Author’s Note: Being a Pitch Wars alum has offered me a unique perspective by allowing me access to aggregated information in the form of rapid succession stories about all the things that once hid behind the “After Agent” veil. Super successes. Quiet wins. Loud defeats. Agonizing almost-but-not-quites. Rewrites and redos. Some of this information (non specific, all anonymous) is gathered from that experience. Some is gleaned from reading too many articles about all the things I never thought to think about before I was agented. All the advice is my own. I compile it here not to discuss one specific event or series of events but some of the many multiple possibilities that could await you in your next chapter. It’s information I wish I had before and with Pitch Wars gone and so many other mentorships with it, my hope by putting it here is only to help someone else who may not have the same access I’ve enjoyed.
To those who have let me be part of their journeys, thank you. There’s no better crew than you.
Congratulations! You wrote a book! Edited the book! Had it critiqued! Survived those critiques! Probably edited the book again! Survived that without burning the book! You queried the book! Survived the rejections! Maybe you did that for years over the course of many books (don’t know anyone like that at all). Maybe you got that lucky book the first time. Doesn’t matter. Whatever the situation is…
YOU GOT AN AGENT!
CELEBRATE! BASK! EAT CAKE! MAKE THE TWITTER ANNOUNCEMENT! CHANGE THE BIO! SLEEP FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS! I’ll wait, because the rest of this post is uh… not as exciting as all that.
Pause. Bad News™ incoming.
Turn around now if you haven’t appropriately partied your socks off. Publishing doesn’t give us enough opportunities to do that, so we sort of have to seize the moments we can and hang on tight. Bookmark this bad boy for later. Go party some more. Eat another piece of cake. Or the entire cake. I’ll be here.
Did I party my socks off when I got my agent? Abso-fucking-lutely. With a custom cake, cookies, princess crown, photoshoot and all. Nothing is too ridiculous. THIS IS YOUR MOMENT!
Last opportunity to turn back.
3
2
1
Bad News™: There’s still a long way to go before that sweet, sweet book deal
For most of you who have been around publishing awhile, this won’t come as a surprise. (Your family will still be surprised. I have a post on that if you’re interested.) What might come as a surprise, however, even to those who have been around a little, is how much further away the book deal feels once you get over the hurdle of getting the agent.
Moving goal posts is probably a big reason. Everything in publishing is a moving goal post. The achievement benchmarks are constantly growing. It’s a bit like Pacman. A wish for a single personalized rejection turns into a wish for a partial request turns into a wish for a full request turns into a wish for ten full requests, into an offer, into three offers, into a literary agent, into one editor being interested, then three, then six, then an auction, then a five figure advance, no six, no seven, hardcover, audiobook, book tour, no BOOKCON, Netflix deal and on and on and on.
Out there somewhere, your favorite author with all the success is moving their goalpost, I can almost guarantee it. If they weren’t, they’d have written a book on how to stop doing that and be even more famous. The fact is this is an industry where there’s always something else to strive toward, to want, and that makes the “end” seem… well, endless.
Oh look, it’s me, just mindlessly eating all my goalposts without stopping for one second to celebrate any of my achievements. Don’t be a Pacman. Stop and savor your food. I mean, wins.
Practically speaking, however, if you’re someone who has queried for a bit, submission also might seem daunting because, well, you’re fucking tired. You’ve already taken a hell of a beating so to dive right into the enterprise of receiving more rejections but at arguably higher stakes is… a lot. And then there are the steps that you didn’t think about or you didn’t know about or seemed too far away when you were querying to worry about.
Well, they’re here now so let’s go ahead and talk about them.
Honestly if I made a timeline for the whole publishing process it might unroll halfway across the United States. No wonder our families don’t understand this.
Sign with Agent
If you haven’t done this yet, read your contract before you sign it! I wrote a blog about that, too. Look at me, I’m a whole wealth of information 😎 NEXT! (Look at me also trying to be brief(ish)).
Edit Letter
Woof. More Bad News™. You have to edit this thing. Again. If the book sells, this won’t be the last time, either. Buckle up, buttercup! Depending on your agent, what you both see for the book, the state of the market, the shape of the book, etc. your edits might be anything from line edits to developmental rewrites. This is definitely something you should have talked about on your call prior to your offer though, so it shouldn’t come as a huge shock. If your edit letter does come as a shock, don’t be afraid to reach out to your agent to talk to them about it! Also don’t be afraid to inquire after your edit letter if you were given a timeline and it’s unreasonably delayed.
Tip: If this is your first agent and first book, this is a weird time. It’s hard to go from querying (especially if you’ve been querying for awhile), where you spend a lot of time agonizing over everything you can do to win agents over, to seeing yourself as an equal business partner to one. Even the most supportive agents can’t fully make this dynamic different because it’s a partnership and it takes two (meaning you need to shift your mindset, too). I’ve seen it in my friends and felt it in myself, and my agent could not be more open, honest, communicative, or lovely. It’s simply a strange period of time while you try to transition from “terrified of writing the wrong salutation” or “providing 5.5 sample pages instead of 5” lest I piss off this person I desperately want to impress to “it’s totally fine to disagree with their artistic vision for my work.” But advocating for yourself is normal in any relationship, and if that can’t be normalized in your business relationship with your agent, you have an issue. I know it’s hard to hear and trite and probably no one will listen because it’s just one of those things you have to learn yourself but I’ve seen it enough now to know in my soul that a bad agent (or a bad for you agent, also a thing!) is worse than no agent. That said, be professional, as always.
So you have to edit the book again. At least once. Probably more. Super bummer. Add that to this list of reasons why the submission process can be a bit… well… soulsucking. If you’re going from querying to signing with an agent to submission for the first time, this is the first time you’ve made it this far and… it’s still the same book. In theory, this could be the book that lives with you the longest of any book in your career if it goes the whole way because once you have an agent, they’ll hopefully stay your agent and sell your next book so that book won’t go through the whole, you know, querying thing. Of course there are a myriad of publishing snags embedded in that statement, but let’s just say it’s good to be really in love with this book, just in case.
The act of writing a book is not about falling in love. It’s about staying in love.
Leigh Bardugo, MadCap Retreats, 2017
Is this me editing my book for the 9th time during #PitchWars? Yes. The one I started in 2020? Yes. Was this in 2021? Yes. Was I still editing the EXACT SAME book a year and a half later with my agent in 2023? Also yes. Does a world exist where I might still be editing the EXACT SAME book potentially into like 2026? I think you know the answer. (It’s yes).
Submission
Submission does not go down the same with every agent. I’ve heard and seen lots of different strategies (which one is being employed for your book should also have been a topic of conversation during your call). In many respects, however, submission is like Querying 2.0, but where you at least don’t have to do the querying.
Who and Where
Your agent will prepare a list of editors at publishing houses to submit your pitch packet and book to. The who will depend on the strategy your agent (and you) have devised. Some author/agent teams want to submit only to Big Five publishing houses (or their imprints). Some author/agent teams are interested in independent presses but contingent on size. Some author/agent teams want to shoot all the shots. You and your agent should discuss the strategy that’s right for you both on your call and before submission (and hey, there’s always room to revise it along the way).
Note:Many publishing houses are “one and done” just like many literary agencies, meaning your agent can only submit to one editor at that imprint. Also, there are a lot less editors to submit to than agents (it seems impossible but yeah, less shots this round, folks). Selecting editors carefully is important. It’s also important to remember (IMO) that publishing is a business of connections and your agent has built them in a way that no amount of deep research on Publisher’s Marketplace will be able to replicate (likely). You have an agent for a reason, it’s not a terrible idea to listen carefully to their suggestions for submission. Or even cede this responsibility entirely.
