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.

Generational Change

Those of you who read my monthly Recommended Reading List know I love The Year’s Best Sports Writing volumes. I always feel sad when I finish reading it, but this year, I felt especially bereft. Normally, I would have started The Best American Essays or some other nonfiction book to fill that slot, but I didn’t have anything on my TBR shelf that would have fit into that mix of uplifting and difficult and well written.

So, thanks to some automated bot suggestion on Amazon, I ordered The Best American Sports Writing of The Century, edited by David Halberstam and Glenn Stout. The book is almost 25 years old (and does not have an ebook edition for obvious reasons), but I didn’t care. I figured there would be a lot of good reading in it.

What I hadn’t expected was the healthy dose of perspective that came from David Halberstam’s brilliant introduction.

Halberstam was one of the most influential writers of his generation. He died in a car accident, not ten years after writing that introduction. I suspect he had a lot more books in him that we’ve sadly been robbed of.

He wrote one of the most devastating nonfiction books on the Vietnam War, which came out while the war was still going on. In the late 1970s, he wrote a book called The Powers That Be, which examined the impact the media had on history (put a pin in that right now), and he also wrote some of the classics of sports journalism, including a book I have on my shelf called The Summer of ’49.

All of that experience came together in this long introduction, which you can probably read as part of the “look inside this book” feature on any online bookstore.

What this introduction did was look at the history of sports journalism and sports writing as it developed in the 20^th century. In the 19^th, sport itself was local and often based in neighborhoods. It took nearly 100 years to become the big entertainment business it was in the 1960s, and another sixty years to become the juggernaut it is today—not that Halberstam lived to see that.

Right now, sport is getting me through some of the world’s dark times, and I noticed as it’s been happening that I had the same experience in 2020.

In the introduction, Halberstam explores several things and does so in the context of 800 pages of historical sports writing. Some of what he does here is what I call “editorial justification.” It’s something that all of us who edit do: Here are the reasons I chose the works in this book—not just because I like them (which I do) but because they make this point or illustrate that concept or explore these tiny corners of this particular topic.

Inside Halberstam’s justification, though, is a brilliant century-eye view of the way writing and journalism and entertainment changed as the world changed.

Reading about those changes got me thinking about our changing world. I’m going to get to modern times later in this post—and yes, I’ll be dealing mostly with fiction—but I’m going to set it up first.

Halberstam started the essay (and the book) with Gay Talese’s 1966 piece on baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (whom most of you probably know of because he married Marilyn Monroe). The Talese article, titled “The Silent Season of a Hero,” is considered by some to be the beginning of a sea-change in reporting called New Journalism.

In his editorial justification, Halberstam wrote:

It strikes me that the Talese piece represents a number of things that were taking place in American journalism at the time—some twenty years after the end of World War II. The first thing is that the level of education was going up significantly, both among writers and among readers. That mandated better, more concise writing.

Right there, I perked up when I was reading. It was kind of a well-duh moment for me: Of course what was happening in the journalism profession and in the craft itself was a reflection of what was going on in society at the time. Of course.

He went on:

It also meant that because of a burgeoning and growing paperback market, the economics of the profession were getting better: self-employed writers were doing better financially and could take more time to stake out a piece. In the previous era, a freelance writer had to scrounge harder to make a living, fighting constantly against the limits of time, more often than not writing pieces he or she did not particularly want to write in order to subsidize the pieces the writer did want to do.

Those changes—writers doing better financially—pretty much describes what happened to the fiction-writing profession as well, from about 1960 with the rise of paperbacks to the massive distribution collapse in the mid-1990s.

After that collapse, everything got very hard for fiction writers for about 15 years. A lot of writers vanished during that time, heading off to professorships or corporate jobs, convinced that writers couldn’t make a living at their chosen profession.

They had a point.

Anyway, a few pages later, Halberstam writes that he did not intend this collection to become a work of history, although it had “a certain historical legitimacy.” He explains:

In the background as we track the century from beginning to end, the reader should be able to see the changes being wrought by society by a number of forces: racial change, the coming of stunning new material affluence, the growing importance of sports in what is increasingly an entertainment age, and finally the effect of other communications on print.

He elaborates on all of those things, but I’m going to focus on the final one. For that, he wrote:

The role of print was changing—it was no longer the fastest or the most important means of communication. Instead by the late fifties reporters had to assume that in most cases their readers knew the [sports] score and the essentials of what had taken place; increasingly their job was to explain what happened and why it had happened, and what these athletes whom they had seen play were really like.

My copy of the book is a sea of underlines here. I really paid attention on two levels—on what Halberstam was actually saying and how all of this analysis could apply to 2025. (Not literally—again, I’ll get to it. Bear with me.)

He discussed politics and regular news reporting as seen through the lens of television cameras, and then wrote that TV had become more powerful in the 1960s than it had ever been before. He wrote:

That meant talented print journalists, to remain viable and be of value, had to go where television cameras could not go (or where television executives were too lazy to send them) and answer questions that were posed by what readers had already seen on television.

Therefore, for print to survive, the reporting had to be better and more thoughtful, the writing had to be better, and above all—the storytelling itself had to be better. Print people were being forced to become not merely journalists, but in the best sense it seems to me, dramatists as well.

I pulled back here and thought long and hard about what he was saying, and the implications.

Of course, I went to modern media first because I have three levels of training. Level one: my B.A. is in history (and I constantly wonder if I should get some graduate degrees in it—until I remember that I would have to focus on a time period and immerse myself in it. My butterfly brain resists that on so many levels that I can’t begin to express how I would feel about it).

Level two: my secondary training is in journalism. I started in print (and initially got published, ironically enough, as a sports writer at 16, covering my high school), and then fell into broadcast journalism. And no, I don’t have a degree in it. I worked as a reporter all through college, and then became a news director. Let’s put a pin in that one too.

Level three: fiction and editing. Once again, I learned by doing, which was pretty much all we had. Sure, there were classes at the universities (one story per semester, taught by someone who had no idea how to make a living at it), but mostly there were workshops (like Clarion) taught by working writers, and talks at fiction conventions and little else.

So…all of those levels combined into the way my brain worked after going deep into the Halberstam piece.

First, modern media.

I’ve been saying for some years now that it needed to change. If it’s broadcast, it’s being run by people who have no journalism experience as well as no courage. Let me add this: It has always been so. TV and radio were generally owned by entertainment companies that were required, by law, to include news.

(Most of these laws, by the way, were gutted first by the Reagan administration and then by each Republican administration since.)

The influential print media left the hands of large family groups (the Grahams at The Washington Post and the Chandlers at the Los Angeles Times come to mind), and were purchased by billionaires. At first, those purchases were praised, but they’re not going well now.

Again, this is not a huge change. William Randolph Hearst owned the biggest media empire in the world in his lifetime, and controlled content with an iron fist.

So the idea that journalism always had free reign was and is wrong.

However, when I say that the media has to change, I’m referring to generational change, just like Halberstam discussed above.

Sadly, education isn’t as good now as it was in the 1960s. The U.S. government turned its back on good education for all in the 1980s—once again under Reagan—but most successive administrations did little to shore it up. A lot of people fell through the cracks.

And now, most folks do not have the time for long-form journalism or explanations of “what happened and why it had happened.” There are/were entire cable news channels dedicated to just that kind of musing, but those aren’t reaching the younger generations either. Cord-cutting and fragmentation is actually bringing journalism into a completely different place than it was when Gay Talese wrote his article in 1966.

In some ways, we’re returning to the 19^th century when the news (and entertainment) was fragmented. In other ways, we’re in a whole new place where a journalist or a fiction writer can hang out her shingle and people can come support her and her long-form journalism or fiction or whatever.

That’s good, if you’re good at the social media side, and difficult if you’re not.

But…what I mean when I say that the media needs to change with the world is that with online access and cable and broadcast news and podcasts, there are literally thousands of ways to get information.

Now, journalists need to figure out how to do it on their own. And they need to throw out some of the rules developed at the journalism schools they all went to.

Here we’re going to have a sidebar for one of my pet rants:

When I moved to Oregon, I wanted to freelance for the local Eugene paper. The city desk editor, whom they shuttled me off to, wouldn’t give me the time of day. I had written for major publications around the world. I’d had pieces on NPR and was still working for several information-based foundations. I had been a news director for years.

What I didn’t have, and what he sniffed over, was a journalism degree. My experience counted for nothing; all that mattered to him—and his cronies as the years went on—was the vaunted degree.

Over the years, I’ve worked with people who have J-school degrees but little experience. They’re terrible reporters and even worse writers. Plus they have a two-sides attitude, particularly when it comes to politics.

They don’t want to talk to everyone. They figure there’s only two sides—for and against. Most things in life are more complex than that.

So as the media landscape is fragmenting and becoming more complex, the big media companies are becoming less so.

They’re paying a price for that. But not the price everyone discussed in November. For all the hand-wringing after the election, the loss of viewership among most of the cable news channels isn’t a big deal. It happens after every election.

What is a big deal is that both readership and viewership of all traditional mainstream news has been declining for decades now. And the change is profound. People 50 and older still tend to get their news from traditional sources like television or print, but people younger than 50 get their news from social media or a digital aggregator. Mostly, though, they get their news from a variety of sources, some of them untested and inaccurate.

Rather than lament that this change allows for the spread of disinformation as most are doing, the media companies (and those of us who work in media) should be embracing the change, and finding other ways to fight disinformation.

Let me add this: when big media companies are in the hands of a single entity, be the Murdochs at Fox or Gannett News Media, the news is biased anyway. The owners of large corporations have an agenda. Sometimes it is to make profits. Sometimes it is to spread a certain perspective in the world.

Once again, it has always been thus. I didn’t work for commercial stations back in the day, because commercial reporters were muzzled. They were not allowed to report on any company that advertised with the parent company. So imagine this: no investigative reporting on pollution from a local company. Coverage was only allowed when the story became too big to ignore.

Journalism is changing again, and we need to embrace that change. We need to see the plus sides of it.

Places like Patreon and Substack help, but they have issues as well. They’re private companies that can get sold like Twitter did and then there will be huge (and often unpleasant) changes.

So…my mind went through all of that as I read the Halberstam piece. New Journalism (which is now old journalism) still exists. There are places that publish great long-form articles. Now there’s some great long-form reporting on podcasts and in new forms of media that did not exist when Halberstam wrote his introduction.

The key will be how the creatives—from writers to photographers and others—respond to these new forms of media. Some of us will adopt what we can, and others will cling to the old ways.

Maybe the old ways will return. Who knows?

Once I got through the traditional thinking on all of that, though, my mind turned toward fiction.

No one, to my knowledge, has done the kind of analysis of fiction in the 20^th century that Halberstam did (first in the late 1970s, and then again in this article). Sure, there’s been a lot of writing about the history of fiction, in America in particular.

But that writing is myopic. The literary historians in the university system (including my late brother) focused on literary works or “mainstream” bestsellers, books that took over the national consciousness and led to changes and/or discussions.

There have been too many papers written on the impact of Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird and not enough on the overall fiction landscape.

The genres aren’t immune from the myopia. I have read as many books on the history of science fiction and fantasy as I can get my hands on, and probably just as many on the history of mystery fiction (both here and in the U.K.).

There are fewer analyses of romance fiction for two reasons: The first is that the genre is the newest of all of the big genres and second is deadlier. Romance was (and is) perceived as fiction for and by women, so it isn’t considered important (especially by the white men who ran university literary programs for most of the past century).

What books there are on romance were written by romance writers and aficionados for romance writers and aficionados.

So, let me put this out there for graduate students in search of a topic: Examine all of fiction publishing since the 1890s or so—genres, pulps, digests, and paperbacks as well as hardcovers and “important” books. See where such an examination takes you. If nothing else, I can guarantee that your dissertation will be different than all the others.

What Halberstam did so deftly in his introduction, though, is something I need to spend quite a bit of time thinking about.

He combined the changes inside America with the changes in the journalism business. Then he looked at the impact of those changes on the way that sports journalism was produced—

And he examined the impact those changes had on craft.

For example, he included little craft gems like this:

The [New York Times] in those days was still a place where copy editors were all-powerful, on red alert for any departure from the strictest adherence to traditional journalistic form, and [Talese’s] tenure there had not been a particularly happy one. But if he had wrestled constantly with the paper’s copy editors, his work was greatly admired elsewhere, particularly by reporters of his own generation in city rooms around the country who were, like him, struggling to break out of the narrow confines of traditional journalism and bring to their work both a greater sense of realism as well as a greater literary touch.

Passages like this make me think of modern traditional publishing, which got more and more hidebound after the distribution collapse in the 1990s. Then the purchase of those publishing companies by non-book people, who were buying inventory and intellectual property, and who needed these companies to make a profit on the balance sheet.

To do that, they hired editors without experience, many of them Ivy League graduates whose biggest credential was taking classes from some famous fiction writer (who could no longer make a living at writing). (Sound familiar? See J-School above.)

It became more and more difficult for established writers to work with these inexperienced (and low-wage) editors, prompting some writers to change companies. Other writers simply left to do other things, and once self-publishing became a major big deal, started publishing their own works.

There have been a lot of changes in fiction publishing, both indie and traditional, in this century. From the gold rush of new material when the Kindle was introduced in 2007 to the plethora of distribution sites for fiction, the changes have been immense.

