I don’t go around proclaiming to be a writer. Usually, what I tell people is that I want to write for a living. Right now, I write for fun and for practice – I write a lot of fanfiction, which is not publishable for profit. Actually, I started out writing original stuff, and went to fanfiction to polish my craft. At 18, the novel idea I had was much too big for my ability.

Here’s what I’ve found in my six years of writing fanfiction – writing fanfiction, in and of itself, makes me something of a writer. It does not, however, make me an author, or a professional, neither of which I claim to be. (I typically don’t claim to be a writer outside of fanfiction circles, either.) I have found that writing fanfiction in and of itself has a value to me, but not the value I actually want as an aspiring author. I love it and will probably always do it – it’s a very different beast than trying to publish original pieces.

I’ve learned a lot from writing fanfiction. Technical stuff, as well as overall plot crafting. I’ve also learned quite a bit about what makes a story good – I’ve seen a lot of fanfiction that is better than some of the published novels out there. And that’s great, if that’s what they want to do. But, as much as I greatly enjoy myself when I write fanfiction, I am not quite satisfied.

I started writing fanfiction because I was afraid I wasn’t good enough to publish. That’s really what it boils down to – I figured I could hone my craft without feeling bad about never being published. But the thing is, I never even tried. As a fanfiction writer, I’ve won contests and have a following of 200-300 people. And yet still, I haven’t tried to publish. Fear is a ridiculous beast. I thought, hey, I won, but it was only a fanfiction contest. But then, what about those people who I’d declared better than most of the published novels on the shelf? And I think about how it’s hard to get published, and there are a million people out there who are probably better writers than I am, right? …But look at some of the shit on the shelf. (Twilight, anyone?) Plenty of people have been published without being the best of the best. So is it luck, I ask? Because, damn, I’m not really all that lucky.

It’s circular thinking at best. I know that I know how to write. I know that people are interested in my original ideas, not just my fanfiction. What the hell is holding me back?

I don’t plan to stop writing fanfiction. But I do plan to actually take to steps to get published. Because, damn it, if I don’t start trying now, when will I? I’m 27 and a hundred times the writer I was at 18. Maybe in another ten years, I’ll be a thousand times better. But if I’m always waiting to get better, I’ll never actually start.

So… guess it’s time to give it a go. Because damn it, what I write IS worth something. Time to try to cash in on that.

But what galls me more than sources that want free content, is a mentality that has pervaded our culture at large, in which people feel entitled to ask others to work for free. Isn’t there a law against slavery? In my day job life, I have a freelance PR business and work with independent filmmakers and creative types. You won’t believe how many time people who need PR have asked me to work for free—for the exposure. Seriously.

If I want exposure, I’ll go down to Malibu and lie on the beach. I’m with you: I want a paycheck.

Hmm. Yeah, I might just do that.

–
Patrick

One last thing. I think ‘exposure’ is overrated. Publishers might look for stories in a whole pile of places, from new zines to old books to Google (and it’s Google first most of the time, trust me). What they find (how good the story is) is going to be a lot more important than where they find it. The notion that no-one will consider picking up a story that hasn’t seen ‘respectable’ publication elswhere is old and increasingly shaky; a good story easily found on your personal site carries the same weight as one in a small-press journal or even a big-name magazine; shit, a less-exposed story may be more attractive to a publisher that wants to re-release it, because there’s less risk the new audience has seen it.

Insofar as exposure matters, it matters in creating a presence and a name for yourself so that when you do start approaching bigger-name publishers, they recognise you and bump you up the slush pile, or even come to you with offers. Nice in theory, iffy in practice, because there will always be other stories and other authors, and once you get past the big names, the slush pile and even the midlist are full of people with a bit of exposure, and with the best intentions from the publisher they all meld into a stew of vaguely remembered names and titles.

What’s better than exposure? Good writing and focused, careful publication efforts that put your stories and your name in the right places at the right time. Exposure is a broad brush. You need to be a fine brush. You need to be a laser pointer. You need to work at it.

And if you’re going to work at it, you should get paid for it.

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Patrick

Two things occur to me.

First, I get that publishing is complex work. I get that margins are usually razor thin, if they exist at all. I get that everything takes more time and money and energy than you expected, and a dozen times more than that if you don’t have the resources of a big multi-national company behind you. I get that the publishers of small-press journals and indie mags are doing it for love and passion and probably lose money every issue.

You still need to pay the writers. Okay, fine, let’s broaden that – you need to make it work their time and effort. Money is usually the best way, but maybe there are options like professional services and credit from sponsors. Shit, get them drunk on your dime. That works for me. Exposure isn’t enough, because they can get exposure elsewhere, and maybe control that exposure better. You need to offer something _concrete_.

Chuck already weighed in on how there are ways to find funding and capital for a project, and I don’t think I need to add to that. In the end, it’s the publisher’s responsibility to find ways to pay for what s/he uses. You found the money to get the magazine printed. You found the time to negotiate with your distributor. You found the energy to organize this whole thing. Go back to those resources and put them towards the individuals to whom you have the most responsibility – the writers who are putting their work in your care.

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And second, I want to echo what Chuck and others have said about writers controlling their ‘brand’ and managing their own exposure. Because from a publishing point of view, that works better than giving your stories away for someone else to promote.

When tracking down stories for the two anthologies I’m currently publishing, I found it a metric shittonne easier to find stories that were published and promoted by their author rather than a small-press publisher. If I do a search on subject matter, or style, or country of origin, I’ll find many short stories online. If those stories are on the author’s own site, it’s easy for me to read them, easy for me to contact the author, easy to arrange rights.