What
After you have an editor list, your agent will prepare a pitch packet with an introductory email that is essentially a query but to an acquiring editor. Often, they’ll include personalization from the agent to the editor (remember that connections bit from above?) about why they’ve chosen the editor in question. They’ll also include a pitch of the book, and your bio. Some agents will then wait for the editor to request your full. Querying 2.0 strikes again, yes. Although there’s some difference here. Some agents will send the full book right away because (thanks to your agent’s connections) the editor has already expressed interest. Some agents will do a combo (especially with one and done imprints). Good news? You’re not the one waiting this time. Well, you are, but you’re not on the front lines of waiting. There’s someone between you and waiting. That distance matters.
When
Many (but not all) agents will do submission in “rounds” just like querying (or how querying used to work). The round sizes and length between each will vary based on the submission strategy and breadth.
Tip: Talk to your agent before you go on submission about what their thoughts are on public mentions about submission. Submission is being talked about more on social media but it’s still not always recommended to discuss submission (or certain aspects of submission) publicly.
Bad News™ Time (again)
Now you wait. For… well, it can be a while. Unless you’re a rockstar with an auction and movie right fights on the way of course. But honestly most everyone falls into the “probably not” category where that’s concerned so let’s talk about that.
What do you do while you’re waiting?
You know, the standard hurry up and wait writing fare. Obsess over your email. Talk to your writing pals about your lack of emails. Immediately thereafter get an email but with Bad News™. Eat ice cream. Try to figure out the corporate structure of Penguin Random House and all its bazillion imprints. Doom scroll.
Or you can always go with the old addage that continues to ring true and through: Write the wait.
Like I said, Querying 2.0.
Tip: If you’re an author who wrote a series (fantasy, sci fi, romance serial, mystery serial, whatever) do not spend this time working on the second book unless you can sell it as a standalone. There’s no guarantee the book on submission is going to sell. (I cannot tell you how sorry I am to report this.) Even if it does, there’s no guarantee you’ll land a multi-book deal. Not all you see on Twitter is reality. Make life easier on yourself and get to working on another book your agent can try to sell if this one doesn’t. (Also, many agents will help you with the next idea if you’re trying to figure out which one might be most marketable.)
Not really a write the wait book but a chance to talk about my New Thing at least! Is it another adult fairytale retelling? Yep, sure is. Is it marketable? Who knows. But at least it doesn’t count as a sequel because it can be sold alone. SO THERE.
Acquisitions
CONGRATULATIONS! SOMEONE WANTS TO BUY YOUR BOOK! YOU HAVE ARRRR…
JUST KIDDING. (Maybe).
Acquisitions is the least talked about cruelty in all of publishing. You wrote the book. And probably another one (or ten). You wrote the query. And ten more versions after that. You queried everyone. And waited. Finally, you got the agent. You revised the book. Again. And maybe again. You worked on a submission strategy and a pitch packet and a revised bio and synopsis and fuck, you finally found real comp titles that work. You’ve written all the waits. Now, FINALLY, an acquiring editor says they want to acquire your book. Buy it. Make it a real live book.
You’re here.
Except there’s another step. The acquisitions meeting.
All publishing houses do this differently and there’s been much blog ink spilled over how, so if you’re interested, you can do a google and read up on it, but the gist is basically an acquisitions team consisting of loads of people who are involved in book production (from finance to marketing to other editors to distribution) all get together to listen to pitches from acquiring editors and decide what books they’re going to buy for how much.
Acquisitions is where many midlist and debut dreams go to die.
You don’t always get through. If you do get through, the offer isn’t always what you were hoping for. There’s a plethora of available emotions involved with this process that aren’t deliriously excited, and the honest truth is that sucks. It sucks to be anything less than deliriously excited over something you’ve been working toward for so long. It sucks to feel guilty because you’re not excited, you’re actually just fucking scared or worried or disappointed while you have friends still struggling in the querying trenches. Friends you believe in. Friends you know are just as talented as you. Friends you think might have books more sellable if they were here and you weren’t. I imagine that guilt is one of the things preventing us from talking about this part of the process.
But here’s the thing.
You made it this far.
When your agent tells you you’re going to acquisitions: Celebrate! Do not move that fucking goal post one inch before you’ve celebrated! Screamed! Squealed! Taken pictures! Yelled frantically! Eaten cake! Run around the house! Danced! Made an impulse purchase! Whatever it is you do to celebrate, do that thing. Don’t hold back.
Tip: Acquisitions can take awhile to get through depending on the meeting schedule and the press involved. Sometimes meetings can go over, your book might get bumped to the next meeting, it might get held up while the editor tries to convince people in the press to buy in (like Nancy Pelosi counting last minute votes). It may also take some time to get an official offer because proposals have to be drafted, signed, etc.But this is also an opportunity for your agent to nudge other editors so they can get in the game as well. Ever wonder how an auction or a preempt happens? This is how. And yep, agents nudge too. It’s a stressful time while you wait so celebrate before!
CAKE! This was absolutely as delicious as it looks, yes.
Offer to Buy
YOU REALLY MADE IT THROUGH! In software, what happens after an acquisitions team signs off on a book is what we call a “business verbal.” It basically means the business side of the house has given the financial approval for the go ahead on the purchase. The general offer terms are conveyed to your agent in a brief written proposal. This is the dollars and cents things, timeline, royalties, what is being acquired (type of rights), and other pertinent terms.
All the nudging goes next. Your agent notifies editors who still have the book that there’s an offer to see if they might also be interested in making an offer (Querying 2.0, yes). If multiple editors express interest, you might be set up for an auction. If one editor is super interested and wants to sort of steal the deal, they can make a preempt offer (like the Buy Now link on eBay, beat out the auction price by paying potentially a little bit more right now). Regardless, you’re at the finish line (at least as it relates to your and your agent’s unpaid labor, because money comes next).
Because after that you have…
Contract Negotiations. My favorite part.
But first, don’t forget to eat more cake. You’re going to be a published author (probably 😉)*
Legal Disclaimer: I am not an attorney so nothing in this blog should be construed as legal advice. It is not comprehensive and as you’re about to see, this is a nuanced subject that is very fact intensive. If you think your copyright or other intellectual property right has been infringed upon, please consult legal counsel well versed in intellectual property right matters.
Length Disclaimer: This post is long. I mean most of my posts are long but this one is really long. And it doesn’t encompass everything I wanted to talk about or could talk about. It’s just a sort of 101 guide tailored to address authors and AI and the use of books in LLM (and other tech).
The Statute
In general, the Copyright Act of 1976, as amended (the “Act”), governs the intellectual property right of copyright (there are other intellectual property rights such as trademark and patent but copyright is the primary source of conversation when we’re talking about intellectual property (“IP”) related to written works). In 1998, the Copyright Act was amended by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). Sometimes, the DMCA is referenced independently, but it is structurally part of the Copyright Act and will not be referred to separately here.
The Act grants to creators a swathe of exclusive rights related to their works, including the right to reproduce and distribute the works, create derivative works based on the work, to sell, lend, or lease copies of the work to the public, to perform the work publicly, and to display the work publicly. See, 17 USCA § 106.
Like almost all laws, however, the Act has exceptions. Many of the exceptions are narrow and extremely specific. For example, a library can reproduce one copy of a book without infringing on a copyright if the purpose is noncommercial, the library is open to the public or researchers not affiliated with the library, and the copy has a notice that it’s been copied under the Act’s exceptions. If they want to expand it to three copies, there are even stricter requirements. See, 17 USCA § 108.