For a while, it was possible for all of us to have the same information and act on it in the same way. If you have a newsletter, you get x-many more sales. If you monkey with Amazon’s algorithms, you will get your book in front of these eyeballs. If you use this program, you will have adequate paper books.

And then…suddenly…everything changed. Just like in the California Gold Rush, there’s money to be made in side businesses. You can make money as a cover designer, as a virtual assistant managing social media, as an expert in In-Design.

Not every writer needs those services, but a lot of them do.

What I find most amusing now is that, properly designed, indie books look better than traditionally published books. Traditional publishing companies are still trying to cost-cut their way to profit.

Indies are still experimenting with the latest bestest coolest tech, to see if it will not only enhance book sales, but also the reading experience.

What I hadn’t really considered—and I should have—was the thing that Halberstam was mentioning the most in his rather long introduction. He talked about technological, economic, and cultural change leading to changes in craft.

I know that has happened for fiction writers. I know that a lot of writers feel free to write what they want. I know many writers who are writing long series that would have either never sold at all in traditional publishing or been abandoned midway through the series.

Halberstam talks mostly about changes in storytelling methods, and I think we’re seeing that. I’m not well read enough, though, in the indie world to know what the craft changes are.

And it’s also not just a matter of being well-read. It’s also a matter of influence. When the publishing world was small, as it was in 1966, everyone saw a piece like Gay Talese’s. Everyone had an opinion about it—some good and some bad.

Talese’s influence on his peers came in the form of freedom to write differently as well as the freedom to try something new with the writing career.

We, as indie writers and publishers, can see what the something new is on the business level. I’m watching all the beautiful books being produced by writers like Anthea Sharp and Lisa Silverthorne. I want my books to be lovely as well, and I have a vision for it. Back in the day, it cost thousands of dollars to print beautiful books, and now it can be done as print-on demand.

There are other innovations that don’t interest me at all. Some of them make me ask a business question, “Should I do this? Will I be able to monetize it?” And some of them make me shrug. Some of them make me realize that there’s only so much time in every day, and I need it to do many things, including writing and running my business.

But as I climb out of these hectic and difficult past two years, I can finally see ahead. I didn’t realize, until I read the old Halberstam essay, that part of looking ahead is looking backwards on a macro scale and figuring out what the heck happened in the industry.

The cool thing about the macro scale is this: It makes everything that happened to an individual writer during the change impersonal.

For example, I got caught in the distribution downturn and wasn’t allowed by my traditional publisher to finish a series. I spent the early part of this century scrambling for work.

Then indie came along, and opened a lot of doors. But nothing remains the same. What looked good in 2015 doesn’t look good now. What worked ten years ago doesn’t work at all now.

Change happens. Sometimes it’s good, but often it’s confusing and difficult and frightening.

I was one of the first generations to go to college after New Journalism took over the big publications in New York. I had professors who railed against that. I mostly ignored it because I wasn’t a journalism major. I worked in the industry and learned a lot. But today I find myself thinking of my colleagues, many of whom were journalism majors, and wonder what they’re doing now.

I know of two people who followed the same path I did. One, a beautiful and brilliant reporter, ended up as an investigative reporter on a major Wisconsin TV station. Now, she’s working as senior anchor (and still reporting), benefitting from all the lawsuits that women had filed over the years about ageism. (She fully admits this.)

The other kept getting jobs at places that died. From UPI to major newspapers that closed up shop, he moved from place to place until he finally gave up and went fully into broadcast. I hear his familiar voice on occasion on one of the streaming channels, where he has his own show.

Those two stuck with it, weren’t afraid to take risks, and ended up with forty-year long careers.

The others…? I have no idea where they are now. I do know that, even in those halcyon days, they had trouble finding work because their writing showed their lack of experience in actual reporting.

They’re victims of a change that is no longer really relevant to modern journalism. And another change is coming.

I can see the changes in the media—as I mentioned above.

I’m going to have to think about what’s going on in fiction.

And I’m really looking forward to that.

“Generational Change,” copyright © 2024/2025 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

I had a shocking experience this past week, and yet the experience shouldn’t have been shocking at all if I actually thought about it.

Because of the events of the past three weeks, I’m behind on almost everything. For those of you who don’t know, Dean fell in a 5K (while running really fast) and shattered his shoulder. He had surgery to replace the shoulder five days later. (The American system, my god, it’s a nightmare of phone calls and organization and…well, some of you know. I hope the rest of you never find out.)

He met with the surgeon two weeks after the surgery and is recovering well. We’re moving into a different, less intense, phase of the injury, for which we are both grateful.

So we’re getting back to doing the things we had to set aside. For me, that includes getting our workshops in order. I had planned to release a reading list for the Science Fiction/Mystery workshop that we’re holding in person here in Vegas in January.

I was working on the list the day before we headed off to the now-infamous run, but I was missing a piece that I really wanted. I was missing an anthology of science fiction mysteries. We had not done one in Fiction River (oversight mine, I guess), although we have some fantasy crime volumes. I was about to research what was available when an accident sucked three weeks out of our lives, and made us face a different direction.

This week, I was able to get back to the research. I was looking for an anthology that featured writers who have been active since 2010. I have read some great sf mysteries in Asimov’s and some of the other publications. I figured someone had to have collected them. My friend the Google didn’t come up with any anthology of science fiction mysteries that fit that criteria. Neither did GoodReads or any place else I looked.

So I emailed some long-time editor friends of mine, many of whom had done theme anthologies in the past, and asked them if they had an anthology that I had missed. Not a one had done a science fiction mystery anthology, although like me, they had all done fantasy mystery or straight mystery/crime anthologies.

Whoopsie. That’s a major oversight.

So, I went to my own brag shelf and looked for an sf mystery volume. I had been invited into several. I wrote stories for all of them, and I wrote two major novellas for different sf crime volumes. I figured if nothing else, I’d default to those.

First shock: the volumes were 15-20 years old. Jeez. Writing one of those major novellas felt like just yesterday. But nope. The book came out in 2007, which means I wrote the thing in 2006.

Okay. Time is blurring for me. That’s apparently normal for someone my age. Lots of life lived, and the highlights seem like a moment ago.

Yeah. Got that.

I thumbed through three of the anthologies. One was good except it had a dead baby story by a big name author, and I almost never force my students to read children-in-jeopardy stories. I figured I could tell the students to skip that story if they wanted.

The other anthology—well, mine was the only female name and the only story that had been published in this century. It was usable as a historical anthology of crime stories, but it really wasn’t what I wanted. So, I ruled it out.

I went to various online booksellers to find the really good first anthology, only to discover that there were about 25 print copies available and affordable. (The hardcover was $92 at its cheapest.) There was no ebook edition. The editor had passed away before the pandemic, the publisher is long gone, and so…those 25 books are all that we could get our hands on.

Not a good solution at all, because even though I limit the in-person classes, the study-along often has upwards of 80 people in it…all of whom would need to read that anthology.

The math simply didn’t work—and there was no one to appeal to so that I could get a PDF for the students. I doubt I would have gone to that trouble, but the option simply was not there.

So…I went to the third anthology. I was going to use this one anyway, even though it was a bit older. It has some great award-winning stories in it, and it makes you think.

The editor has left the business and the company got absorbed into another company before being shut down entirely. But surely, that anthology would still be available.

But, no. It wasn’t. It came out in 2007 as well and there was no e-book. There were 34 copies available on all the sites. That’s it.

Once again, the math did not work, and I was deeply disappointed.

I had a momentary lapse of judgement. I held a copy of that anthology in my hands and thought: WMG could reprint it. And then I thought about all the work—contacting the authors or their estates, figuring out how to pay everyone, dealing with an agent or two—and I let that idea slide away.

There wasn’t enough time anyway, even if I did suddenly have a mental meltdown and decide to reprint the anthology. At least, not enough time to get everything for this class.

So, I went back to the drawing board, found an anthology by an editor I respect, one that I could teach something useful from even though there were some fantasy stories in the volume, and put that on the list.

But that still didn’t satisfy the sf mystery short story need that I had, so I went back to the old anthology, the historical one, and figured we’d all have something to talk about. Some of the people in that anthology did help start the short sf mystery genre, so that’s helpful.

It was the oldest volume, having originally been published in 2003. Then, apparently, it was licensed for ebook in 2014 by a completely different publisher. Which is, by the way, something I should have known about, since I have a story in the volume, but no one informed me. I haven’t seen royalties on that book…ever, even though my contract says I’m entitled to them.

Honestly, if I were to get them, it’s a mess. The surviving editor lives in Australia. The other editor is, sadly, gone, and the estate is really not active. So, trying to get a handful of dollars out of a 20-year-old publication is just plain silly.

All of those things combined to create my shock. I had forgotten how awful traditional publishing was before ebooks. How books went out of print, never to be seen or found again. If the print run was 20,000 and people liked the book, they kept it. Finding a copy was nearly impossible.

I had once spent decades trying to find a novel by Phillip Rock. I had read the first book in his trilogy, The Passing Bells, in 1981 and loved it so much that I wanted to read the second. By the time I got to the second one, it was out of print. I couldn’t find it in any used bookstore. In the days before Amazon, every time I went into a used bookstore, I searched for that book.

I finally found it, thanks to Downton Abbey. Because of the TV show, someone had thought to revive Rock’s trilogy and reprint them in 2013. I got to read the second book—and while I didn’t love the second like I loved the first book, I still enjoyed it. The satisfaction of finding something I’d been searching for was profound.

That was ten years ago. Ten years to get used to the fact that any book I wanted was at my fingertips. Clearly, it’s not. Many of the books on my brag shelf are not available anymore.

I had given that some thought as the indie publishing movement started up in 2009. WMG started a project to put all of my (and Dean’s) work back into print. That included short stories. The novellas I mentioned above are available at the touch of a finger. “The End of the World” was in the volume with the dead baby story. (My story does not have a dead baby.) And “G-Men,” from the anthology that I really wanted to use, is available in both English and Italian.

I’m not worried about my work. Now that I have control over it, I’ve put it back into print, so that my readers can find whatever they want. I still have to get my bibliography straight so that people know what’s available, but I’ll get to that. (We finally got the website updated! Yay!)

What breaks my heart is that the work of these editors is gone. Editing anthologies is a specific skill akin to writing a novel. The stories get chosen because they fit a vision. Then they get organized so that the reader who goes from beginning to end can enjoy a particular set of emotions.

Some anthologies are ground-breaking. Others are just fun to read.

All of the ones I considered are worthy of reprint, only it would be much too hard to put the pieces together to do so. And the economic downside is extreme.

A reprint anthology would involve a lot of work (which I outlined above). The participants would need to be paid (unlike what I found with that 2014 reprint), and so would the staff who did the work of tracking everyone down.

It would cost a lot, and it would probably take another decade to recoup just the overhead, not counting the modest fees for the writers, editors, and estates.

So, the work is mostly lost. It provided entertainment for the people who bought the books when they came out, but it will not entertain any longer. It did inspired me to write some stories and maybe it inspired other writers whose work is still in print.

But for the most part, these works have become ephemera. And while that was normal in the previous century, it’s weird from the perspective of 2023.

I’m still a bit shocked that I had forgotten so much of what that pre-ebook world was like. When I lived in it, I had been in denial about it. I figured my books would stay in print, and when they didn’t, I figured they were still available in libraries.

Of course, when I discovered that libraries culled their collections, getting rid of books that hadn’t been checked out in some designated amount of time, I comforted myself with the thought that such a thing would never happen to my books…while it was happening to my books.

I do love the world we’re in now.  But it is astonishing to me how much work—work I’ve been attached to, involved in, loved, admired, and was inspired by—is either down to fewer than 50 available copies or is gone forever.

That’s a little strange and a little painful.

And so, while my brain is still coming back from the black hole it had fallen into, I thought I’d share, with the hope that the analysis piece I mentioned last week will become possible next.

****

One thing that did continue while Dean and I were in the throes of medical hell was the planning for the upcoming workshops. The great staff at WMG continued moving things forward.

Which is why we could announce that the Anthology Workshop, which writers love, is back. We only had 40 available slots, and we’re down to fewer than 20. The workshop will be held here in Las Vegas in July. For more information, click here…and do it quickly. The slots are filling up.

Speaking of which…

Because I was late with the reading list, you still have time to jump into the workshop. You can jump into the in-person workshop by November 27. Just contact Dean through his website. You can also sign up for the study-along until the end of November. See how I end up using these anthologies, and some other books as well.

And now that I’m past that, here’s the reminder:

This weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

Click paypal.me/kristinekathrynruschr4e to go to PayPal.

“Business Musings: Out of Print,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Photo at the top of the blog copyright © 2023 by  Kristine K. Rusch

In 2011, our close friend, Bill Trojan, died. His death wasn’t sudden—he had untreated diabetes—and yet his death was sudden. He literally keeled over at Worldcon in his room. The end, for him, in many ways was both swift and slow. Swift, in that one moment he was alive and joking with people before going to his room, and slow in that he wasn’t caring for himself, and he knew that he was getting sicker.

The swift/slow aspect of his death enabled Dean to bully Bill (who was single) into writing a will, which put Dean in charge of the estate. We were able to follow Bill’s wishes, but we also had to deal with all of Bill’s stuff. He was a hoarder/collector. He had maybe a million (not making this up) collectible items, pristinely kept in bags that filled boxes which were also lined with things like empty grocery bags and used underwear.