If they’re on a small-press site or in a hardcopy zine, however, it can be harder to actually dig down to the content, harder to work out where the rights lie, hard to get hold of the author. If the press goes defunct, the stories vanish from the site; if they’re printed in hardcopy, and I somehow manage to find a copy of the journal and want to follow up, I’m stymied because the emails bounce. If the press is still kicking, great, but can they get me in touch with the author? Or has that author moved house and changed email address, but not bothered to tell the press because hey, it’s not like any money was going to come from that source, so it just fell off the radar.

These are not hypotheticals. These are not issues confined to online publishing. And true, they’re not issues confined to small presses and no-payment publications; they happen with the big boys too, which is why we have to hire permissions editors to just chase up rights all day.

But the point is that authors need to retain responsibility for their stories, and they need to maintain a thread of connection to stories so that follow-up sales and publications become viable. That’s easy to do if you keep control of your stories at all times, self-publishing or releasing them into the wild yourself. It’s reasonably easy if you’re published by someone who pays you, keeps records and invoices, and gives you solid financial reasons to maintain that connection to a given piece and platform. It’s a lot trickier if you just give your shit away.

When you sell stories, you take yourself more seriously, and your publisher takes you more seriously. That’s the minumum buy-in; it’s the same reason you take poker more seriously playing 10 cents a chip than for matchsticks. That extra stake pushes everyone involved to bring their A-game to the table, and the end result is better for the writer, the publisher, and any other publishers waiting at the next table to deal themselves in.

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Patrick

You speak mighty wisdom, and it’s something that hadn’t occurred to me before: the romantic notion of “writer” as “person who writes” is a fallacy (I think my agent prefers the term “author” to remove the verb action from the term), and it comprises so much more than that. But some people think their job ends when they write “the end” on the page.

– c.

I gotta work on being less verbose. Especially when commenting while at work.

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Patrick

I’ve got a couple of longish comments, as a writer and as a publisher. They’re both coming from the same place – ie I think you’re absolutely right on this – but if that was all I was gonna say you could just write my comments for me. Which, you know, would be a lot funnier if nothing else.

Anyway, writer’s comment first.

I’m in the same boat – I won’t write for free, and I think writers who do write for free devalue their own work (although not mine, because I’m just that awesome). I get passion and love of writing – well, okay, I don’t really get it, because I’m lazy and mercenary, but I acknowledge these things are true for other, finer people than myself. For me, writing is work, it’s time and effort, and most of all it’s not something I enjoy all that much when compared to the simple pleasures of getting drunk and playing Rock Band, so I need that incentive of a payment at the end of it. I don’t write for free.

…but that’s not actually true, when you think about it a bit. Not true for me, and I daresay not true for a lot of the people saying the same thing. Because the vast bulk of the time, we write a story/story/poem/whatever without the promise of payment at the time. We write it on spec because we have the idea and want to get it down into a form where we _could_ be paid for it, but we’re probably _not_ writing to a commission or the definite promise of payment for services rendered.

(Although some of us are, or used to be. And I think that makes an impact on your attitude towards why you write and what you expect in return. I can’t speak for you, Chuck, but my time freelancing for White Wolf pushed me even further from writing for love and to the expectation that I should _always_ look to make scratch from my work. Perhaps writers who don’t dip their toe into the world of contracts and deadlines don’t have that same pressure on their convictions.)

Anyway, we almost always write for free.

So what we’re talking about, 9 times out of 10, is not _publishing_ for free. About not taking that story that you worked on because you thought it was worth the effort and time and then giving it out to the wide world under someone else’s direction with nothing in return except a namecheck and good vibes. (And apparently ‘honour’, in some cases.)

And given that the work is already done, the desire is already sated, the time and effort already went into the story with no promise of return… then yeah, okay, I can see how some writers may feel that they’ve done what they set out to do, and that they don’t need to care so strongly about payment. Because they didn’t do the writing – what they see as the actual work – for money, so why care about getting anything for the publishing, which is maybe just an afterthought? Well, okay, probably not an afterthought, but a whole different activity.

The difference to me, and I’m guessing to you and a lot of these other folks, is that I don’t see getting a story published as a separate activity to writing it. These are two sub-branches of the same activity – being a successful writer. So is marketing yourself, networking, creating an online presence, scamming speaking engagements, begging for pocket change and assassinating the character of other writers on your blog. It’s all part of the whole. And okay, the part where you actually write something is the most important part – unless you’re me, who is so goddamn lazy and easily distracted it’s taken me a year to write 3 chapters of this fucking novel – but it’s _not_ the only part.

But if you think it is, then you’re maybe not going to care so much about getting paid for what you already did. And you’re maybe going to be okay giving that stuff away, because the alternative is having it sit unread on your hard drive forever. And you can maybe hope that the free story does the work of establishing your presence and rep for you, because you don’t see that as being something _you_ do for yourself.

The real alternative, as far as I’m concerned, should be revising your self-opinion so that you see yourself as _already_ a writer, rather than someone trying to _become_ a writer. Fuck paying your dues, whatever the hell that means. If you’re serious about writing, be a writer, and own the full process of writing; control your brand, get your work out there, and get paid for it. Get paid for being a writer, even if no-one actually paid you while you were writing, because what comes after writing is important too.

If you don’t care about getting paid, that’s your prerogative, but you’re not thinking of yourself as a writer yet. Change that shit up. Because if it’s good, it’s worth getting paid for.

–
Patrick

It’s great to see you here, my good sir. Great link, and that’s worth pasting around the Twitters, too.

Rock on. I imagine artists and Photoshoppers and web-designers long must endure calls to provide free work.

– c.