17 USCA § 107 (“Section 107”) is different. This section, which outlines the doctrine of Fair Use, is a bit… murkier. Section 107 is quoted in full below.
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include– (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
17 U.S.C.A. § 107
The Fair Use Factors
The four factors listed in Section 107 (the ones with the numbers before them) are the ones courts evaluate to determine whether a use of a copyrighted work is “fair use” and thus, non-infringing (assuming it’s not an obvious case set forth in Section 107’s preamble such as a teacher making copies for a classroom).
So, which factor matters most?
It depends.
Could we have just made rules? I mean sure, but that’s hard and annoying. Plus, how would we keep our fellow lawyers gainfully employed? And give them a career path from partner to judge? <– Politicians.
Both federal appellate courts and the United States Supreme Court have repeatedly stated that fair use cases are fact specific, there are no bright line rules, and the factors should be weighed on a case-by-case basis. See, Am. Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 21 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), aff’d, 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994) (no one factor is dispositive in weighing); Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 1183, 1197 (2021) (some factors may be more important in some cases than in others); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 577 (1994) (there are no brightline rules and each case requires an independent case-by-case analysis).
Because of this, the US Copyright Office created a Fair Use Index, a searchable database compiling summaries of major fair use cases by category and type of use.
I’m going to again repeat that I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. It’s a compilation of generalities to give folks a better understanding of how complicated this can get and why, “It’s on the internet” does not necessarily equal fair use. It’s also to help people avoid pitfalls like “I thought I understood copyright and fair use because I did a Google then went and developed some AI.” Again, not legal advice but uh… I just don’t recommend that as a citizen of the world. For reasons I already touched on but also because you might get sued and honestly, getting sued sucks. 0/10 do not recommend.
You’ve been served. With a fair warning about fair use. Which is definitely not legal advice. Something I can’t give because I’m not a lawyer. I’m going to say that probably four more times this post. Just in case someone didn’t read the whole thing as people are prone to do with legal stuff (and every email I write).
Factor One: Purpose and Character of Use
When someone asks me to “bullet point” legal analysis, I laugh. It simply doesn’t work like that. So in typical “it doesn’t work like that” fashion, there are sub-factors to the factors to consider:
Commercial v. Non-Commercial Use
The so-called “Transformative Use” of the work
Commercial/Non-Commercial Use
Commercial versus non-commercial use is pretty simple. It’s what it sounds like. Is the person using the allegedly infringed upon work profiting off it? There are some interesting exceptions here because (!) we (!) can’t (!) go (!) one (!) paragraph (!) without (!) exceptions (!) Have you gotten the point yet?
But one of the exceptions I want to point out is that a use can be considered commercial if use of the material infringed upon induces someone to purchase something else. See, Compaq Computer Corp. v. Ergonome, Inc., 387 F.3d 403, 409 (5th Cir. 2004) (inclusion of allegedly infringed on book on ergonomic hand positioning included with computer sales induced purchase of computers and reduced potential liability of computer company making use commercial).
In general, a commercial use case will be more likely to be considered infringing than a non-commercial use case but because there are more factors (and sub-factors) which may be given more weight (it depends, after all), commercial use is not dispositive by any means.
Transformative Use
*Cracks knuckles* Okay, buckle up, y’all because this one is going to take some work. Actually by the time we get to the end this butterfly might have transformed from its chrysalis into a whole damn butterfly. But this is one of the most important parts for books and AI and all that so stick with me (and the butterfly).
A use is considered transformative if it adds something new to the work so that the new thing has a different function, purpose, or character from the original work. This analysis is about as squishy as it sounds. The case most frequently cited around this concept recently is the Supreme Court Case, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 143 S.Ct. 1258 (May 18, 2023). That case goes into great depth about different types of what is and is not transformative. Andy Warhol painting a Campbell’s soup can is transformative. Why? Because despite it being basiaclly an exact replica, the purpose of the soup can label was commercial – to induce people to buy soup through branding. Warhol’s purpose of painting it was to critique consumerism, something totally different. He transformed the work so it had a different purpose and character. However, Warhol’s creation of orange silkscreens based on a photographer’s photo of Prince (the subject of the actual case) were found to not be transformative because the uses by both artist and photographer were commercial and so similar as to not make the derivative Warhol created transformative.
All that to say when two people in similar fields (artists, basically) are creating something for essentially the same reason (commercial or otherwise) and the one copies the other, turning the copy orange isn’t enough to convince a court that it’s been transformed enough to make it new. Green probably doesn’t count, either.
In tech, use of copyrighted works has been found by appellate courts in several circuits to be transformative (but not necessarily non-infringing because again, there are other factors to consider). See, A.V. ex rel. Vanderhye v. iParadigms, LLC, 562 F.3d 630 (4th Cir. 2009) (Archival of student essays in an online database used for plagiarism review is transformative of the original works); Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir.2007) (Google’s use of thumbnail images in a searchable index is transformative despite not altering the images at all); Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014) (a digital library’s full-text searchable database of millions of books is transformative). TL;DR: Databases are transformative but again, that does not guarantee they’re not infringing this is only one sub-factor of many.
How these circuits determine whether a work is transformative also, shockingly, depends. The 9th Circuit has suggested the new work should not be in competition with the old one to be considered transformative. The 2nd Circuit has suggested the new work must be creative or perhaps comment on the old work itself (such as in a parody or in Warhol’s soup can). It has backtracked a bit on the comment uh… comment since then. However, all these cases talk about the “author” of the new work, and closely examining authorial intent when determinining a work’s transformative nature.
Fun fact. The current (but rapidly evolving position) of the US Copyright Office is that AI can’t be an author and that human authorship is a prerequisite to copyrights. However, surprising no one at this point, there are now some notable exceptions you can read about here. There is other tricky stuff about the repercussions around that, but I’m going to pass because we are still on factor one, everyone.
Who says this guy can’t be an author? The US Copyright Office, that’s who. And honestly probably for the best, this guy seems like he would write awful books.
Factor Two: Nature of the Copyrighted Work
Sub factors: (1) Creative or factual; (2) Published or unpublished
These are actually not complicated. The more creative a work, the more likely it is to be protected by the Act. Works of fiction are more protectable than nonfiction. Nonfiction is more protectable than say… lists of numbers (yes, that’s literally a thing that can be copyrighted in some cases please don’t ask me how I know I don’t want to talk about it).
Significantly, exploitation of creativity will weigh against the transformative nature of a work (e.g. if a transformative work transforms in a way that exploits the original creative work it’s not given as much “credit” toward fair use). I mean hypothetically that could mean maybe… I don’t know… if you created an AI program that stole a bunch of super cool creative books written by real people then used that to uh… create other books. Maybe you transformed the books into something totally new (data, an algorithm, a software model, hell a new book making a radical comment on the old). But you did it by uh… infringing then used the thing to compete against the orginal thing. I mean I’m not a lawyer but that just doesn’t seem super fair to me.
An unpublished work will also be more easy to protect than a published one, because a published work already got to have its day in the sun, essentially. It had its commercial debut and is now up for potential commentary and critique.
Factor Three: Amount and Sustainability of Portion Used
Sub-factors: (1) Qualitative; and (2) Quantitative
Qualitative
Using one line can be infringing if the one line is the heart of a work. Or it spoils the movie. See, Video Pipeline Inc. v. Buena Vista Home Entm’t, Inc., 342 F.3d 191, 201 (3d Cir. 2003). Using the whole thing can be appropriate if it’s for a purpose permitted under the other factors. It all really depends here. What is the heart of the work? And how does ripping it out damage the work, its reputation, and the author?