Instead of working on our fledgling business, WMG Publishing, as well as on his own writing, Dean sorted through the detritus of Bill’s life, mostly alone.

I remained at the Oregon Coast. I had book deadlines from my various traditional publishers. We needed that income, so I worked very hard on finishing the projects I was working on.

In addition to all of the physical work, we had the emotional side. We were grieving the loss of a good friend. I was worried about Dean, who was in what I call superhero mode. He was going to get the work done, come hell or high water. Hell and high water showed up as he finished dealing with the actual estate, while he drove millions of dollars worth of collectibles to the Oregon coast the night before Thanksgiving in an epic storm.

He made it, barely, and for his efforts had a stroke inside his eye, losing some vision there. Then he got the flu that was going around that year, and spent most of December shivering with fever, in bed.

I still had deadlines. I was writing frantically and caring for him.

Because traditional publishing had gotten so ugly in the first decade of this century, I no longer enjoyed the work. In fact, I was feeling besieged. I had a traditional editor so bad and abusive that there was a private Facebook group devoted to how to cope with her.

I coped with her just fine a few months after Bill’s death—while all of the other personal stuff was going on. She called me, after having read a book I will discuss below, and called me a talentless hack who couldn’t write, who didn’t know what the hell she was doing, and couldn’t write a good book to save her life.

Well, at that point, I was a decorated, bestselling author in multiple genres. The words stung—words like that always sting—and after I hung up the phone from the “discussion,” I wrote to the company and pulled the book. In fact, I pulled every book that they had bought, including the ones already published.

No one puts Baby in a corner.

That decision could have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars, because I had no real termination clause in the contract for something like that. But I had documentation of this woman’s abusiveness and I was willing to go to court if I had to in order to get all of my work out of her hands.

I negotiated with the publisher and ended up with a deal that got me out of the company and cost neither of us money. Every time that woman contacted me—and she tried several times—I wrote a certified letter to the publisher, telling him that she was abusive, and our agreement was that she never speak to me again. I threatened them with legal action (and a restraining order) with each new contact.

No one puts Kris in a corner.

That fall, I learned that I could write through anything. It wasn’t fun, though, and it wasn’t an escape. It was work. To make matters worse, the book I was working on when Bill died was called Charming Blue.

Charming Blue is a Kristine Grayson novel. The Grayson books are light fantasy romances that are off the beam. I always had fun writing them, and I had been really looking forward to Charming Blue for more than a year.

In my novel, Wickedly Charming, a character walked through the opening. He was dressed all in blue. He was drunk. He smelled of Aqua Velva. He was about as repulsive as a man could be (except that he was handsome, underneath it all). Worse, he was known throughout my fairy tale world as Bluebeard.

I knew he would be the romance hero of my next novel.

Yeah, I’m weird that way.

I imagined myself writing it and laughing, unable to believe how strange I was being.

Charming Blue started that way, but then Bill died, and life got stressful. I didn’t want to be writing anything fun. I wanted to write mean, dark mystery novels, maybe noir. Nothing uplifting at all.

But I had no choice. I had to finish this book. I dragged myself to the computer every single day, wrote and finished the book. Of course, this is the book that the horrid editor told me that I couldn’t write and she was rejecting it outright because it was awful and didn’t follow the outline.

Ironically, it followed the outline to the letter—something I rarely did—and if the reviews and the emails I get are any indication, the book is as good as I hoped it would be. Maybe better.

That whole experience after Bill’s death, though, made writing hard, and put me off Grayson for a while. I wrote other things.

That was the problem with traditional publishing: the deadlines are immutable. Sure, you can push them, but if life circumstances make it difficult to write something light and funny and uplifting because life is not any of those things, well, too bad. You signed a contract, have a deadline, and an obligation, and maybe a financial need, to get that book done.

I’d been in that circumstance before, but never as blatantly as the experience I had with Charming Blue.

So…as many of you already know…we had one of those life events about ten days ago.

Dean and I were running in a 5K on Sunday the 22^nd when Dean’s foot caught on the lip of a depression along the concrete path. He fell, hard, and thanks to his athletic training, landed on his shoulder, not his head. His shoulder was crushed. Shattered. Destroyed.

Long story short, he needed surgery immediately, but this being America, it took until Thursday the 26^th to get him onto the operating table. To find out more, click here.

I was doing all the things, but mostly working hard to coordinate appointments, fill out medical information, and doing what I could to make him comfortable. My memories of last week are mostly of me running from place to place, and Dean being in terrible pain. I mean excruciating, awful, horrible pain.

Our condo was full of notes and to-do lists, because I couldn’t keep track otherwise. I didn’t get much sleep, and I was moving the entire time I was awake. I didn’t stop moving until I was in the surgical waiting room on Thursday afternoon. And then it started up again on Friday.

But, by Monday of this week, we had found a pattern. Dean is healing well. He’s still in pain, but the medications manage it (if we follow our own self-imposed schedule). On Sunday, I left him in the telephone custody of a friend (who was monitoring her cell) to go on another 5K run.

By Monday, I had gotten enough sleep to enter my office in some semblance of a routine. Dean was back sleeping again, and I had some quiet time that didn’t involve calling every doctor on the planet.

I opened the file of my latest novel—the fourth in a five-book saga that’s a prequel to the Fey series—and stared at the page. My brain chugged. I wasn’t sure I could figure out how to write anything.

So, I gave my muse the option. You can write anything you want, I told her. Or not write at all.

That’s the beauty of independent publishing. I could take the next six months off if I wanted to. The money would still flow from the books we’d already published. I never had to finish the book I was working on, if I didn’t want to. Or I could wait two years.

The options are all mine.

I spent fifteen minutes staring at the screen, going through options, and my brain sent me a message. We have to finish this book now. I am in the final stages of writing the novel, which is usually something that goes very fast for me.

I wasn’t sure if that thought came from me feeling obligated to finish or if the voice was my muse, giving a command. I really didn’t want to have a repeat experience of the Charming Blue variety.

So I allowed myself a few minutes of rereading what I had recently done. And then I found myself tweaking one or two things, which is how I often start after a long hiatus.

And then, I was writing.

Even better, the writing felt like an escape. It felt fun. I promised myself I would write 1,000 words or one hour, whichever was later. Within 30 minutes, I had the 1,000 words, with more on the way.

I credit the freedom that I had with the fact that I could write. I could choose to write whatever I wanted, and what I wanted was to finish this book. Whether or not I transition immediately to book 5, I have no idea. That isn’t important at all.

What’s important is that I got into the fiction-writing habit again, after a hellacious week.

Another interesting thing happened once I started up again. My brain relaxed, and took inspiration from the world around it. Not from the hospital or the medical things, which I’m sure will find their way into stories, but just a feeling of possibility.

I’m reading several short novels by a writer I like, and I’m seeing how the novels stretched him. I wouldn’t mind challenging myself like that.

Then today, I made my way back to this semester’s class, which is a theater class called “Gay Plays.” It’s been fascinating so far, but the part of the class I’ve most been looking forward to is being able to see/read Angels in America by Tony Kushner.

I wanted to see the play since it was on Broadway in 1993. Then it became an HBO miniseries in 2003, which I put in my mental playlist. But the time commitment is a lot (6 hours) and, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure I was up for the emotional rollercoaster that I knew was coming.

I’m still not sure. I was a reporter during the early years of the AIDS crisis, and some things are real triggers for me. I lost a lot of friends during those years and watched others struggle through some hideous decisions.

I knew, if I watched the series, I would need others around me, to talk and discuss it. But most of my adult friends don’t want to revisit that time in our lives.

Hence, the class.

We watched the opening of the series today, and I could see the pieces falling into place. Tony Kushner is an amazing writer, and I watched his screenplay (based on his play) put big themes and heartache and commentary into motion, deftly and with great power.

That’s inspiring. It makes me want to reach for something bigger than I am.

I love that feeling.

Even though I’m in the middle of a life-changing event, I have the mental freedom to be creative. I know I can move to something else if I want to, or stack up some ideas for future use. I’m not struggling against the expectations of an anonymous publishing company or an abusive idiot of an editor.

I know that my mind will be very busy with the changes to our lives. We have to make adjustments for the next several months as Dean heals.

As I’ve written many times before, shit happens. We all have to deal with those things and take the time to work through them.

Sometimes, writing isn’t possible.

Sometimes, writing what you were writing before the event isn’t possible either—at least, not for a while. Maybe not at all.

Events change you. The person I was before Dean fell is not the person I am now. Dean is not the same person either.

We don’t know how much will change, but some things will.

Other things won’t change. We’re both writers, after all.

I think I can continue writing on this Fey project because, at this stage in the book, every character is dealing with the aftermath of a life-changing event. It feels natural, almost like a commentary on the last few weeks of October 2023 in our lives.

I have no idea whether or not I would have set aside a Kristine Grayson novel. I found myself thinking about a Grayson novella late Monday night. So who knows?

The real point here is that I have the freedom—and so do all of you who are independently publishing. We’re not tied to deadlines or demands. We can follow whatever path we need to be on.

That feels really good.

It also feels quite surprising.

The contrast is amazing to me. But I celebrate it. It will make life easier in a time when life is filled with other challenges.

And that’s a good thing.

*******

We are in the last few hours of a Kickstarter. It feels odd to tell you that because of the events I mentioned above. I didn’t get to do much promotion of the Kickstarter at all, but many of you did the promotion for me. Thank you!

The Kickstarter is for the Holiday Spectacular, which is one of my all-time favorite projects. A calendar of stories, which subscribers receive one per day throughout the holiday season, is the centerpiece, but the Kickstarter also features writing workshops and a lot of cool things, like great merchandise.

Plus, the folks at WMG (and Dean) put together the prettiest Kickstarter I’ve ever seen. If you’re reading this post on Wednesday or Thursday, you’ll be able to catch the last few hours of the Kickstarter and join up.

Even if you don’t join, you might want to look and see what’s possible in a modern Kickstarter. I know I’m a bit gobsmacked by all the possibilities.

Click here to see it.

And here’s the other reminder:

This weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

Click paypal.me/kristinekathrynruschr4e to go to PayPal.

“Business Musings: Focus and Escape,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Cover at the top of the blog is for The Charming Trilogy, Volume 2, by Kristine Grayson, available through WMG Publishing.

Every year, the Las Vegas Book Festival takes place three blocks from my condo. Every year, I watch the tents go up for the outdoor presentations and the book sales, and every year, I think, Hmmm, maybe I should go.

A few years ago, I tried to get a ticket the day before to see one of the featured speakers, not because of a book he’d written, but because he’s a personal hero of mine. Unsurprisingly, since he’s uber-famous, the tickets had disappeared months before. (The festival is free, but you still need tickets to attend the big events.)

As you can probably tell, I don’t pay a lot of attention to the literary scene here in Las Vegas. There’s a writers institute here that focuses on traditional publishing. It condescendingly includes “genre fiction” in some of its programming, but the people it puts on panels wouldn’t make a panel at a major sf convention or comic convention. Maybe a small town sf convention in the 1990s that had no budget at all. Maybe. Because they just don’t have the credentials.

This year’s Las Vegas Book Festival has some good panels on romance and a rather silly “genre fiction” topic combining…wait for it…history, horror, and sci-fi. There is a worldbuilding panel with a few writers who actually build popular sf/f worlds. But for the most part, this festival still shows its literary and traditional publishing roots.

Which is why I keep forgetting about it, year in and year out.

I do keep an eye on the book programming of the various tiny local festivals, just to see if a friend will show up or to get tickets to see someone whose work I adore. Last year, a friend and I went to see Roxanne Gay as part of the Wave In festival (which included music and art as well as books). We sat outside in the heat at Springs Preserve to listen to her excellent talk, as well as the interview conducted afterwards.

My friend, also a writer, asked why I didn’t go up and introduce myself to Roxanne Gay before the event, when she was sitting alone. I didn’t for a variety of reasons. Usually those introductions are awkward. If the featured writer hasn’t heard of me, then they’re embarrassed or dismissive. If they have, and it’s through my editing, there’s a chance that I rejected them. If they have, and it’s through my writing, there’s a chance that they don’t read or like that sf (mystery, romance) crap.

Just better to let me be a reader-fan than it is to try to impose on their moment in the sun.

Besides, I’m keeping a low profile with the local literary scene, a decision that I realized was a good one when another friend with a long career in science fiction moved to the area. She was treated by one of the organizations like something that needed to be scraped off their shoes. That’s embarrassing too, but not as bad as being recognized.

Because if you are—and they like your work—they want you to do everything for them, usually for free, because you’re local and you don’t have to have a travel budget.

Again, not for me.

Over the past two decades, speakers bureaus of various types have arisen. Writers and other creatives can sign up. They will get speaking fees, often in the four to five figures, as well as expenses to headline a festival like the one that happened here in Vegas over the weekend.

These tiny festivals can afford the fees because someone in their organization is great at grant writing. The grants are often specific—they want x dollars to fund these exact speakers for this particular literary festival… and more power to these festivals.

I love it when people talk about books—even though I really don’t want to be the star attraction at all anymore.

I did it a lot back in the day. About 20 years ago, I did the math. Even with all expenses paid and a small stipend (no one was paying five figures for a writer in those days), I lost money. I always had to pay for things out of my own pocket. I tried to be a good guest too, and would buy something at auction. I was quite judicious about my expenses. With one exception engineered by Julius Schwartz of D.C. fame, I never treated all of my friends to a large meal at the most expensive restaurant on the convention’s dime. For those of you keeping count, that’s one meal out of maybe five hundred at various conventions over 20 some years.

