This Strategy Builds Your Writing & Publishing Success
Of course, you have to do the work - but you like writing, right?
One writing strategy doesn’t ever fit all. Because we are individuals. And it may be odd to say this now.
Any strategy should be tactics to match a plan - which is based on a goal - which is based on your enhanced future survival.
Those who make goals, write them down, and have someone to hold them accountable - they make whatever they decide to do. It just takes persistence and faith.
That said, I’m violating what Dorothea Brande talks about in the third chapter of her “Becoming a Writer.” Well, mostly. (She says there, basically, keep your dreams to yourself until you have a decent first draft to hand around.) And my advice here is free, with the caveat that you test everything I say here.
What you read here will either work for you or it won’t. Or parts of it might work.
In looking over what I’ve produced in my longish career as a writer, and where success hasn’t followed, some things stand clear:
You have to keep metrics.
You have to keep some sort of schedule.
Finish what you start, but come back to things you had to put off.
Audience building is key.
What you Measure, You Can Improve
Your top metric is subscriptions. Because being able to send information about new releases (and samples) to your audience keeps them in the loop.
Next below that is paid subscriptions. This allows you to keep your lights on. Bills paid, etc.
Before you can track book income, you have to have published words. That’s the word count of books you’ve published that week.
Also, to succeed as a writer, you have to read and you have to write. Daily.
The Writer’s Schedule
The trick with all these lists of things is to get a schedule you can keep.
Stephen King, in his “On Writing” said his schedule was basically
Writing in the am.
Answering emails and doing business in the afternoon.
Reading at night.
His quota for daily words was 2000.
Rachel Aaron in her “2K to 10K” says to basically keep notes on what you are writing, where, and how much. Once you have several weeks of these notes, then you can see where your best production occurs and when. She found going to a local coffee shop was best, out of the house completely.
How you write, when, and where is completely up to you.
What metrics you keep are just those that make sense to you.
If you keep words written daily, then you’ll be able to improve your word count daily.
I prefer words published, as I usually work on completed works, and then need to get these out so they don’t sit around and ask for endless revisions. (Muses can be nags.)
Also, if you publish two stories a week, like the prolific Corin Tellado did. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prolific_writers) She wrote mostly short stories and novellas. An average of one and two-thirds (1.67) titles published every week for 60 years. That’s prolific.
Corporate vs. Indie — How Printers Became Publishers
“Traditional” publishing has long been misnamed. It’s all corporate, including the in-house imprints Amazon has started. Traditions change. Printers used to produce magazines and books. Then some figured out how to make more income by adding marketing to the mix. Then editors had to be hired as well as proofreaders.
Corporate book publishers also did magazine print runs. There has always been independent authors and entrepreneurs willing to pay printing, marketing, and distribution costs for their own books and magazines. The corporations eventually either grew and merged or went out of business.
When Smashwords helped ebooks became a “thing” then these print-based corporations made the ponderous shift clumsily. Print on demand was pioneered by Lulu.com helped Indie authors to keep their printed books available indefinitely — a tactic the corporate publishers have also adopted.
There have always been corporate and independent. Self-publishing is just the bottom rung of indie publishing.
Charles Dickens ran his own magazine and produced most of the content for it as serials.
As printing technology evolved and made printing more profitable, authors like O. Henry could submit short stories to magazines and make a living from their longhand writing.
Jack London came a little later and was able to make the transition to printed collections of his short stories, for the audience he’d built from magazine readers.
Pulp fiction started as magazines and after World War II went to inexpensive paperbacks (mass market.) These would republish the novels they’d been publishing in installments monthly as regular books. Many science fiction, fantasy, romance, and detective authors were able to make this transition.
Isaac Asimov is probably the most well known of these. And he is credited with over 500 books of his own, plus another 200 that he co-authored or edited.
Frederick Schiller Faust (Known for his 15 pen names such Max Brand, as well as creating Dr. Kildare) started in the pulps and moved to Hollywood script-factory at the studios there. He published over 500 novels for magazines and nearly that many shorter works as well. His books are still reprinted today.
Faust and William Wallace Cook (of “Plotto”) were known for hammering out a million words a year of production.
Authors after that point had fewer magazines to support their works, and the narrowing of corporate publishing opportunities tended to weed out authors.
Our current Internet-based publishing has enabled writers to now do their own “printing” and marketing, so filling most of the work that the corporate publishers would do. Practically, this is making it easier for the corporate publishing houses, as they can now recruit and sign indie authors. Like Amanda Hocking who already established an audience for herself.
There is a huge, almost insatiable demand for stories these days. Because anyone can buy them cheaply (or “license” them) from Amazon and others. And carry them around in bulk with their smartphone. If they don’t like the computer-rendered audio, they can also buy audio books.
Anyone can publish these days. The ones who are prolific and keep at it will be able to make a decent living regardless of the roadblocks put in their way. Corporate publishers like Amazon can’t corner every single market of indie publishing if any. Because they are a big corporation now.
Sure, you’ll succeed if you keep at it. Be prolific. Consistently publish weekly and monthly - for decades. Enjoy what you do and so will your readers. Publish wide, everywhere you can and in all formats possible. Write for your readers - what they want, how they want it.
Eventually, you’ll be able to reach for your million-books-sold title, and then your millions income earned. How fast you accomplish this is up to you. Most of it has to do with how prolific you are and how much you and your readers enjoy your writing.
The Simple Strategy for Writing Success:
Keep your metrics.
Figure out and keep your schedule.
Write as good as you possibly can and make every story better than the last.
Build your audience by writing high quality and prolific work.