Spoiler alert! The Titanic sinks. Darth Vader is Luke’s father. That kid can see dead people. Jon Snow… too soon? Now THERE is a sub-factor. When does it cease being a spoiler? Someone tell my ADHD that it doesn’t need to go figure that out.
Quantitative
While a quantitative analysis is easier to understand: how much of the work was copied and used? It’s not applied in an easy-to-understand way. There’s no rule that says “You’re totally fine if you use less than 5% of the total thing.” Because of the other factors. And also because sometimes the quantity isn’t determined based on the total thing but on how much of the thing competes (Google, Inc., 804 F.3d at 223) and sometimes the quantity is determined based on how much of the thing is “relevant.” See,Am. Geophysical Union v. Texaco, Inc., 802 F. Supp. 1, 21 (S.D.N.Y. 1992), aff’d, 60 F.3d 913 (2d Cir. 1994). You can use 1% and infringe if there’s heavy weight given to other factors or use 80% and not infringe if there’s heavy weight given to this factor. So, again, while I’m not handing out legal advice here because I’m not a lawyer it’s just… not hugely advisable to apply bright line rules where there are none. Even if it would be easier.
Listen, I didn’t make the rules. Because if I had, there would uh… be some.
Factor Four: Effect on the Market
Sub-factors: (1) Direct market harm caused by the alleged infringing work; and (2) Harms that may result from other similar infringements in the future
Direct Market Harm
This is basically exactly what it sounds like. It encompasses loss of sales, profits, revenue, royalties, and potential licensing deals. Basically any allegedly infringing use can be seen as having market harm by depriving the copyright owner of sales. See,Bill Graham Archives, 448 F.3d (2nd Cir. 2006). Also included is market harm for markets the work has not yet entered or fully exploited. To prove such harm, the owner of the copyright must prove that (1) such market exist for it to enter; and (2) the copyright owner is likely to or has plans to enter that market.
What cannot be considered as market harm are uses that criticize the work (even if such criticism results in loss of sales, revenue, licensing opportunity, etc.). This is because the Act does not supersede protected First Amendment Rights to free speech.
Future Harm
Courts also take potential future harm into consideration. The concept here is basically, if we allow this one through, we’re setting a precedent for others like it, and what kind of economic impact will that have on the copyright owner?
This one might be important to pay attention to in some of the upcoming LLM cases (e.g. Silverman, et al. v. OpenAI, et al., N.D.Ca. 3:23-cv-03416) because the stakes there on future harm are potentially quite high not only for the authors involved in the lawsuit but for creators everywhere.
Random Other Things
In typical court fashion, there are also some other random things that have been tacked on during the years that courts consider when making fair use determinations. I won’t belabor the nuance because if you’re not asleep already you’re pretty much a hero. The bulleted key points on some bigger more relevant ones are below:
The use is consistent with industry practices
The use provides a signficant benefit to the public
The infringment was knowing and in bad faith
Conclusion
TL;DR: Copyright infringement is bad. Fair use is complicated. And not always the fairest. There are rules but they sorta suck and can change with a light breeze. I’m not a lawyer. If you’re having an issue with your IP or you want to develop AI that uses IP that isn’t yours (including use an open source base that uses data you’re not sure where it came from, call your In Real Life Lawyer).
Legal Disclaimer: I’m not an attorney, so nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. If you believe your intellectual property rights have been infringed upon, please contact your agent, your publisher, and/or your (or their) legal counsel. The Author’s Guild is also available for many traditionally published (or agented but not yet published) authors.
Work Disclaimer: These opinions are my own and are not intended to represent the views or opinions of my employer.
Yes, I work in software compliance. Not in the arts, but in healthcare. Still, the ethical constructs remain the same. My job is to guard data with, to be frank, utter ferocity. I take this job extremely seriously. Because at the end of the day, data isn’t simply data.
It’s also my job to remind people of that.
Data is protected health information. Emphasis on protected. It’s that diagnosis you’ve been hiding from your family because you don’t want to worry them. It’s the abortion you had when you were young held between you and your doctor. It’s your birth sex that no one has a right to know except you and your OBGYN. It’s your weight. Your mental health history. Your struggles and triumphs. It’s precious. Sacred.
Data is personal information. It’s the social security number you fought to earn over a course of years as you worked toward citizenship. It’s the driver’s license you won back after you won your sobriety. It’s the credit score you battled to on your way out of poverty. It’s the zip code you’re hiding from your abusive ex.
Data is dreams. It’s decades of callused fingers holding a pick to strings. Frustration as you mixed and remixed colors trying to capture the exact shade of pink in that sunset over your grandmother’s funeral. It’s the cool grass beneath your head, a book in your hands, reading about a female knight for the first time, realizing you might be able to write stories like this too if you tried. It’s burning, bloodshot eyes staring at draft after draft after draft. It’s bitten down pens and pencils and charcoal stained hands. It’s college tuition money you’ll never see back in your lifetime, and arguments with parents that echo in your ears as you chase a dream so far out of reach but worth chasing all the same. It’s years of jobs you hate, trudging home exhausted, trying to find time for the only thing that quenches the ache in your soul. It’s a first commission. A demo tape slipped into the right hands at the right time. An advance split into four payments that dwindle to nearly nothing but not quite. The not quite is important because it’s something after years of nothing, nothing, nothing.
Yes. I take data seriously. Data ethics, too.
So imagine my surprise and dismay when I signed off my work computer after giving an hour and a half long presentation on ethical AI and secure coding to my compliance and data security teams only to find ethics had once again been breached in relation to my dream: publishing.
For those who don’t know, yesterday, a company incorporated in Oregon doing business under the name Shaxpir, went viral in the Twitter writing community after it was revealed a project called Prosecraft (operating under the Shaxpir name), had collected thousands of books to be fed into its algorithms without authors’ or publishers’ knowledge or consent. At this time, it’s unknown how many books or authors were affected but Prosecraft boasted of having a database of more than 25,000 books. Authors like Angie Thomas, Victoria Aveyard, and Kate Elliott addressed the issue head on, stating consent was not given for their books to be listed there (yet there they were). Dozens of other authors confirmed the same. Some of them friends. Debuts. People I know who have clawed their way through impossible odds to arrive to… this.
Shaxpir founder Benjamin Smith took the Prosecraft website down after public cries of outrage and issued an… apology looking thing, but made no mention of the data. Not where he got it, or if he was keeping it, or if it was indeed fueling Shaxpir, the software as a service business model billed at $7.99 a month. According to the Shaxpir site, though, the Prosecraft data is indeed part of the paid model.
Note that Shaxpir also boasts a “Concept Art” feature. Just pointing that out.
Taking the website down but not deleting the data is a big deal. It means there are authors out there who don’t know if their books were part of this because they didn’t get a chance to search the website before it was shut down. I myself was in the middle of searching the website for friends’ books (and actually my own once upon a time self-published books) when it was taken down. I found one final friend’s book before it went dark. I never got to check on my own.
There’s a larger picture, here, however. It’s one I talk about frequently in my day job and one that hovers at the front of my mind almost constantly. It goes beyond one man running a two-person startup, and shit apologies, and the fury burning through my veins when I see my friends’ books blatantly stolen as robot food.
It’s a picture about the larger picture.