Yeah, been there, done that, paid those dues.

What really caught me, though, was when I figured out my hourly rate for writing versus my hourly rate for all of these trips. Even with good book sales at these conventions, I never ended up clearing more than $20 per hour. (I suspect it would go up now, thanks to indie publishing, but not by much.) If I stayed home, I made a minimum of $500 per hour.

The math really doesn’t work.

It still doesn’t work with the $5000 or $10,000 or $20,000 appearance fee. Maybe if I got the upper end, it might work out. Or maybe not.

Because here’s the rub, at least for me. If I stay home and write, I get a product that I can license for the rest of my life plus 70 years. If I speak at a book festival, that speech is usually gone right after I say it. If not, it’s on the festival’s website, not mine, and they make money off it, not me. Unless, again, I’m that churlish writer who won’t let them record what I’ve done.

These days, by the way, those recordings are usually included as a condition of getting that large appearance fee.

Since I always got sick on the road, I could never really write on the road like some of my friends do. And good for them. I’d rather stay home, get the work done, do some leisure activities that I enjoy, and…keep the pounds off. My years of travel and eating on someone else’s dime led to a 60-lb weight gain for me that it took two dedicated years to lose…after I stopped traveling a lot.

But, thanks to indie publishing, I don’t have to do this kind of traveling anymore.

With about three exceptions, though, most of the writers/speakers at this year’s Las Vegas Book Festival do not make their living as writers. I define making a living at writing like this: the writer must make at least 6-figures, year in and year out.  If they have a day job, it’s because they love the work, not because they need to supplement their income.

Because of the changes in traditional publishing, most writers simply cannot make a living like the one I mentioned above. The contracts are abysmal and license almost everything, including auxiliary rights like audio. The contracts are nearly impossible to get out of. There are very few traditional markets anymore, and the books themselves—even the bestselling novels—sell a fraction of what bestselling books sold in the 1990s.

John Grisham noted this in a New York Times article in 2017. He said his books sold half of what they sold in 2007. The 2007 numbers were significantly less than the 1990s numbers for all bestsellers, as Publishers Weekly documented in those days. (Now, Publishers Weekly no longer prints sales figures for the major bestsellers, like they did for decades.)

I have no idea what Grisham’s sales figures are these days, but I wonder if he wrote the sequel to The Firm that just appeared because he wanted to revisit the character Mitch McDeere or because his agent/editor told him the book might sell better than his other recent novels. Or maybe both reasons apply. I know I often think of revisiting some earlier characters just to see what they’re doing.

Be that as it may, unless you’re a long-time bestseller like Grisham or Nora Roberts or Stephen King, you need to supplement your writing income with something else. For some writers, that means going into debt to get an MFA so that they can teach at a local college or university. (Weirdly enough, universities don’t believe in bringing in professors who actually work in the field they’re lecturing on; the universities want someone with a degree who maybe has published something. Don’t get me started on how bad that is for the students.)

For other writers, that means getting on the library/festival circuit. If the writer can command five figures per appearance and keep their own spending at a minimum, they’re actually making more per appearance than they might make on a book advance. And maybe they’ll sell a few books for their publisher in the process.

They’ll also network, not just with other print writers but with screenwriters who show up at these things. The writers still might not make a living by my definition, but at least they’ll be working in the field without grading papers.

The other thing these writers get is something matters to many of them, something called validation. They get the approval of an editor at a publishing company who decides to spend some of that company’s money on their book. They get the attention of festival attendees. They get written up on local blog sites or in local papers (if the community still has one). They get interviewed by someone connected to local television.

It’s a very 1990s way to live, without all of the money that used to go along with it. Most of the writers who still take traditional deals were raised in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of time that Molly Jong-Fast, daughter of Erica Jong (and a writer in her own right) calls “peak book tour.” This kind of writerly fame is imprinted in their brains as “this is how it is done.”

Savvy writers in the 1980s and 1990s could make a living with the occasional book and the annual tour. No traditionally published writer, coming in today, could make a living like that. Which is why these book festivals are filled with writers getting a stipend and hoping to make some kind of inroads that will give them the career that they once imagined.

I certainly don’t have the career I imagined. I don’t think any writer gets the career they envisioned when they were starting out. Writing is, by its very nature, too haphazard. We write what we want to write, even the traditional writers when they start out, and that doesn’t always fit into the mold that exists in our heads.

As a young writer, I thought I wanted Nora Roberts career, but my hummingbird brain is too flighty for that. I can’t write the same kind of book, with a romance in the center of it, every single time. I also wanted Stephen King’s career, but I don’t have the same kind of horror mentality that he does. Nor am I willing to face the darkness every time I sit down to write.

I’m happy with where I’m at, but I wouldn’t be here without the massive change in publishing that came with the arrival of the Kindle fifteen years ago. Now I can write what I want and market it directly. All of my training, including the businesses I’ve owned, made it possible for me to jump into that world easily.

I do a lot of work and I have used the money I make to hire a lot of help. There’s still more work to do than all of us can accomplish, and that’s okay. Writing indie makes it possible for me to be as creative as possible, writing what I want to write when I want to write it.

It also broke me out of the need to travel. I can say no to almost everything.

I make it sound easy, but it’s not. It took years for me to wean myself off that life. My media work as a broadcast journalist taught me to speak in sound bites whenever I’m interviewed. Once I get interviewed by someone, they invite me back over and over and over again, because I can say a lot in a succinct manner. I could make a living going from festival to festival. I’d be sick, of course, but I could manage hauling my butt out of the hotel room to talk to people before lying down.

After I had decided I wasn’t going to travel anymore, I got asked to give a TED talk in Telluride, Colorado. It was one of those moments that tested my resolve: I knew how much a TED talk would help my visibility. I also knew that I’d be down for about a month after that, especially with the altitude and the travel. That was right before we moved to Las Vegas, when I only had about four hours of actual ability to function on a good day.

It wasn’t worth the sacrifice to me. Not just because of the math, above, but because I really didn’t want to be known as a public speaker. I am a prose writer, and that’s what I love to do.

The indie world has made it possible to do what I love all the time. I’m often overwhelmed by the opportunity here. I make a very good living at writing, just like I had in traditional, only now I have control over my output, what I publish, and what I choose to write. (Well, as much control as my cranky muse gives me, that is.)

I’ve been thinking about this difference for a while. I’ve watched a lot of people I respect choose to go the traditional route. They really have no idea that there’s no living to be had at it, but they gamely do what they must. Some end up brokenhearted, but others seem to thrive in this new world.

It’s just not for me. I’ve been contemplating the differences in the careers for a while, because I’m staring down the barrel at the end of the year. I always do a year in review, and about two weeks ago, I decided I wasn’t going to do that series.

After all, everything is changing rapidly. What I write this month might not mean as much next month. Events from January feel like they occurred before the pandemic. I figured everything was changing too fast to do a year in review.

So I sat down tonight, in fact, and started the blog on why I’m not going to write a year in review. But as I did, I thought of some things I needed to address anyway. I began to make notes, thinking that I would write a single post about the year, mostly a list of the changes.

Only I wanted to discuss a few of them. They’re significant.

And then I took a break and watched those tents go up for the festival and realized that one of the things I wanted to discuss was the different career paths between traditional and indie.

I’ve said for years that these paths would eventually diverge. What I do as an indie writer is so very different than what traditional writers do. They have different concerns than I do, and they honestly don’t seem to care that the contracts are bad and they won’t earn a living. A lot of them never expected to in the first place.

It’s a different mindset. Traditional writers nowadays aren’t chumps just because they make that choice, and indie writers aren’t hacks because we make our choice.

It’s still part of publishing.

And I have things to say about both types of writer. Still.

I didn’t think I had until a few hours ago.

I needed to write this piece, though, maybe as an outline for me on how to approach the year in review. There are things that traditional writers need to know, but there are also things that indie writers need to know.

The world itself is changing. Social media is less of a thing. AI has crept into every aspect of our lives. Controlling our work has become more important rather than less.

So there will be a year in review. I’m not sure when it will start, but it’ll get done.

When I saw Roxane Gay last year, I was struck by the undercurrent of her talk. It mentioned, more than once, about how difficult book tours and traveling was. But there was no question in her mind that they were necessary.

And they are for the kind of career she has chosen.

Me, though, if I choose to spend a hot spring evening sitting outside in Springs Preserve, I’m going to do it to listen to someone else, rather than giving the talk myself. I didn’t have to do a book signing afterward. If she had been a dull speaker (hah! Not her), I could have left early and felt no remorse at all.

I have no idea how many rubber chicken banquets I’ve choked down or terrible talks I’ve had to sit through politely while I was sitting behind the speaker on a stage.

I love that such a life is not a requirement for a 21^st century writing career. I was around during those peak book tour years. And as glamorous as most wannabe writers think those days were, that perception was very wrong. They were grueling and somewhat humiliating and always exhausting.

Today, while a bevy of traditional writers arrived for the Las Vegas Book Festival, carting their luggage through airports, finding their hotel rooms, politely sitting through a dinner with the organizers, I wrote 6,000 words—3,000 on my work in progress and now this blog post.

I also had a lovely lunch with some local writers and as soon as I finish this, I’m going to walk from our place, past those tents, to get some fresh donuts before heading back home to sleep in my own bed. Tomorrow I’ll get up and run past the tents before the festival starts, and then while everyone is giving the same old panel on the same old topics, I’ll be writing.

I have actively chosen this world.

I hope that at least some of the writers at the festival have actively chosen theirs as well.

*****

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“Business Musings: Totally Different Careers,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © 2023 by  Kristine K. Rusch

Me and the Google (as a friend of mine calls it) spent what I almost termed a “dispiriting” hour as I searched for the 21^st century’s superstars in a variety of fields. I say “almost termed” because, when I think of it, “dispiriting” is the wrong word.

Adult me, who loves this modern world of indie publishing and going directly to the reader, doesn’t mind the lack of superstars or “big names” as most people call them.

Teenage me, who was trained to figure out the coolest, latest, most “in” superstar (and to judge people based on who they liked and who they didn’t like), feels…well, not dispirited either. But at sea, maybe. Because it’s not as easy as it was fifty years ago to figure out who is guiding the culture.

That whole concept—guiding the culture—comes out of curation. And class-based curation at that. Hardcovers, considered permanent and as a result difficult to afford, were for upper class and/or educated readers. Paperbacks came out of World War 2, and became even more popular thanks to the GI Bill (here in the States) paying for the education of anyone who served.

Paperbacks were considered disposable, though, like the pulp magazines before them. So anything that was in cheap paper was considered cheap fiction, and not worthy of all the things we used to measure “good literature.”

Curation is an important part of the creation of superstars. Yes, the fans have to like what they see, but to get the maximum number of fans to like something or someone, there has to be an information funnel. People need to see that something or someone in very, very, very large numbers.

Even so, those numbers don’t mean a lot when you move across the globe. Global superstars were extremely rare, even back in the day, and were often only in the movies—especially action films that didn’t have a lot of dialogue. Global superstar writers really didn’t exist ever. Each language and/or country had their own stars and often those writers didn’t translate well into a different culture.

Instead, books became blockbusters across the globe, and I’ll get to that in a later post.

One of the many, many reasons that global superstars are rare has nothing to do with language or cultural barriers in the arts. The reason is that there were no curators worldwide. Here in the States, we had a tightly regulated curation system in the mid-20^th century, and it was all based on distribution.

There were only so many shelves in bookstores across the nation. Books that went into department stores (remember those?) were the cheap disposable kind (or as we knew them, the mass market paperback). Records had similar issues. There was a large struggle to get radio play, considered free advertising, and then record stores and yes, those department stores, clamored for the music that their customers came in and asked about.

Even then, nothing remained on the shelves long. There just wasn’t space.

Just like there wasn’t space in the movie theaters for more than a handful of films. The movie theaters expanded from showing one film for a month or two (the 1970s) to three or four films at the theater in the mall (the 1980s) to multiplexes (the 1990s), but even that didn’t make distribution easier.

Someone curated who saw what film, just like someone curated who heard what record, just like someone decided who read which books.

Television expanded outward faster, thanks to the arrival of cable, but the networks, which had dominated since the 1950s, held sway until we entered the new century.

Curators told us what to watch. We, the audience, chose among the curated product and accepted or rejected what we found.

Along the way, we found our favorites. Since the curators were nameless and faceless to people outside of the various industries, we couldn’t follow the curator, so we had to find a different way.

We followed the artist, the author, the actor. We couldn’t even follow the television program or the book series because the curators would often discontinue the television program or the book series for reasons that had nothing to do with popularity, and everything to do with contract negotiations or the difficulty of controlling the producers or other behind-the-scenes problems.

Because there was so little actual product out there, we had “watercooler” conversations in which everyone—and I do mean everyone in a particular country/culture—had an opinion about the latest bestseller, the latest movie, the latest album released.

Now, movies can appear and disappear without anyone noticing. It doesn’t matter if we make it to the theater before the movie leaves because the movie will eventually stream. Finding music that we like is as easy as picking a playlist on one of the streaming services, and in many ways, we curate those ourselves based on algorithms of things we have listened to before.

Books are similar. I’ve complained here before about the fact that I have to actively search to find a new release by one of my favorite authors. Many of those authors don’t have newsletters, not that I always open the newsletters that I get, letting them clutter up my inbox.

