willingness to learn.

This very idea actually showed up on The Voice last week, when Anthony Riley, one of the contestants, said there wasn’t a song he couldn’t sing. He told this to Pharrell Williams and Lionel Richie (!). Both Richie and Williams jumped on Riley, telling him that he had to be humble.

Lionel Richie took it one step further, saying, ““If you’re great, let [the audience] tell you. Never tell them.” 

Richie seems to live this philosophy. In video that accompanies his album Tuskegee, he talks about all he learned from re-imagining his hit pop songs as country songs and singing those old hits as duets with country artists, some of whom had not been born when the hits came out. 

It takes courage—creative courage—to reinvent your hits. So many professional musicians of Richie’s age tour the casino circuit, playing the same old tired renditions of their past glories. Richie not only reinvented his, but he also learned from artists younger than he is.

(If you want to see what I mean, watch this duet with Jennifer Nettles. I’ve never been a big fan of the song “Hello,” but this performance of it is quite memorable, and takes it to a new level, imho.)[youtube]https://youtu.be/nLFQGRNedTw[/youtube]

Let’s go back to Richie’s words. What happens when the audience tells you that you’re great? Are you done? Can you rest on your laurels?

So many writers, so many artists, do. They’ve climbed the mountain. They’ve achieved greatness.

The problem is, that greatness is fleeting.

Enjoy it when it happens, but realize that ten years from now, the Hugo win or the megaselling pop hit will seem dated to a new generation.

Do you need to reinvent yourself?

No, but you do need to look at your craft—continually—and figure out ways to grow. That way, you don’t get left behind as tastes change. You don’t become Whatever-Happened-To or Didn’t-She-Write-A-Book-Once or (God forbid) Who?-I’ve-Never-Heard-Of-Her.

You’ll never appeal to all readers all the time. And, quite honestly, even when you’re at your most popular, not every reader will have heard of you. 

Appealing to everyone should never be your goal.

Your goal should be to become the best writer you can be. And this year’s best-writer-you should be better than last-year’s-best-writer-you but not as good as next-year’s-best-writer-you, because, in theory, you should keep learning and improving.

Does that mean you should take classes or go to workshops, hire editors or get a million critiques? Not necessarily. You need to figure out what works for you, and how you learn. Critiques are often destructive to writers, especially peer critiques between beginners or with professors who don’t make their living as writers. In fact, on The Voice, the superstar musicians often talk to the contestants about unlearning everything they picked up in their graduate music studies. If you watch, look at the sadness on the faces of the coaches when they realize someone has (or is about to) graduate from a major music school. Often as not, those artists never make it past the third round, because they’re too technically perfect and their work lacks heart and emotion.

I learn a lot from artists in other disciplines, like music. I’ve learned a lot as I watched Lionel Richie explore the roots of his own music. I learn from artists like The Roots, who seem to know every genre of music and play them all well.

I ask a lot of questions, and when I don’t know the answer, I go to someone who does. I also have a lot of students because students are always asking new questions, questions I’ve never considered. If I’ve never considered it, then I haven’t learned it yet.

I watch things like The Voice. I read all the time. I listen to the new writers coming in, and watch what’s working for them. I still read for enjoyment. I follow trends and I stretch my craft, trying things and sometimes failing spectacularly.

One of the things I do, as a series editor for Fiction River, is read a lot of stories in genres I’m not personally fond of. When Dean and I decided to return to editing short fiction, we decided ours wouldn’t be the only voices in Fiction River.

We have a lot of different guest editors on different volumes. Those editors provide different voices and points of view. They often have very different taste than I do, and sometimes buy stories I don’t like. I think that’s a good thing—not just for Fiction River, but also for me.

Because those stories are in Fiction River and because I line edit each volume (for clarity only), I have to go deep into stories I would never normally read. I learn a lot about other forms of storytelling, about plot, about craft.

I also learn from the way that the other editors work.

I also know my limitations. Every now and then, as the supremely confused line editor, I send a story back to the volume’s editor, saying the story makes no sense to me and here’s why. I ask the editor to have the writer make a few revisions. Sometimes the editor says the story is fine and I’m clueless Sometimes the editor asks for tweaks from the author that I would never think of in a million years because I don’t “get” the story. I learn from both of those instances.

Sometimes I think Fiction River is one of the best things I’ve ever done for my writing.

I learn from doing. It’s taken me years to find new ways to learn. I’m sure five years from now, I’ll find yet another way of improving my craft.

The key, though, is that I’ll still be looking five years from now.

I am not yet the best writer I can be. I’m not sure I’ll ever be the best writer I can be.

But no matter how many awards I win, how many books I publish, or how many copies of those books I sell, I will always know I have a lot to learn as a writer.

Chasing excellence—and knowing it is ever elusive—keeps me in my writing chair. I seriously can’t imagine playing the same old hits to ever-smaller audiences. I would much rather try something new and fail spectacularly, than receive applause for something I did twenty years ago.

Somehow I’ve managed to reinvent my nonfiction career while I was busy doing other things. It constantly surprises me when someone asks for more nonfiction from me. (I would have killed for that reaction thirty years ago, as a full-time nonfiction writer.)

I’m pleased I talked to friends younger than me who convinced me that writing on my website was a good idea. I’m listening to other friends who are urging me to try other things.

I’m thinking about it all, and I’ll bring what interests me to these blog posts.

Thank you all for coming as well.

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“Business Musings: Beginner’s Luck,” copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.