Technology isn’t inherently evil. We can very easily make it so, though. Because we make it in our image. And when we make technology without considering the global picture, we recreate ourselves, only worse. The decisions come faster, are often unexplainable and undetectable (even to their makers), and in being so, are often indefensible. This is sometimes called the “black box” problem. To avoid it, AI and algorithms (deep learning in particular, which to be clear, Shaxpir does not appear to have been using) have to be created with purpose, transparency, ethics, and a global framework in mind. They cannot be created simply because wow, wouldn’t that be cool?
Wouldn’t that be cool? The question that started a thousand dystopian novels. (That some techbro went and data scraped for their LLM lolz.)
This was titled “AI This was titled “AI generated dystopia.” Whether that means it was generated by AI or the dystopia was generated by AI is unclear. Perhaps both. Both seems appropriate. I try to avoid AI generated art in these posts (where I can, I’m no artist and sometimes can’t tell) because many of them are using LLM to create their generative art which is stealing art the same way LLM text features are stealing books but the transparency with the title gave me enough pause to be equally transparent with the use case here. Because transparency is what I’m about to talk about.
The fact is AI isn’t going away. It’s been here awhile and it will continue to be. It’s doing amazing things in a lot of places. It’s also hurting people. Whole industries, actually. Like the people who act as its gods, it creates and destroys in their image. It can be biased and prejudiced and innovative and beautiful and ethical and transparent and honest. It can learn and develop and change and evolve. It can become worse. Or better. It depends on the guide.
Software developers are creators, too. We just speak a different sort of language. Are they all going to listen? I’d be naive if I thought so. But if enough of them do, we’ll be a hell of a lot better off.
So that’s my goal every day. To help people in tech understand these aren’t just points of data fed to a machine. To encourage them to slow down for five minutes so they might better understand the base of that LLM learned to speak human by STEALING from a human. From someone like you. Like me. From someone who had a dream.
A dream just like theirs, really.
Am I angry? Yes. Today more than other days. Honestly, I started this blog to be a seething commentary about Shakspir and AI and all the shit tech keeps stealing from us. But as I wrote, I realized I only feel sad. And tired. Maybe a little scared, too. I’ve fought so hard for my dream and I’m not ready to give it up.
From that springs hope. Hope for ethical, responsible AI. Hope that we can find common ground. Hope that we’ll be able to understand one another if tech can slow down and maybe we can all sit down and work this out together.
Before we destroy all the data. Or all the dreams it holds.
Author’s Note: Full disclosure, my full time job is in software (healthcare sector). I’m the Vice President of Compliance, meaning I’m highly involved in data security and data sourcing. I live and breathe data issues not only in my publishing life but in my 8-8 (ha!) as well.
Disclaimer: I am not an attorney and nothing in this post should be construed as legal advice. Please consult an attorney in your jurisdiction should you require legal advice.These opinions are my own and are not intended to represent my employer.
The [Copyright] Act “reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts.”
Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aiken, 422 U.S. 151 (1975)
Right now, a bot is scraping this for my words to train a machine to sound like me. Well, not like me specifically, because I’m a nobody, but like a human who is well-read and well-studied. A human who happened to get an 800 on the English portion of the SAT. Who has a degree in English literature from a highly ranked university. Who has written sixteen or more books. Who has a literary agent. Who has spent seemingly endless waking moments since she was four chasing the dream of becoming a published author. Who has sacrificed other dreams, other lives, other paths in that pursuit. Who has cried, screamed, bled, sweat, studied, pulled all nighters, read millions of words, wrote millions of words, all pushing toward that singular goal.
Thirty-one years of language to eat. Steal. Regurgitate for a profit I’ll never see.
It’s hard to figure out how to come at this topic, honestly. There’s a legal angle. What are the four factors that make a copyrighted work “fair use?” A technical angle. What is data scraping? A large language model (“LLM”)? An emotional angle. Why are writers and artists and actors so pissed? A philosophical angle. What does it even mean for something to be art?
I know them all. Each one pumps through my rapidly beating heart, coursing through my veins, itching to be freed through my fingers. Tabs fly open as I try to discern what angle I’ll take. On my right screen, tabs upon tabs upon tabs of Westlaw copyright cases. On my left screen, emails and articles about LLM and NLP (natural langauge processing) and the differences between the two. Techopedia ready to go, to explain. All the while, thoughts of that horror movie M3GAN flash through my mind.
Does AI write itself as the villain, I wonder?
Perhaps that’s how we know it truly is starting to come alive…
Something shudders through me. An echo. A whisper against the back of my neck. Somewhere, a ripple.
My ADHD flies into overdrive. Speared on by the unknown. The unseen. Desperate. Trying to outpace a thing I know I cannot outrun.
On the right screen, I open the Author’s Guild’s open letter to generative AI leaders: Open AI; Alphabet; Meta; Stability AI; IBM; Microsoft—God there are so many already, since yesterday it seems—begging them to stop this madness, to pay writers their fair share. Another tab. The NPR article about median writers’ income for 2022 being $23,000. Poverty levels for the US for 2022. $13,590 for an individual. $18,310 for two. $23,030 for three. There it is. Poverty comes quickly. A single child and a spouse not working for whatever reason, there are so many reasons these days. A single parent and two kids. Options there, too. Nevermind I don’t know anyone who can live off $23,000 on their own in Philadelphia and publishing doesn’t pay for an author’s healthcare.
Our dreams. Our dinner. Our lives. Our livelihoods. Is there nothing they can’t have?
They’re the newage Ursula, stealing our voices and our princes and our happily ever afters. There’s probably a book there somewhere if the bots don’t scrape it first.
My neck aches. I press my fingers into the place where my skull meets my spine, molding my skin like clay. Skin. Clay. Sleep. My stomach growls, reminding me of my humanity. I ignore it. Move forward.
I’ve written this before. Literally and metaphorically. I’ve been drafting it in my mind. But a draft I spent hours on also disappeared. I thought about giving up. It doesn’t matter anyway. I can’t keep up. But it has to come out. I’m angry enough to write it again. And again. And again. Our dreams are being fed to the machine while we aren’t being paid enough to feed ourselves.
Virginia Woolf comes to mind. Money and a room of one’s own is needed to write fiction. Art is for the economically privileged. It always has been. Does it surprise us that art was the first to fall victim to Silicon Valley?
The fair use doctrine permits courts to avoid rigid application of the copyright statute when, on occasion, it would stifle the very creativity which that law is designed to foster.
Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990)
So far, there are concrete answers. What is fair use. What is LLM and NLP. Why are authors and artists and actors mad.
What is literature, though. That has me frozen.
Except… maybe there aren’t concrete answers for everything.
The court notes the purpose of the Campbell’s logo and label was commercial: to advertise soup. Warhol’s purpose in reproducing the image was the opposite: to comment on consumerism. Therefore, the use was fair.
Controversial statement but… I wonder if the designer of the label, someone who was presumably a real human who didn’t profit off the can label nearly as much as Warhol profited off the reproduction of the soup label, finds that particularly fair.
I wonder if that person cares they are unknown for their creation while Warhol is known for its reproduction.
I wonder if I am also afraid of AI replacing me into anonymity.
Art is my only potential legacy, after all.
Pertinent to this discussion, I googled “Who designed the Campbell’s soup logo” and Google highlighted Andy Warhol despite his name not making an appearance in my search because hi, bots. Also, people apparently ask if Andy Warhol designed it. Just saying. But for the record, Dr. John T. Dorrance created the logo in 1897. In 1898, Herberton L. Williams swapped the orange and blue (yikes) colors out for red and white because he saw Cornell’s colors at a football game and liked them better. Herberton later became the company’s treasurer, comptroller, and assistant general manager, so probably we don’t have to cry too hard for that guy.