Distribution has changed, which is something I deal with on this blog a lot. Curation still exists, but it’s essentially worthless. It’s a dying profession in a dying corner of dying parts of the various entertainment industries. (Dean did a great series on this from the writer’s side a few weeks ago. The series is over ten posts long now.)

Adult me loves the change in distribution. I can find any book I want at any time day or night. My TBR pile is ridiculously big, and I don’t mind a bit. I really should keep an equivalent for the movies I want to see and the TV shows I’ve heard of, even though I haven’t done that yet.

Teenage me is watching the kids I am getting to know at UNLV with a mixture of envy and awe. They might have a conversation about Billie Holiday one day and Usher the next. They might know who is doing what in the style of whom and they might never have heard of someone I consider a modern big star.

It’s fascinating, and there’s no stopping it. These kids did not grow up with curation. They learned how to choose their entertainment on their own…or following various influencers, who are the modern version of curators. Only the influencers don’t have the same kind of power.

Sure, a major  influencer can point out and even boost an artist’s career, but they can’t silence other artists to benefit the artist they like. The old curators, back in the day, could do just that. Writers, artists, actors could get silently blacklisted—writers for “low sales,” artists for “inappropriate material,” and actors (particularly female ones) for getting “too old.”

The new system is much better for book writers (and other artists who work individually), although it still has problems for those in more organized entertainment. Getting revenue out of the new system is one of the main points in the WGA’s writer’s strike, and will be one of the main demands if SAG-AFTRA goes on strike at the end of the month.

As an entertainment culture, though, we are stutter-stepping our way into this new world. We don’t know how to get the word out about new product—not in good old-fashioned shorthand.

It doesn’t mean much to say “bestseller” these days, because bestseller in what context? Amazon’s bestseller lists include paid and free, and fall into so many categories and subcategories that if your book is in an obscure subgenre, it can be a bestseller with one sale every few weeks.

Not to mention the fact that Amazon isn’t the only game in town anymore. Brandon Sanderson sold over 185,000 books on his Kickstarter last year, and none of those books counted toward any “bestseller” list at all.

For context, it takes anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 sales in a week to hit The New York Times list, which is U.S. only. None of this makes for good marketing anymore.

Every industry is struggling with this. Variety  ran an article last month lamenting the fact that the superstars in the movie industry are “geriatric,” citing 80-year-old Harrison Ford’s walk down the red carpet at Cannes as just one example.

The article quotes (maybe over-quotes) a man who is in charge of selling films to distributors. Protagonist Pictures COO George Hamilton claims that the collapse of the DVD market in 2008 has destroyed the star system. He said:

Nearly all of the actors and actresses who are [bankable] now had very successful films when DVD and video was still a huge force. You could see that as a dividing line shift in terms of older or newer generation. With the new generation, there’s more divisions between success because you could have the most-watched show or film on a streamer. But there might be a whole swath of society who might not subscribe, and they’re not part of that.

But the quote that Variety ended with is what really caught my attention. Hamilton said:

We used to treat our movie stars like gods. But the marketing of these streaming movies is so limited that it doesn’t really create stars. Actors aren’t burned into the minds like they once were, and they don’t have this larger-than-life image any longer.

Get rid of the word “actor” here, and insert “writer.”

The advertising markets for bestselling books are mostly gone. The big ones disappeared years ago. Newspapers, with very few exceptions (like The New York Times), have completely done away with their book sections. Magazines that covered entertainment used to include books. Now, Vanity Fair puts one paragraph “reviews” in 8 point type to fit six “reviews” on the bottom half of a page.

No one runs book ads in any paper venue that I can find. The last hardcopy place that took a lot of book ads was Mystery Scene and they closed up shop late last year. They couldn’t get anyone to pay for book advertising in paper.

There’s a lot of online places to advertise, from Book Bub to Amazon itself to all kinds of book blogger sites, but many are influencer based. The rest are as spread out as streaming, and they’re curated by algorithm.

When I log onto Amazon, I get a series of ads or suggested titles, which are completely different from the ones that Dean would get or that WMG might get.

Those kinds of ads aren’t that effective anymore. Most people have easy-to-access adblockers on their browsers so that they’re not bombarded with unwanted messages.

I know, I know. Many of you are panicking reading this and you want me to spoon feed you a way to have your books “discovered.” I’ve written dozens of blogs on that topic and even wrote a book describing the principles of discoverability (called, of all things, Discoverability), so I’m not going to answer that here or even put any of that fretting through in the comments.

Because the point of this blog isn’t to help your book get discovered in this new world, nor is it a blog that will tell you how to become a big name.

This post is a little stranger than that.

I’m thinking that pursuing “big name” status or trying to become a “superstar” is so last century. There is no longer a narrow distribution channel for any kind of entertainment—and that’s good news for those of us who want to write what we want to write.

But it also makes marketing tough. There’s a reason that Variety spoke to a person they later identified as a “sales agent” for their lack of new superstars article. That man has no real idea how to market his product—and that’s his only job.

I’m going to set aside the idea of advertising or marketing to new readers or even doing newsletters and other such things.

I’m just going to focus on what will replace Big Name status—the automatic reaction every reader gets when they hear the name John Grisham or Nora Roberts or Stephen King. Ready?

Nothing will replace Big Name status. That’s not a thing anymore because there are no longer narrow trade channels. Besides that, the generations coming up in this era of streaming don’t think about Big Names the way that the rest of us do.

These new generations think about what they like and maybe what their friends like. They have learned how to find their niches. Sometimes, they learn how to move out of those niches.

Those of us raised in the Big Name world have to learn how to pivot to niche marketing…and here’s the rub. We have to learn how to be happy with that.

Changing our attitude is the first step. The next step is going to be more complicated. And because it’s so complicated, I will deal with it in the next post.

*****

I mentioned Discoverability in this particular post. You can get it as a standalone title or you can get it in a bundle on marketing with a book on sales copy and another on author brands. As is the case with all of my nonfiction books, some of the techniques are products of their time, but the strategies remain the same now as they were when the books were published.

I’m fascinated by the changes in entertainment, as you can tell, and I’ll be dealing with many of them throughout the summer. Please do remember that this weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

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“Business Musings: Stars,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Choreograph

The initial title of this post was “Fighting The Future.” It came from a quote that I spent about a half an hour searching for. I had hastily scrawled the quote on a piece of paper while doing a dozen other things the past two weeks, but I didn’t cite the source. All I know is that the quote came from something I was reading, but what, exactly, appears to be lost to the wind.

I suspect the quote came from a book called Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman. The book is a dishy, but well-researched history of various parts of the Academy Awards. A lot of the book deals with the history of organizations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences to the Writers Guild and beyond.

Many of these organizations came about in times of great technological change, because the creatives whose careers were going to be impacted by these changes wanted protection. In other cases, the creatives whose careers were impacted by the changes wanted to carve out the future, in a way that would help them dramatically.

It’s not always young creatives who are creating the future. It’s established creatives as well. Sometimes those of us who’ve been in the business for a while can see the future more clearly than those who are just stretching their artistic wings.

We’ve been through some of these wars before.

It’s also possible I had seen the quote in some of the coverage of the current Hollywood writers strike. All I know is that when I read the quote, I felt not only inspired, but I also felt the speaker’s sense of frustration.

The quote went something like this: No matter how hard you try, you can’t fight the future.

It’s a negative quote—You can’t—and I really didn’t want to go with that.

It’s true, though. You can’t fight the future. It will come for you, and it will come in unexpected ways.

Those of us who have lived through the past eight years know that very clearly. Things started to go off the rails for many of us in the United States in 2015. Other countries were off the rails before that, and some seemed to be chugging along just fine until 2020.

Then the future clobbered us. Hard. Thought things would go your way? The future asked in its best villain voice. Try adding a pandemic to your calculus.

Some of us eventually did add the pandemic to our calculus. The past always holds the key to the future, but not in ways that people expect.

People expect a road map from the past. A kind of if you do things this way, then that will happen. And oddly, in publishing, it remained like that for about forty years. That period of stability, in publishing in particular, was greatly unusual.

Stability isn’t the human condition. As the pithy little saying on this morning’s cereal box reminded me, the only thing we can count on is change.

Sadly, the way that the past holds the key to the future is by giving us imperfect examples of what had come before.

I remember vividly telling damn near everyone I knew that if we follow the road map set by the flu epidemic from 100 years ago, we wouldn’t see the end of the pandemic phase of Covid-19 for three years.

And I was right, almost to the day. What I didn’t say, though, was that protected communities—those that completely quarantined—got struck by later stages of the pandemic. Other places had built up immunity, but these isolated communities hadn’t, so they went through their own pandemic hell, some as late as seven years after the first case of the flu showed up in North America.

As I said, imperfect, and just a guideline. But still, something to look toward.

This week, The Washington Post had an article titled “The WGA strike is part of a recurring pattern when technology changes.” The article explored everything from the arrival of kinescope to television to streaming, and showed how, when technology changes, the industry had to change with it, whether the industry or the creatives who worked inside it like the changes or not.

Ironically, this article landed on the same weekend as a huge variety of scare headlines about AI. “AI is as big a threat as nuclear war!” screamed one. “AI’s creators are afraid of it!” screamed another.

And a dear clear-eyed friend on Facebook talked about ChatGPT and noted that we’re watching the world change. He also noted that we will see a lot of denial about it. Farther down the thread, he noted that we can’t stop the change, but we can figure out how we’re going to use it.

That’s the point of the scare headlines, by the way. They’re not wrong. In the wrong hands, AI will destroy everything we know and love, maybe even destroy the planet, if our science fiction colleagues from decades past are to be believed.

But that’s because these things—from AI to virtual reality—are tools. Tools are apolitical things. A hammer can assist with building a wall or it can tear down the same wall, depending on which part of the hammer you chose to use. But it can also kill someone, quite quickly and easily, with either side of the hammer.

In the wrong hands, quite literally, a hammer becomes a murder weapon.

I learned this lesson early, with words. My family was all about words. Words can create worlds. They can make a child feel loved. Words can also humiliate someone or even destroy them. Words are a tool, and that tool can be as destructive as a hammer to the head.

At Clarion, thanks to another clear-minded friend, I learned that I had learned the weaponization of words all too well. I had to learn how to speak kindly. I almost wrote all over again but that would have been wrong. I had to learn how to use words kindly in spoken speech for the very first time.

It is a learning curve, and it’s one I work on every day. (I also occasionally feel the urge to destroy with words—and I do, if confronted by a bigot (and my brain catches up to the situation quickly enough). I now use the weapon when a weapon is needed, and not in every day conversation.)

Commenters on my first friend’s Facebook post pointed out that the AI genie is out of the bottle, and our job now is to use these tools wisely and regulate them properly.

Yes, that will not stop the determined person who wants to misuse the tools, but it gives us resources to solve the problem.

Better folks than I am working on ways to control this part of the future. As I mentioned in “Lessons from the WGA Writers Strike” a month ago, the WGA is trying its best to prevent AI from destroying lives and livelihoods.

The sad thing is that it will not be 100% effective. It will get the best deal possible and negotiate a few points away that will cost someone a job somewhere. That’s one of the sad things about technological advancement. It will create jobs, sure, but at the cost of others.

This weekend as well, Neil Clarke issued the first draft of a position paper for the publishing industry, particularly the genre industry, to use. He’s frustrated that the publishing industry (particularly the genre organizations) have been slow to respond to this changing dynamic, so he is starting the ball rolling.

He’s asking for helpful comments. If you go there to pick a fight, you will be sent away.

We’re at one of the early stages of this particular change. It’s not the only change we’re going through. The pandemic caused a lot of unanticipated change. Climate change is also going to force many of us to change the way we live—not just how we live, but where and what we consider to be important in our futures.

There are a lot of other changes like that, some local, some regional, and some international. (The pandemic was unique in that it was completely global. Not even last century’s world wars were 100% global.) I suspect the world of 2035 will be completely unrecognizable from the world of 2015.

The future is inevitable. We need to face that.

Or, in the words of the now-lost speaker in the lost article, We can’t fight the future. We can’t, because we’ll lose.

I’ve been thinking about that as well, as I read all of Dean’s posts on being a new writer coming in. He spoke at two writers conferences this year, and each time, he realized that the new writers are getting conflicting and often bad advice from both the traditional and indie publishing industries.

He has written ten posts (so far) on the conflicting information. Start with this one, and then search for the others. They’re not always well marked.

Writer Ron Collins took on Dean’s posts in a post of his own. (Oddly, I agree with both Dean and Ron.) Ron has taken to labeling traditional publishing “Dependent publishing” and independent publishing as …well, independent publishing. It’s Ron’s phrase “dependent publishing” that really caught me, though, because that’s what it is.

Writers in the past were forced to rely on traditional publishers to get product out. The writers who are struggling the most with all of the changes are the ones who liked being dependent, the ones who liked having someone else take care of that messy business stuff. It really didn’t seem to matter to those writers that the people taking care of the messy business stuff often took advantage of that writer, never fulfilling any promises, skimming money off the top (which still goes on), or actively embezzling.

Nor did it seem to bother those writers that their career of “being taken care of” would have a short lifespan. Most “dependently published” writers, to use Ron’s phrase, back in the day had a career that lasted at most ten years.