Is it the intent of our art that makes it art, then?
Because as someone who has spent a lot of time in writing workshops listening to snobbery about the bastardization of literature due to genre fiction’s pandering to commercialization; who has also spent a lot of time listening to programmers talk about programming rules that sound a lot like intent, let me tell you about how that is a slippery slope.
The court goes on.
The Court of Appeals noted, correctly, that ‘whether a work is transformative cannot turn merely on the stated or perceived intent of the artist or the meaning or impression that a critic—or for that matter, a judge—draw from the work. [O]therwise, the law may well recogniz[e] any alteration as transformative.'”
Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 143 S.Ct. 1258 (May 18, 2023) (Internal Citations Omitted)
Not intent then. Or at least not entirely.
Relief floods me.
Still, legality and literature have entangled in my mind. Day job and dream job comingling again.
What makes something art.
Life.
The answer is life.
It’s a falsity that you must suffer to create art. But you must live. My art requires suffering because that’s my lived experience. All that’s truly required, however, is a lived experience. Write what you know. You.
Art is about the individual life experience. The individual voice. The individual expression. Not a little of me and a little of you and a little of him and a little of her and a little of them strewn together to create one voice, one story, one experience. Art requires many singular voices and stories and experiences. Canon but more importantly, culture, then becomes that body of singular works. The thousand, single stories. Then a thousand more. Art isn’t a single story put together by a thousand voices. That’s what creates the danger Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns of in that TED talk. The danger of the monolith. AI puts together experiences that cannot be unified or reconciled. That’s exactly what marginalized voices have been fighting against except so much worse. It’s the stripping of language of all its nuance. All its individuality.
We have forgotten.
Words have power.
We have to pay people appropriately, so they can wield them well.
Author’s Note: Hard truths time. Before you go in, some disclaimers about where this is going so you can read it in the right headspace. This isn’t a subtweet blog, but it does vaguely track the relevant discussion of the publishing hour (how an agent rejects you) and my vast experience being rejected by pretty much every agent in this business (including my own at one point). It’s for newer writers and is more relevant to 2023 than not. It’s not particularly positive (or I would argue negative, it’s honest). It’s based on my experiences in both self-publishing and traditional publishing over the past decade, though focuses mainly on traditonal publishing. It can thus be reflective of only one person’s point of view, which as I like to remind folks is white and cisgender. It contains minimal advice except some tricks I’ve seen used and to practice mindfulness and self-care. Finally, I think it’s fair to note that I am (finally) agented, so I do have a rose-colored perspective on querying (sort of, lol).
Content Warnings/Trigger Warnings: Discussion of rejection, loads of it.
Welcome to Publishing, Everything Sort of Sucks Here
I’ll be the first to admit that when I (re)entered the querying trenches in 2017, I was not prepared for what I was about to face.
Neither failure nor rejection were particularly new to me. I was querying on the heels of what I considered two failed self-published books. Those books were rejected by what felt like the world. They had also been specifically rejected by hundreds of bloggers, bookstagrammers, and Goodreads reviewers* who I had to pitch to one by one, according to their varying instructions. Those emails were frequently rejected and ignored. Sometimes, they were accepted, only for me to spend dwindling money on printing and shipping to the result of no review. Once (only once, a victory, honestly!), one was read, resulting in my first one-star review.
Not so unlike querying, truth be told. Except querying never cost me hundreds of dollars.
*(No shade to reviewers, by the way, an honest review is an honest review, and your time is your time! You’re as unpaid as the rest of us, I mention this experience only for a close comparison to the traditional publishing world’s rejection to link the two together).
This is what I told myself as I prepared to query (for real, as an adult) my first novel.
I was ready.
The first of many lies I would tell myself over the next five years.
The Rejections
It’s been awhile since I did a nice chart here, so let’s start with one of those then break it down from there.
Was this a pricing chart before I reformatted it? Maybe. Is it missing Closed No Response? Yes. Did I try to reformat it and give up? Also yes.
The Form Rejection
In 2023, the form rejection is the most common type of rejection to receive (besides potentially Closed No Response, more on that at the end of this section). I hear legends this wasn’t always the case, but for me, it sure as shit has been, so I’ll take people at their word when they say that wasn’t true in 2017. (I also hear that a 20% request rate was a perfectly reasonable thing to aspire to in 2017 but again, rocking that big goose egg for years over here, so I’ll have to believe other people when they say that).
What does the form look like? Well, it depends on the agent. Some agents have forms that say “This is not right for me, but thank you.” Some agents have forms that are so un-formlike I (and others) mistake them for personalized rejections. Some agents have multiple versions of form depending on what (in their mind) went wrong (thanks for submitting this, but I don’t accept this genre versus thanks for submitting, but I didn’t connect the way I’d hoped, for example).
If you’re new to querying and aren’t sure what might be a form, the best way to figure out if you’ve been formed is to go to QueryTracker and read the comments for that agent. Lots of people will record what the form for the agent is or what they believe it to be. If you received the same thing as others, you’ve been formed. Try not to stress, it happens to literally everyone at least ten times (or ten dozen). (If you did not get formed ten times or more, please happy dance elsewhere, this post is not for you).
Sample of someone reporting a form response on Querytracker. I didn’t pick on this agent if you know this form, I literally just signed in and clicked on the first form rejection I saw on my account and scrolled through to find this.
When I started querying, I hated form rejections. I particularly hated form rejections of the “this isn’t for me, bye” variety. I hated them for all the reasons many new (or newly querying) writers hate them. Because they didn’t give me any information about what was “wrong.” And there’s so very much that can be wrong. The query, the pitch, the idea, the pages, the writing, the genre, me.
What. Was. Wrong.
If I knew what was wrong, I could, presumably, fix it.
Hard truth. A lot of the time, you can’t. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. If you’re doing The Things (getting beta reads, critiques, improving your craft, putting together a strong query package, listening to fedback and taking it, etc.) you’re probably doing nothing wrong. You are simply having bad luck.
I also hated them because they felt cold. Some didn’t have my name, or the title of the book. I had no indication if the agent had even read the damn thing.
Hard truth. They are cold. I don’t know these people. They don’t know me. I’m a drop in the bucket. It isn’t personal. Therefore, it doesn’t feel personal. That hurts because it is personal. Here I was, putting all this time and effort into something, no not just something, my dream, and on the other side of a screen someone didn’t even take time to read it! It felt unfair. Unjust. Wrong.
Yeah, there’s that word again. Wrong.
I thought if I could prove to an agent I work harder than everyone else I could show I deserved this more.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
I don’t work harder than everyone else. I work hard. There are people who work harder. I know that without a doubt now. I admire these people. Envy them. Sometimes worry about them. There are people who deserve this more. I feel guilty about that. Frequently. There are better writers than me. People who I feel have stories more worthy of being told. My distinguishing factor is I was determined and lucky. I hope loads of others will be too. Some of them already have been, and I cheered for them harder than anyone.
After I got over myself, of course. Some days I still need reminidng, and humbling, yes. That’s normal. Human. Don’t hate yourself for it, but do try to be better in spite of it. Be kind to yourself when you fail to be better, then try again. Forgive when others around you inevitably fail (and with the exception of a few, most everyone will fail at this along the way).
Anyway, back to rejections.
By year four of querying, I started to prefer form rejections. Better than a no-response. Better than a personalized rejection that made me wonder if the agent liked it why not request? Better than feedback that suited one agent but not another. Forms were tidy. An answer to pilot me to QueryTracker to mark this one closed and move to the next. In and out like a wave.