Those writers never could figure out how to stop the inevitable decline of their fortunes. Only a handful of writers—and I do mean a handful; I can count them on one hand—who wanted to be taken care of had a career that lasted twenty or thirty years. That was a happy accident, usually caused by a lottery-style windfall that made all kinds of traditional publishers want a piece of that pie.

Thousands of other dependently published writers never went beyond the third book of their careers, although some of those writers still sell the occasional short story.

Still, though, there are hundreds of writers who want to get into that dependent publishing game. I no longer have pity for them, because the information on how to actually have a career as a writer has existed for a decade or more now.

Many of these writers stick their heads in the sand and will not listen to anyone tell them that their dream is not possible in 2023. Maybe if they’d started in 1990, they might have had a chance. Even then, they wouldn’t have lasted through the purge at the end of the previous century; most dependently published writers, especially those without business savvy, did not.

The writers with their heads in the sand aren’t really fighting the future. They’re fighting the present. Confront them with the possibilities—both good and bad—that the future holds, and they will bury their heads deeper. They’ll deny it all.

And honestly, they’re lost. They can’t be recovered. In some ways, they’re volunteering to be the ones whose livelihoods disappear (if they’re making a meager living at traditional publishing right now) or they’re volunteering to have their dreams destroyed.

It’s the writers who face the future who will survive. That’s why I chose this title. Because we might not understand what is coming at us. We might not even predict it all accurately.

But we are standing with our feet firmly planted in the present, aware of the way that the publishing industry (both dependent and independent) works now and we’re keeping a weather eye on all of those developments lurking in our future.

Yes, we’re guessing at what’s going to come. Many of us, like the Writers Guild, like Neil Clarke, are working to shape that future. Many others are figuring out where we will fit in what’s heading our way.

We can’t fight the future as much as we want to. History teaches us that. Those who deny that the world is changing or pretend the changes won’t have an impact on us will probably lose everything.

Those of us who understand that change is inevitable will survive. Those of us who are figuring out how to make that change work for us will do better.

Ron notes:

The chief development skill of an Independently Published writer, then, is listening. By that, I mean, taking in the thousand streams of information that seem to flow over them, and sifting out the wheat from the chaff.

He makes it sound so easy. It is for him. That was his training in his pre-writing career and it’s just his nature.

So many writers aren’t geared for listening to anyone. Others aren’t able to take “streams of information” and sift them. To many writers—heck, many people—sifting through information is impossible. It’s a learned skill, one that I discovered years ago when I hired really smart people who hadn’t gone to college.

I had not realized until then that the main skill college teaches isn’t some career path or how to take an exam. The main skill college teaches is the one Ron describes above: how to listen and then separate the wheat from the chaff.

People who have not had that experience or who rebelled against it and refused to learn it are not suited to an independent freelance career. Nor are they suited to any kind of career that lacks a set path with definable goals.

Writing used to have a set path with definable goals. Those goals weren’t easy to achieve, but they were understandable. Now it’s a choose your own adventure, which suits people like me. I like living that way, and I like trying to anticipate the future.

Most people don’t, though. Most people find this way of living very stressful.

I’ve come to the conclusion over the decades that some writers just need to be taken care of more than they need a writing career.

The rest of us, though, need to plant our feet in the present, turn our back on a past that never treated us very well in the first place, and face the future, whatever it might bring.

****

For a long time, Dean and I have tried to teach writers how to face the future. It isn’t just standing and staring at it. There is some active planning involved, even if that planning turns out to be somewhat wrong.

We’ve finally put that planning into an online class called “The Decade Ahead.” You can investigate it if you follow this link.

In the meantime, let me remind you that this weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

Click paypal.me/kristinekathrynruschr4e to go to PayPal.

“Business Musings: Facing the Future,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Gajus

Three things happened in quick succession recently, that forced me to write this blog now, not, say, months from now.

First, a writer friend astonished me by saying they have finally gone indie, after being urged to do so for more than a decade. They’ve been unable to sell a book traditionally for that entire decade, but they’ve kept writing.

Only…they’re not really ready to go indie, because they want to pay someone to design the book’s interior for both ebook and for paper. They want to pay someone else to design their cover, and they want to pay yet a third person for marketing.

I’m afraid my hair was on fire as I answered them…as gently as I could…informing them that they could do most if not all of these things on their own. They were looking at a cash outlay per book of a minimum of $5,000—and they wanted to publish a book per month.

I have no idea if this friend is wealthy. I do know that as a start-up, with zero track record outside of nonfiction and short fiction, this person would not earn back the full $60,000 they spend on this plan for years and years. I warned them about scammers, I gave my writer friend links, and I know that I overwhelmed them. But Good-freakin’-God, this person and I had the same conversation in 2012, when doing everything they discussed was a lot harder.

Then I sent them to a service…that went out of business, like every other service. (Except this service did not steal the writer’s IP in the process, like so many others had.)

I know other writer friends are trying to triage with this poor person, but I’m thinking, just let this writer spend the money. They’re actively refusing to learn modern publishing and have actively avoided it for 12 years. It’s not going to matter how much most of us yell; that person will not take the leap into indie.

Then, at lunch, I mentioned an older writer friend of ours, a writer in his eighties who declared fifteen years ago that he was retiring from writing because he was about to hit seventy. He crept into indie publishing with some unpublished backlist titles, then published all of his out-of-print titles and finally, about eight years ago, published a brand-new newly written book.

Yeah, this writer has help, because he’d run a business in the past, so he built a new business (after he retired) that resembles WMG. Someone else handles most of the publishing details, and he has social media folks because he can afford them. (He is wealthy, having had movies made from his work and because he’s a good money manager.)

Lo and behold, this guy, who fifteen years ago said that the words have dried up, has published at least 10 newly written books since that first one eight years ago.

I got a newsletter from him on the same day as I had gotten that other email about the writer who wants to be taken care of. Dean got the same newsletter and we discussed it at lunch.

I mentioned how this eighty-something writer had secretly unretired, and Dean said, “If he had stayed in traditional publishing, he wouldn’t be writing anymore. It’s indie that brought him back to life.”

Completely true. Not only has indie brought his fiction back to life, but he’s doing all kinds of creative marketing things, like limited editions and special editions and fan-favorite editions. He’s participating in bundles and is talking about a Kickstarter, but worries that he lacks the time, because he doesn’t want to take time from his latest novel.

Lately, I’ve been having issues with creeping into my sixties, so I was looking at my eighty-something friend and marveling at his production. Also he’s more than twenty years older than me, so if I keep writing at my normal pace for twenty-five more years, imagine…

Well, age was my focus in thinking about my friend, not indie/traditional. But Dean is exactly right. This writer friend was being destroyed by traditional publishing and he found a way out. He loved indie so much and loved the freedom it gave him even more, so all those stories in his head returned.

The other writer? They just want someone to take care of them, the way they imagine traditional publishers will.

I understand the “taking care of” attitude. That was how we were all brought up in our careers back when traditional was the only thing we could do. We were told that these people would take care of us…only none of them ever did. Not even with the bestsellers.

But I had a different revelation earlier in the summer. (I actually wrote a more general column about it for The Grantville Gazette.)

As regular readers know, I got very sick in June. Unable-to-get-off-the-couch sick. Unable-to-read-or-write sick. Unable to do anything challenging, including watching something that required brain power.

So after wending my way through the three most recent Star Trek movies (which I was seeing for the umpteenth time), I channel surfed, and found myself on an old episode of Magnum P.I.

The episode aired in 1987, and because it was 1980s TV (and Magnum), the technology in the episode was current, if not a little ahead of what was available.

I was having enough trouble with the ancient cars and the fact that everything looked out of date. Then T.C.’s daughter gets kidnapped and the team jumps into action. They come up with a plan to catch the kidnapper using money that Higgins gave them from Robin Master’s account (and, it feels weird to tell you all this without saying SPOILER, but if you’re that interested in a TV episode from 1987…well, not my issue).

The money is in the ubiquitous bag, of course. They’re going to put a tracker in the bag, and Rick will use a computer to monitor the tracker. The computer is the size of my desktop screen, but is clearly a brand-new late 1980s laptop. The tracker is the size of a dinner plate.

How anyone could miss that thing in a bundle of money is beyond me.

The team promises to stay in touch…on their walkie-talkies. (Those things were hard to ignore too.) Magnum is the one who receives the instructions from the kidnappers (why him? I don’t remember. Because his name is on the show?). He goes into a hotel room, finds a cued-up video tape showing T.C.’s daughter and that day’s newspaper…and of course, enough details to give the good guys a clue as to where she was being held.

Then the instructions come across the landline in the hotel room. And everything gets put into action…as the commercial break hits and the daytime commercials (hemorrhoid cream, Medicare Advantage, dentures ack!) roll.

I sat there stunned—not at the commercials (okay, the commercials), but also at the technology.

I was a full adult in 1987, divorced and on my own, working very hard at breaking into what was then known as publishing because there was no traditional to add to it. I learned every nook and cranny of that profession upside down, backwards, and forwards. I learned as much as I could as in-depth as I could, and then proceeded forward.

Over the years, I learned other things about that profession and I kept learning and growing. I found ways around the things that no one told you about until you experienced them (like what to do when your excellent career tanks through no fault of your own), and I still continued forward.

I started writing this blog—409 posts so far—to convince myself that indie publishing was viable, and then when I realized it was, I continued the blog as a way to keep learning and growing and moving forward in my writing career.

I can see myself, publishing in whatever way is viable twenty-five years from now, just like my eighty-something friend.

But my other writer friend? They got started later, but all of the teaching they absorbed was from the 1980s or earlier.

In fact, everything all of you have learned about traditional publishing from traditional publishing is still rooted in the 1980s.

The days of walkie-talkies and landlines and trackers the size of dinner plates.

That writer friend who wants to be taken care of? They believe that books were beautifully designed back in those days and yes, some were. Usually specialty press books done with an eye to the interior beauty.

But regular books?

Those of you with a 1980s hardcover on your shelf, go pick up the book. Turn to a random page. Take a look at the typeface. Then look to see if the lines on the page are actually lined up.

I read a lot of older books and what catches my eye every single time is that the interior design is much harder to read than the designs in modern computer-generated interiors. Books set on a linotype and hand-pasted were as good as the person doing the pasting. Then they were printed on machines that sometimes failed, and ripped off parts of the page.

Those books are not beautiful on the interior. They can hurt the eye.

Books designed in the early days of computer book design had the usual early days of any computer anything problem. Some of those books have missing chapters or repeated chapters or a failure of spellchecking. (You know what I mean: someone accidentally put the wrong word into the spellchecker so the spellchecker inserts the wrong word instead of the right one.)

Everything this writer friend who wants to be taken care of believes about publishing is as out of date as the radio in Magnum’s borrowed Ferrari.

The thing is…we all get comfortable with what we learned from the days we learned it.

For a long time, I kept all of my books from college, including the texts from my baby science classes like my Physics for Poets class (yes, that was what it was called). Until I dropped the book in one move or another, and actually read the page before me. Everything on that page, and I do mean everything wasn’t just out of date. It was wrong.

Science had moved on. Kris’s library hadn’t.

Everything that writers believe traditional publishing will do for them, from beautiful covers (have you looked at some covers lately?) to good copy editing (have you read trad pubbed books lately? I have and the copy editing is atrocious) to marketing (what marketing? Seriously? What marketing?) comes from the 1980s or older.

If those things were being done well then (and marketing was, for bestsellers), those things are not being done well now. If they were done poorly then, they’re worse now.

But more than that. You all know how I feel about traditional publishing, so let’s put this in the indie context.

Most indie writers base their expectations on the traditional publishing model that I mentioned above. The indie writers learned the same 1980s or earlier model, so these indies are doing what they can to goose initial sales, to increase velocity so that a new book will go out at thousands of copies (even if they’re given away).

Then the indie writer forgets about their older books, thinking the backlist is worthless. A lot of indies don’t update their covers after a few years, and certainly don’t go through their inventory when a new subgenre becomes popular. Or when a topic becomes trendy and they have an “old” book that is on-topic.

There are no old books now, folks. There are newly published books and new-to-the-reader books.

New and old is a traditional publishing concept based on physical shelf space, which was limited. The virtual shelf space is unlimited, so readers can find an old title just as easily as a brand-new one.

You can do marketing yourself (better than trads ever did) and market a title that’s six years old right next to the novel you just finished.

To use traditional publishing expectations, methods, and nomenclature is as silly as running to find a payphone to call 911 when you have a perfectly good cell phone in your hands.

We’ll never be able to convince that first writer I mentioned to do indie publishing right. We (the friends) will watch them publish that first book, spend thousands, and then watch it sell maybe 100 copies in the first month (if they’re lucky).

I’m braced for the inevitable this doesn’t work conversation.

Because if you’re thinking the old-fashioned traditional publishing way, 100 copies will be a stunning failure.

If you understand modern publishing, though, those 100 copies might be 150 by mid-year, which might be 200 a few months after that, and maybe more later. Over time—and there is time (unlike traditional) that book will sell more  copies than it ever would have in a traditional publishing house…and the book will still be in print.

Win, win, win.

I’ll be honest, though. I’m still thinking about that Magnum episode, wondering what attitudes of mine are stuck in 1987. When I think about 1987 as 1987, I’m aware that it’s 36 years ago.

When I think about some of the things I did, I can feel how long ago that was.

When I think about what I’m writing now, what I hope to write, and what I did write back then, 1987 feels stunningly close to yesterday.

I’m sure I’m stuck in certain years and attitudes. I’m trying to shake them off—or at least evaluate them and see if they’re worth keeping.

I know it’s a long process. If you dig back on this website into the original blogs from, say 2011 or 2012, you’ll see a lot of different attitudes from me than I have now. It took me a long time to convince myself that indie publishing would work.

Very few people were making a living at it ten years ago. Hundreds—thousands?—of writers are doing so now. It should be easier for writers to understand that this is a viable path.

But, if they don’t realize that their training is out of date, then they’re going to have a much tougher time of it than the writer who understands that the world of 36 years ago is long gone.

Everything has changed, and continues to change.

Long about this point in the year, I find myself needing to delve into this year’s new technology to see if it is right for our business at this moment in time. Delving into new tech always feels like a pain, but it’s not. It’s what keeps our publishing business alive.

Writing is writing is writing. We’re storytellers and we’ll tell stories.

But getting our stories to the readers in the best possible way? That changes all the time.

Keeping up is hard, but it’s necessary. Not just for technology’s sake, but for our writing.

My eighty-something friend proves that. He had given up on writing when he thought he’d have to deal with the horrors of traditional publishing for his remaining years.

When he realized that he could control his writing and his publishing, his creativity roared back.

I’m inspired by his longevity and his willingness to change. I think his long career as a writer comes from that willingness to change.

Writers who don’t look to the future, or at least see the present, are never going to have careers that last forty, fifty, or sixty years. Maybe ten years, if those writers are lucky. Maybe. Or maybe only four or five.

It’s sad, really.

But this profession is for optimists, and those willing to learn, willing to try, and willing to grow. Everyone else will have a little luck, a little success, and a long decline.

I’ve learned that the hard way.

I admire writers like my eighty-something friend, and feel sorry for my other writer friend. But I learned long ago that you can’t rescue someone from their own assumptions. People have to find the way out of the blocks in their own brains on their own.

That’s a tough lesson to implement, but those of us who have careers that span decades have seen a lot of people come and go. We’ve learned to stand back and let other people make their own mistakes.

Some people surprise us and climb forward. Most do not.

It’s sad, but it’s their problem. And that’s the hardest lesson of all.

*****

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“Business Musings: Living in the Past,” copyright © 2023 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / Knowlesgallery.

Now, I see a lot of writers who didn’t start in traditional and have no desire to go there. I’ve met a lot of young readers who really don’t care what the newest hottest book is. Heck, I’ve met a lot of young people who have no sense of the latest music (something that was a big deal when I was young) because they have access to all music. They can easily find their niche, and go back to Patsy Cline if that niche is country or maybe find a song by Maren Morris and have them on the same playlist.

Reading the opinion in the attempted merger of Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, a merger that the courts ultimately blocked, giving a big (if twenty years too late) win to the Department of Justice, made me realize just how different the various areas of publishing are now.

It also gave me a glimpse into the future, with more clarity than I think I’ve had on the entire industry maybe ever.

Last year I wrote a post in the Year in Review called “The Split.” I finally had numbers that showed just how different the traditional publishing industry was from what most places call the self-publishing industry. Self-publishing is no longer accurate, as we’ll see below, and I’m not sure it’s ever been accurate. It’s more of an indie publishing industry. Some writers do publish their own work, but others have created large businesses that publish the work of many writers.

I wrote a second Year in Review post in 2021 about the splits in indie publishing, and I still stand by that analysis. In that post, I identified five different areas of the part of publishing I’m calling indie. (I still haven’t found a good name for it all. Neither, it seems, has anyone else.)

While I separated them into five areas last year, I’m only going to explore four areas this year. They are:

• Actual self-publishing. It’s a one-person operation, with the occasional contract labor to help with things like covers (although we’ll see in a future post how that has gotten even easier) or copy edits or anything else the author wants to farm out.
• The Individual Data Managers. People who like playing with algorithms and use the amazing amount of data that’s at our fingertips now to enhance book sales. Sometimes those sales are for the writer’s individual work and sometimes those sales are for books the writer/manager owns a percentage of. I love many things about these folks, but my favorite part—at least for the purpose of this post—is that traditional publishing could’ve used someone like this for decades…and never bothered to hire them. Right now, given the changes at Amazon and elsewhere, this isn’t as successful a route as it was even a year ago, but the more things change….
• Small Publishers. This is a catch-all category, but suffice to say that these are publishers who started as writers but have a full-fledged somewhat traditional publishing business. Traditional in the sense that they license rights from other writers, publish the books or stories on all platforms, and pay the writer for that privilege. The payments are not standardized in this category as they are in true traditional publishing (New York based) but that’s irrelevant. These publishers exist and will become more important as the years go by.
• Small Entertainment Companies. Last year, I described them as companies that “started out as something reading- or writer-oriented.” Then they became something that was not like anything we’d seen before, and eventually sold for millions to larger corporations. I’m not describing them further, because the more I see what’s been going on in 2022, the more I think this category is growing and changing and becoming something that’s about story in all of its forms. We might discuss this in a later Year in Review post as I discuss the influence AI products are making on creativity in general.

Last year, this analysis of the publishing industry seemed pretty thorough to me, although I knew I was missing something. Then, throughout the year, I looked at writer after writer after writer who refused to believe the information coming out at the S&S/PRH/DOJ trial, and continued to move forward into traditional publishing, no matter what. I couldn’t see what drove the writers there, except for old-fashioned beliefs.

I think those old-fashioned and engrained beliefs are there. But those writers were seeing something that I had missed.

They were seeing the “top-selling books” market. I analyzed that a bit in the previous year-in-review post, the one about bestsellers. The DOJ, in making its case against the merger, isolated this market for me, and made me understand that it will always be with us.

Writers, particularly writers without any business acumen or future vision, will always try to get into this market. I hate calling it “top-selling books” because that’s not accurate at all. (See that bestseller post.) I’m not even sure there’s a good label for this category.

Books That Get A Big Traditional Advance? Books That Get Special Traditional Treatment? Books Traditional Publishing Has High Hopes For?

Let’s skip the label, since it’s so hard to make an accurate one, and go with the definition from the opinion in the S&S/PRH/DOJ case.

These are books that get advances of $250,000 and above. From pages 34-35, those books “are expected to sell well, are more likely to include favorable terms like higher royalty rates, higher levels of marketing support, ‘glam’ packages (e.g., for hair, makeup, and wardrobe services), and airfare for authors.” Further:

Publishers print more of the books they think will do well; circulate more advance copies of such books to reviewers or influencers to create excitement; push for interviews with more media outlets; and schedule book-tour appearances in more locations….Anticipated top-selling books get more attention from marketing and sales teams.

All of this I knew, of course. I’d seen it. I’d benefitted from some of it (although not a glam package, thank heavens). I also know how worthless most of this is in 2022. The “top-selling” market isn’t top-selling anymore. The numbers have gone way down.

But if a writer consumes a lot of traditional media and looks at the traditional promotions in brick-and-mortar bookstores as well as those rotating ads on the online book retailers, then they’ll see certain books get promoted time and time again.

I always assumed that those writers didn’t know that there were other better ways to get their books to readers. I thought those writers were ignorant. I still think many writers who go into traditional publishing are ignorant, willfully so.

But there’s another category of writer that I was having trouble accepting. I missed the writers who have different goals than I do. The DOJ defines these writers as “distinct sellers.” There are three points to that definition and two are more or less irrelevant to our examination here. (Those points are based on the idea that self-publishing is ineffective because writers can’t pay themselves an advance or market their books properly. Not kidding. See this post.)

I had missed that these writers have different goals than I do. The goal that caught me was the one described on page 33 of the opinion.

…authors of anticipated top-selling books…(1) care more about their publishers’ reputation and services, which ensure wider distribution of their books…

To which we can add “in the old-fashioned traditional media and marketplace.”

If it’s really important for a writer to get the full 1970s star author treatment, however reduced it is in 2022, then that writer will always go to traditional publishing, or more specifically here in the U.S., to the Big 5.

Think of it this way: The Big 5 have become network television. Once upon a time in the U.S., we had three TV networks. In the 1970s, top shows on one of those three networks could get an average of 20 million households watching every single week. (A household was generally considered to be four people, which meant that the viewership was around 80 million people at a time when the U.S. population was around 203 million people.)

Now, almost no TV show on the networks gets anywhere close to that number. Only Sunday Night Football (American football, you non-U.S. residents) gets around 20 million viewers on a weekly basis, and that’s because sporting events aren’t that much fun to watch after the fact. Twenty million viewers at a time when the population of the U.S. is officially 329 million. So, if you go by percentage of potential audience, viewership of a highly successful network TV show has gone from capturing 39% of the population to capturing 6% of the population.

If you look at how the numbers for TV viewership changed in the 1970s, you can see a parallel with book publishing. In 1970, only 4.5 million people had any access at all to cable TV. By the end of the decade, 15.5 million people had access to cable TV. The programming was nascent and not all that great. My parents subscribed to HBO in its early years, and it consisted mostly of a handful of movies, some relatively new, on a repeat schedule throughout the month. In fact, my folks let the subscription go because the price was too high for the content.

These days, network television still has a bit of prestige. It’s still advertising driven and it’s always looking for market share. But almost no one has a TV that’s set up on network only. Most people have streaming services. The number of people with cable is down, because they have to buy packages that includes channels they don’t want, so a lot of folks are cord-cutting.

As far as content is concerned, TV is in a new golden age. There’s a lot of great programming out there, and not all of what’s airing here in the U.S. and on streaming services is U.S. based. (Think Squid Game and Money Heist, among others.)

But there is more content now than anyone can watch, even if they watch in some form of triple speed 24 hours per day, seven days per week. This is a good thing, in my not-so-humble opinion. Very different from the world I grew up in.

(For my sins the other day, I was trying to remember [without looking anything up] the lyrics to the theme song for Green Acres. I hated that show with a burning hot passion, but my mother loved it, so the family TV was always tuned to CBS on Tuesday nights, which meant no one could watch anything else for that half hour or more.)

Network television still has some cachet, but not as much as it had even ten years ago. Lately, snide sideways comments have crept into the mainstream. Network TV is for “old people” or for people who are “out of touch.” The age thing is true: most of the viewers of network TV are older, just like most cable subscribers are older. From a pretty fascinating article on this year’s upfronts (the sales pitches to advertisers for next year’s shows) comes this nugget:

Tubi, Fox Corp.’s free, ad-supported streamer, promises advertisers a median age of 39 years, while viewers watching CBS programming on Paramount+ are 18 years younger than viewers on linear TV on average, per CBS CEO and president George Cheeks.

I’m pretty sure that cachet for network will disappear in the next few years, as all of the network channels now promote their in-house streaming service, and those services are attracting younger viewers. Surveys that I’m not going to take the time to find (but you can, especially if you look at The Hollywood Reporter online) show that younger viewers don’t care what service they stream from, so long as they’re not putting out a lot of money for a variety of streaming services.

My comparison to TV isn’t random. The Big 3 market share has been disrupted for fifty years. The Big 3 channels are still there, a shadow of their former selves, but they continue to play the same game. They market to advertisers, play in the traditional media, and even have some of the same programming they had in 1970. (The Today Show, anyone?)

As recently as ten years ago, I had producers contact me to option my work and assure me that they would make sure that they would approach the Big 3 networks first. I’m sure no one makes that claim any more, since those networks now get only 25% of monthly TV viewing hours (which is how viewership is measured now).

If you make the corollary between the Big 3 TV networks and the Big 5 publishers, you’ll see the future trajectory of “top-selling books.” These books will continue to travel on the same path that they did ten, twenty, and thirty years ago. The market share will get smaller and smaller, but for a while, it’ll seem like those books are the only “major” books there are.

We’re going to have the same problem that all of those TV shows are currently having—how to break through the noise and capture the attention of the reading populace. But that’s a discussion for an upcoming year in review blog post.

Discoverability is changing, just like it does every year. And some of that is trendy and some of it isn’t.

What I see for the future of the publishing industry is this: traditional will continue its not-so-slow decline. It will eventually become a tiny “top-selling” only part of the market.

Innovation will come from the indie side of the equation. Sometimes that innovation will be in the form of a blockbuster, attention-getting novel or series that breaks out of the pack and becomes a national (or international) phenomenon.

Sometimes the innovation might be a new platform or a new way to combine the actual book form with some derivative right (be that an audiobook or a homemade video or a condensed version read in 30 seconds by the author on TikTok). We’ve seen a lot of innovation in 2022, and I’ll be getting to that in the next few posts.

I’m moving off of traditional now. I actually wonder if I’ll even give traditional publishing more than a single post in 2023’s year in review. Traditional is losing its clout and knows it. What’s replacing it feels chaotic, unless you look at the history of television.

Then you know where this is all going. A lot of content, a lot of innovation, and some truly great storytelling—very little of which will be published by the Big 5. They’ll be the old-fashioned comfort food of book buying. Their writers will get the recognition they want through the old-fashioned media they admire, and little else.

The writers certainly won’t get money and they won’t retain their copyrights. But if recognition in the old system is what they want, then they might trade away everything of value to get their story to the world in the only way that those writers care about.

If the S&S/PRH/DOJ case convinced me of anything, it’s that those writers will never be this blog’s audience. I can argue with them about contract clauses and making better money and getting more readers until I’m blue in the face, and they’ll never listen, because they place more value on getting on Good Morning America to talk about their book.