Were they gentle like a lightly lapping wave? Not really, no. Did some of them hit me in the back like a newbie surfer, dragging me off my board into the depths of existential fear? Sure. Was I probably disassociated by year four and rejection many hundred? I mean, yeah. Listen, I said they were like a wave. That can be all kinds of interpreted.
Also by year four I had (sort of) learned that I wasn’t really doing anything wrong and even if I was, agents weren’t here to teach me about it. I had to learn from other writers, from critiques, from doing the work. But more than anything, I needed the right idea at the right time pitched to the right agent in the right way.
Honestly, it’s shocking it only took five years and four books.
The Personalized Form Rejection
According to the Wisdom that Was, personalized form rejections used to be much more common than they are now. Again, I never saw one until Pitch Wars, but I’ll believe people. They’re not common now. At all. If you get one, celebrate. Believe it or not, this rejection is a victory. It’s the partial request of the new querying era. Someone liked your work enough to spare the time to tell you (even if it’s a line, in this overworked, underpaid industry, a line is money not made so you earned that, celebrate it).
If you’re not sure what a personalized form rejection is, usually it’s the form plus something a little extra specific to your book or pages. Maybe it calls out a character or a particular element of your world the agent thought was interesting or unique. Maybe it’s more generic. I received one for my Pitch Wars book that said, “I definitely remember this one from Pitch Wars!” Then go on to praise my writing and premise.
Personalized rejections are (in today’s market) an indicator that your query and sample pages are “working.” They aren’t a reflection of your work.
Hard truth. They still feel that way.
If there’s one thing that’s true in this business, there’s two. Here are two things to know about publishing and personalized rejections:
The goal post will keep moving, so celebrate every win as best you can (this is harder than it seems and doesn’t get much easier). When I was in the query trenches, I always seemed to be doing Worse Than Everyone Else. Friends would bemoan their losses and I would envy them for where they were. Must be nice to be sad about a personalized rejection. I’ve never gotten one. Then, one day I got one. Annnnnd was sad about it. Quickly, my bitterness turned to Must be nice to be sad about a partial rejection, I’ve never had a request. Then, one day I got one. Which wasn’t good enough because it wasn’t a full. Which wasn’t good enough because it wasn’t 10 fulls. You see how this escalates. It’s hard. Keeping your eyes on your own paper isn’t really possible with social media or writing friends and you need at least the latter, I’ll be honest. You’re going to compete against your friends, your peers. You’re going to feel these feelings (probably, or maybe I’m the only asshole, but I like to think not). When you do, acknowledge them for what they are, and keep them on the inside or with an extra trusted friend or two. Better, have a friend to call you on your bullshit, gently and with compassion, but honestly. Megan Davidhizar is mine (ps if you like YA thrillers you should totally Add Silent Sister On Goodreads, it’ll blow your mind I should know I read it FIRST and told her then it would be The One which was of course, correct). Megan parrots my own advice and moving goal posts back to me with the memory of an elephant, and the humor of a patient saint. “Oh, look at that, remember when you said LAST TIME this thing then you moved your own goal post? Funny how it becomes impossible to do things.” Okay sure, fine, she’s right. My sincerest wish is you all find a Megan to annoy the shit out of you with the exact right amount of tough love plus validation you need.
“Near misses” are a thing to seek and destroy from your brain. The concept of a near miss is somehow more haunting than a flat out nope, goodbye. It’s like that partner you break up with not because anyone did anything wrong but something just wasn’t quite “right.” The person you think about every once in awhile, a nagging worm in your brain. You know the one. The one who got away and left you with this whole world of possibility you didn’t explore for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. The one you think about reuniting with on an Oprah episode in some serendipetous act ten years in the future “First Loves Reunited.” After all, it wasn’t bad it just wasn’t right but that could have been fixed, couldn’t it? Nope. That person is not The One. And your book, I’m sorry to say, was not the agent’s The One. There was nothing fixable to make it “right.” Not because it was horribly broken but precisely because it wasn’t. It’s fitting a square peg into a round hole. The square is perfect, the circle is perfect. They just don’t fit. Acknowlege you wrote a great square and you need to find your square hole, and do your best not to let that near miss eat you alive. Easier said than done, I know. Which is why I prefer the form rejection now!
Why this rando image you ask? Well, because the dog on the left looks like Megan’s dog and the calico cat on the right is sassy because calicos always are which is how I feel today. Plus dog and cat, square peg round hole, fits both points. Now you know how my brain works. Welcome to the circus, it’s weird in here sometimes.
Feedback
All right, I’ll be honest here, I don’t know too much about feedback because I’ve literally only received it one time, and it was from my now-agent on a book they passed on prior to offering on another book. The feedback was lovely, in depth, and kind. It made me want to revise the book, which I did. It resonated the way a CP’s feedback resonates, and was in large part the reason I queried my agent with another book immediately thereafter despite having quit writing forever. Because I know feedback like that from anyone, but especially an agent is rare.
Feedback in a rejection (i.e. not a request to revise and resubmit) can be a bit perilous, however. What one agent dislikes or thinks should be revised isn’t always the same and feedback is so rare these days it’s unlikely you’ll get enough of it to see the same thing repeated often enough for you to say okay yes, this is the market saying I need to revise this, or this is objectively a hole in the craft, or whatever. Revising your book for an agent who didn’t offer on it can change something another agent would have liked. Or, it may change absolutely nothing but waste time you could spend working on a new project. Worse, you’ll never know which it was, so there’s a good chance you’ll end up doing that should I should I not have dance forever more. Or, for awhile, anyway.
The best advice I have on feedback is to take it and run with it only if you know in your gut it will make your book better for you. Not anyone else. You.
The book that my now-agent gave me feedback on? I revised it after I’d shelved it. Because I wanted to see if I could make it better. Because the feedback made me excited to write again. I revised that book one final time for me and no one else. It’s a better book for it. I’m a better writer for it. Revise to make the book better in a way you believe in, and your decision will hopefully be easier to swallow regardless of what happens.
CNR (Closed No Response)
Okay so first, CNR means Closed No Response. It took me more years than I’m willing to admit to learn this, so you’re not alone if you’ve been head scratching.
What it means is the agent didn’t respond to your query. That “No response means no” policy you see on many agent websites these days. Next to the form rejection, the CNR is probably the most common form of rejection these days (maybe more common?). It’s the source of much controversy and despair. I hate it. I’ll never learn to accept it. Well, I could, but the only way I could publishing will never be able to accomplish, so I suspect we can both continue to stubbornly ghost and glare.
The way, you ask? Well, as a neurodiverse individual, I could probably be persuaded to grudgingly accept the CNR as I’ve accepted the other forms of query rejections if it followed rules. The hardest thing for me with the CNR has always been how erratic it is. No response means no except not always. No response means no within 6 weeks not in 2023 though, lolz. No response means no for some agents here but not others but good luck figuring out who.
I’m not faulting agents for this. They’re busy. It takes time to send even a form rejection. Time they don’t have because they’re not getting paid unless they’re selling books. Timelines are impossible to keep. Websites are obnoxious to update, so updates are pushed to the neverending to do list of small business life.
It’s a reality, though. CNRs are hard. And sometimes they aren’t actually CNRs. Rejections you closed out in QueryTracker (and your heart) pursuant to a no response means no policy might come again in a form months later. They sneak out of nowhere and knock you right off that surfboard. Shitty, silent waves.
Hard truth. All you can do is brace yourself for them.