Good Morning America, a show that’s been on one of the Big 3 networks (ABC) since 1975. Old media, without a lot of clout anymore.

But if that writer’s dream is to conquer the media of their childhood, then the only way to do so will be through the Big 5. If the writer can get a contract. If they’re a desirable author for those companies. And if they’re willing to sign one of those awful contracts.

Those writers will always exist. And they’ll keep the Big 5 in new books for at least ten more years. They’ll be part of the publishing industry, just like the networks are still part of the TV industry.

Those writers just won’t have the influence that they want or desire. Nor will they have the name recognition that bestselling writers had, say, in the 1980s.

Things change. Publishing has changed a lot. Traditional publishing is about to get very small, even the Big 5. They’re already fighting for every last dollar, as evidenced by all the contract terms cited in the court case, terms that claim more and more of a writer’s copyright in exchange for lower and lower advances.

But some writers won’t care about that. And they’ll jump into that market.

The rest of us will innovate and move with the new trends.

And now, this year in review will as well.

****

Thanks for indulging my look at the future in the year in review. My busy life schedule has just eased, so I will have time to go in-depth in a few trends that I’ve been wanting to examine closely. Those will come up in the next few blog posts.

I think the changes in the industry are really exciting, and I’ll be sharing those in the weeks ahead. But here’s my reminder:

This weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

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“Business Musings: Tea Leaves: The Year in Review Part 4,” copyright © 2022 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo / creatista.

I think that’s been the burning question in publishing for the past ten years. Bestsellers haven’t entirely lost their meaning, but they’re not relevant the way that they were twenty years ago. Back in the day when traditional publishing controlled 99% of the books that we saw on shelves (before ebooks), a bestseller was the book that sold the best out of the myriad of bookstores.

Even then, those bestseller lists were rigged. I can’t tell you how many times I had colleagues who gamed The New York Times list (the easiest one to buy your way onto, if you had the list of “acceptable” bookstores). It was a relief to have USA Today base its list on actual reported sales across all stores, including the chains. Even those numbers were flawed, though, because they were self-reported by most of the publishers.

Data has never been traditional publishing’s strong suit.

Last week, I examined traditional publishing and the mess that it has become, a mess that has led at least one industry expert to conclude that the services traditional publishers provide are essentially meaningless.

The anecdotal evidence has existed for years. I know several Big Name romance writers who can no longer live off their royalties like they did twenty years ago. Fortunately, a lot of them were good at money management, so they have cash stashed away and their homes are paid for.

Last year, Kat Martin, at 20Booksto50K here in Las Vegas, stated,

I think [the backlist is] a real negative for traditional publishing. Once you sell them your book, they have your book and they own it for years. And they do pay you a nice fat fee up front, so it’s kind of a trade off, but it’s not a long-term, it’s not a retirement thing, because they’re making money off the backlist. You don’t. They give you a percentage, but…the big money, I think, for long term is probably in self-publishing.

(If you want to see this yourself, go to the video. It’s about 38 minutes in.)

Because everyone comes to Vegas at one point or another, Dean and I had a lot of opportunities to talk with writer friends who are (or were) traditionally published bestsellers. Dean had lunch with a person whose work would be considered a major (mega) bestseller. That person expressed shock that the backlist, which once earned a tidy income, earned little more than a trickle now.

That person could no longer sell their books to the Big Five, despite the continuing good numbers on the backlist. The small publisher the person went with is going belly-up, and the author was looking at other ways to publish.

I can’t tell you how many conversations we have with writers in a similar position.

Not to mention the writers we’ve lost over the years. After their deaths, some of the writers’ finances get revealed, particularly when there is no money left and the families have to hold Go-Fund-Me campaigns or seek out help from writerly friends to manage the estates. Now, granted, some of the issues here come from the United States’ ridiculous health care system that requires people with long-term illnesses to go into serious debt, even if they have “good” insurance, but a lot of the problem with writers’ earnings come from the way that traditional publishing is managed these days.

The Big 5, for example, are maximizing their profits at the expense of writers. The Big 5 are colluding, according to the Department of Justice’s case which fought the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster (and won). The judge, in her opinion, points out several cases of collusion, especially on rights and contract terms, and in one case says that the behavior would be considered illegal in most industries.

I will deal with a few of these issues in upcoming posts, as I look at growing subsections of the indie publishing industry.

The DOJ defined what a bestseller is for its case. The case the DOJ ultimately proved was that the Big 5 had created a monopsony, which the opinion describes as “a market condition where a buyer with too much market power can lower prices or otherwise harm sellers.”

The DOJ narrowly defined the sellers as the authors of “top-selling” books (aka bestsellers). The DOJ called this a submarket inside of publishing. Page 24 of the decision included this definition of the submarket:

Anticipated top-selling books are those that are expected to yield significant sales, and for which authors therefore receive higher advances….The government contends that such books have distinctive characteristics, including the need for extra marketing, publicity, and sales support to allow them to reach broader audiences.

That part of the definition both parties could more or less agree upon. Heck, all of us who “grew up” in traditional publishing understand that.

The part that became controversial, at least for the duration of the trial, was the “distinct pricing,” which the government used to identify the potential top-selling books. Without going into all the arguments (which the traditional publishers eventually lost), what the government chose as its price point for its monopsony argument was a $250,000 advance and above. From pages 27 and 28 of the opinion:

…the government’s use of high advances as a proxy for anticipated book sales is logical and supported by market realities. In publishing, advances are correlated with expected sales because books that are expected to sell well receive higher advances….In fact, advance levels are set by using P&L’s, and the defining feature of a P&L is the sales estimate….Moreover, industry practices indicate that $250,000 is a reasonable place to draw the line: S&S and two of the three PRH adult divisions require approval from senior publishers or executives for advance offers of $250,000 or more; and Publishers Marketplace, a major industry publication, categorizes deals for $250,000 or more as “significant.”

Writers and non-writers alike recognize this definition. That’s what everyone thinks of when they think of bestselling books. The definition hasn’t changed much since the 1960s when a $250,000 advance would be the equivalent of a $2.4 million dollar advance today. Not many writers are receiving $2.4 million dollar advances now, but in the 1960s, a significant number of books hit that $250,000 threshold.

These days, according to page 26 of my favorite court case:

Books that meet the $250,000 advance threshold comprise only 2 percent of all book acquisitions, but they account for 70 percent of all advance spending, amounting to $1 billion annually.

Looking at it this way, the DOJ case makes sense. They’re defending a small subset of sellers in a small (and declining) subset of the publishing industry. I will deal with this part of the case in a future year-in-review post, because I ended up with a heck of a realization. (And yes, fiction writers, I’m now withholding information to create suspense. Bad me.)

I do need to note there that traditional publishers still try to sell books into the “trade channels” which means the brick and mortar bookstores. According to Mike Shatzkin,

Bookstores have shrunk in number and in size so that perhaps as little as 20-25 percent (or perhaps as much as 30-35 percent, but no more…)  of print book sales are made at actual retail stores.

In other words, these bestsellers that the DOJ defended may have 70 percent of advance spending, but they’re competing for an increasingly small market—that of the physical bookstore, which no longer dominates the industry at all.

(This is why advances for “top-selling books” have gone down in the past fifteen years.)

But let’s go back to the BBC’s question: What is a bestseller? The poor author of that piece was disappointed to learn that the books that places like Waterstones in England place on their endcaps and in other prominent positions, books usually listed as “New/Bestselling” aren’t anything other than new, and certainly aren’t bestsellers.

Those slots are for sale, so that publishers, who have spent, say, $250,000 on an advance, can promote the book inside the bookstore ecosystem. It’s a practice that has gone on for decades, but was apparently new to the BBC writer. Ah, disillusionment. It comes in many forms.

So do bestsellers. How do we define them? It’s possible to hit the New York Times list in off periods these days with as few as 5,000 book sales. Yet the writers whose books hit the list can be considered bestsellers. Their books won’t earn out (if they received a $250,000 advance) and they certainly won’t get retirement money, but they will have bragging rights.

Are the Amazon lists bestseller lists? Because they too can be gamed. The original idea behind the group 20Booksto50K was to teach writers how to manipulate Amazon’s algorithms to create sales and eventually hit the Amazon lists.

(Amazon hates this, by the way, and now changes up its algorithm so often that it’s truly hard to game. That was a discussion repeatedly at this year’s 20Books, along with a recommendation that was once an anathema to the group: Go wide.)

Are the free bestseller lists on any of the ebook retailer sites an actually bestseller list? Because the books weren’t sold. Technically, they were given away at high discount. They were what’s called in any retail industry a “loss leader.” From Shopify’s blog:

Loss leader pricing is a marketing strategy that prices products lower than the cost to produce them in order to attract new customers or to sell additional products to customers. Companies typically use loss leader pricing when they are entering new markets or attempting to increase market share.

Doesn’t sound like that would count as bestselling to me, then. And how do we define bestselling? Do we use traditional publishing’s old definition, which was the number of books sold within the first week of publication? That always screwed successful writers like Andre Norton, whose books sold consistently and at higher numbers than the Writer Flavor of The Month, but Norton’s books never hit a “bestseller” threshold in the first week of release, so she couldn’t be considered a bestseller. (Seriously.)

Do we use the DOJ’s distinct pricing number of a $250,000 advance? If we look at the advance for what it is, a loan against royalties (that appear once a book goes on sale), we should probably ask how that differs from a successful Kickstarter campaign.

In theory, Kickstarters kick start projects. Most publishing Kickstarters work the way that traditional publishing works, in that the book is finished once it goes up for “sale.” In the court-case definition, that sale is from the writer to a traditional publisher. In the Kickstarter instance, that sale is from the writer to a select group of readers who back the Kickstarter.

If we use the $250,000 figure, then Brandon Sanderson’s mega Kickstarter from March, for which he received nearly $42 million, is clearly a bestseller. Even the numbers of backers, while low compared to what his traditional publisher reports as his sales (note my hedging here; I don’t trust their numbers any more than the United States District Court For The District of Columbia does) are in the modern bestseller range. That particular Kickstarter had 185,341 backers.

Let’s take Brandon out of the equation though, and consider his Kickstarter as the outlier it is. Let’s go with the $250,000 threshold.

A quick and not thorough glance at Kickstarter on December 6 brought up projects like Will Wight’s three-book fantasy series, which funded at $760,000, and a children’s adventure book earned $384,000. A book on Japanese folklore brought in $510,000 and another turning Dracula into an interactive experience finished at $378,000.

I doubt any of those books would have received similar advances from traditional publishing. Nor would the books on regenerative agriculture (about $400,000) and collecting the art of G.I. Joe ($393,000).

If you count each backer as one book sold, the number of backers hasn’t risen to the number of sales in the old-fashioned bestselling categories. (That might not be the case, but go with it.) For Will Wight, the three books had 6,021 backers.  Augie and the Green Knight, the children’s adventure book, had 9,044 backers.

G.I. Joe had 2,797 backers (which is about what a coffee table book would sell for a small publisher). Regenerative Agriculture had 3,088 backers which, if I were doing a P&L for a traditional regional publisher, would have been right in the ballpark, spread out over a year. The Japanese folklore encyclopedia had 5,735 backers which, given the short time frame of a Kickstarter, might have gotten that book on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.

But here’s the thing about the Kickstarted books. With the exception of the limited editions (of which there are a few here), the other books are just at the beginning of their sales life. A number of them hadn’t even been posted on retailers’ sites when the Kickstarter ended.

These are just the opening sales, not the largest sales of the book’s life (as are early sales in traditional publishing). These books will go on to have a lot more sales and a long life. They will earn money for years, if the writers keep them up for sale, and the numbers of sales and readers will continue to grow.

How do we count that? We can’t.

Nor can we count auxiliary sales, like audio or foreign rights sales. Those are in flux in traditional right now, and they’re a bit dicey in indie, although getting easier.  (Yes, I will discuss this in future posts.)

That $250,000 threshold is a low bar when it comes to indie. As I wrote to a lawyer friend when the court case came out, I know a lot of self-published/indie writers who make that amount in a year on their books. Sometimes that’s on one book and sometimes it’s on several. But unlike traditional publishing, which divides that $250,000 into at least four payments of $50,000 each spread over two years (minus an agent’s commission), that $250,000 comes in monthly installments.

Kickstarters and other rights sales are bonuses.

The question of what is a bestseller is impossible to answer in the modern publishing world. It’s also probably irrelevant. To use Mike Schatzki’s definition of traditional publishing from the 1990s as a moat that protected the castle (publishing) from the great unwashed with all of their (stupidly creative books on agriculture and Japanese folklore) from getting into the bookstores, the moat has dried up. The castle has been overrun. And no one—not the DOJ, not a judge, not traditional publishing, heck—not publishing itself (if it were a real entity) can define what “bestselling” means anymore.

It’s an old term from an out-of-date business model, and one we need to replace.

But that’s about book discoverability, and that’s a blog for another day.

*****

This weekly blog is reader supported.

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

If you liked this post, and want to show your one-time appreciation, the place to do that is PayPal. If you go that route, please include your email address in the notes section, so I can say thank you.

Which I am going to say right now. Thank you!

Click paypal.me/kristinekathrynrusch to go to PayPal.

“Business Musings: The Year in Review Part 3: Bestsellers,” copyright © 2022 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog © Can Stock Photo / studiostoks.