I have a CP who marks every single query CNR in her spreadsheet as soon as she sends it. Something about ticking a box from “mystery void” to “known rejection” makes her feel better than taking an empty box and ticking it to “mystery void” after months of waiting (and potentially getting hit again months after with a form). It makes a certain kind of sense to me, really. It’s killing the hope before it gets a chance to breathe. One of those it can only get better from here kind of tactics.
The Conclusion of Care
In my author’s note, I said this blog doesn’t really have advice. I guess it has some, but I don’t profess to know the secrets for everyone. Different things work for different people. I always recommend setting up a separate query email just for that, then turning the notifications off. I know people who have loved ones take control of their query inbox, filtering out rejections for them. Others who only check the inbox when they have the ability to take on the rejections.
Some people try to find meaning in every form, every word. Some people find solace in research, in trying to perfect the query for every agent. Others say fuck it and send queries to everyone (but never in a blind copy or absolutely not carbon copy sort of way). Some people have to space out rejections by querying in batches of 10-20, others prefer the “bandaid method” as I call it of making the query package as strong as possible, then querying every agent on their list all at once.
I’ve done it all. None of it has made the rejection easier.
Friends have made it easier, though. If there’s one piece of universal advice I could give to everyone it would be that: Make friends. Now. Don’t wait. Don’t do this alone.
At the end of the day, rejection is rejection. Yes, it’s part of the business. Yes, you’re going to face a ton of it. No, I’m not going to preach thick skin because some people can’t do art without access to their skin. Me, for one. My trauma history causes me to disassociate when I’m facing a lot of upset. It helps me work well under pressure when the work I have to do is survive. When the work is logical and practical and decision-centric. It doesn’t help me write. I can’t access the feelings I need to write in that state.
What I need to do in those moments isn’t pull up my bootstraps and keep working. It’s grieve. Sleep. Cry. Scream (in private). Rage. Vent (in private). Then heal. And if and when I’m ready, try again. And again. And again.
Hard truth. Rejection is part of the business. There’s no easy way to do it or receive it. It simply is. Naked, plain, true.
Welcome to publishing, everything sort of sucks here.
As Jerry Springer (RIP) used to say, “Take care of yourself, and others.”
Author’s Note: It would be in poor taste not to acknowledge my huge privileges in life before saying the things I’m about to say. I’m white, cisgender. Though I grew up economically disadvantaged, my father got it together by my teenage years and brought me to middle class suburbia for high school which created another set of wild and varied life experiences for another discussion another time. I inherited money because of my privilege, the unions, and because my grandparents were depression-era savers. Many suffered and continue to suffer much worse than I did as a result of not only the financial collapse of 2008 but because of systemic injustice built into our society. Those are their stories. This is only mine.
Content and Trigger Warnings: Discussion of financial instability and insecurity, debt, recession, job loss, C-PTSD, misdiagnosis, brief mention of sexual assault and domestic violence (nondescriptive).
I write about my experiences with my creative writing workshop a lot. Here. On Twitter. I crack jokes and complain about lit fic. I talk openly about how the pursuit of writing The Next Great American Novel broke me.
That’s a simplistic view of things, truth be told.
What really broke me was the 2008 financial crash.
Which started in 2007. Arguably before then, but for this post let’s start in 2007.
In February of 2007, I celebrated my 19th birthday as the US housing bubble burst. I was a freshman at UNC Chapel Hill, trying to find myself. Partying too much and sleeping at weird hours. Taking a Milton class I loved, learning how the devil is the best character, and making friends with a girl whose friendship I cherish to this day. Dating a frat boy who abused me while I crushed on a girl so beautiful she terrified me, then a boy who would later become my first real love.
I had no idea what a subprime lender was. Or that in April the largest one in the US, New Century Financial Corporation, would file for bankruptcy, starting an economic slide that would change the course of hundreds of millions of lives across the world. Including mine.
In September of 2008, the US government announced it would seize control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I was 20 now, a junior fully emeshed in the competitive creative writing program that had brought me to UNC in the first place. I’d put away fantasy, trading it for lit fic. I’d also put away partying, trading it for studying. Shakespeare, Milton, Chekhov, Faulkner, Woolf, Hemingway, Joyce, Hurston, Marquez. Quotes about shitty first drafts and butts in seats and killing darlings written in caligrophy pens wallpapered my dorm room. My sights were set on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. The most prestigious MFA in the country. That spring, at UNC, I would be eligible to apply for advanced fiction writing. Getting in was one leap away from my year-long senior honors thesis and the recommendations and portfolio I needed for Iowa.
Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.
William Faulkner
The financial crisis made its way to campus in the way of chatter about sudent loans. Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac held not only mortgages, but student loans.
I was one of the fortunate few who didn’t have student loans. Scholarships had paid for my first year at UNC, a trust fund left to me by my deceased paternal grandmother was paying for the rest, with money left for grad school.
A trust fund invested in the stock market.
A week after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. The next day, AIG had to be bailed out. The snowball picked up speed, barreling down the mountain. Many had already been hurt. Many more were soon to be in the path. Me included. A $700 billion bailout was announced. Using taxpayer money. Protests started. The snowball did not stop. It didn’t even slow. If anything, it hastened.
In October of 2008, the Dow Jones suffered its worst week of losses in history, dropping more than 20%. More bailouts were announced. Sometime during this period my dad, an environmental engineer, lost his job. He’d lost jobs before, but not like this. Not in this economy. No one could remember an economy like this.
He called me. My college tuition money was nearly gone. Wiped out seemingly overnight. His job was gone, too. We would have to take out loans, but in this economy who was giving an unemployed man and a college student loans? There was the house as collateral, a house that he’d do everything to keep, but I would have to get a job to pay back the loans as soon as I could. Did I know what I was going to do?
“It was her habit to build up laughter out of inadequate materials.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Grapes of Wrath
For the first time in my college life, I went to my advisor. Before, I hadn’t needed her. I thought I had it all figured out. Writing minor, get to the honors program, finish my thesis portfolio, get the recommendations for Iowa, get into Iowa, go to Iowa, get my MFA, write the Next Great American Novel. I’d been so close I could smell the ink on my fingers from the hand printing presses my professors at UNC talked about learning to use at Iowa.
My advisor told me with AP credits from high school, how highly I’d tested on some of my entry testing, combined with the heavy course load I’d undertaken, I had enough credits to graduate a semester early. She also told me that meant giving up the honors program, because I couldn’t apply until I was a senior, and the program was a year long.
It meant giving up Iowa, too.
I told her that was fine and asked for early graduation paperwork. By that point, my tuition and housing as an out of state student was costing about $40,000 a year, so that would save us $20,000.
In November of 2008, America elected its first Black President – Barack Obama. UNC errupted into a fit of joy. Students rushed out of their dorms to flood Franklin Street like we’d just won the National Championship. I laughed and screamed and danced. Inside, though, something started to disintegrate. I would miss it here.
There are so many moments in our lives where we split. Forks in the road where we make decisions that will shape who we become. Often, we have no idea we’re making the decisions until it’s too late. We’re simply operating on auto pilot, trying to survive in this mad world. Then, we’re left grieving this version of us who never had a chance to live. I grieve a child who wasn’t abused. A girl who wasn’t raped. A student who got to chase her dreams and ambition without fear. The Next Great American Novelist. A Real Lawyer. A wife. A mother. So many could have been’s but never were’s.
In December of 2008, Bush bailed out the Big Three automakers to the tune of $17 billion while I turned in my final application to my writing professor for Advanced Fiction and told her I wouldn’t be able to pursue the honors program so if my seat was better given to someone who could, I understood. I’d fought tooth and nail for every seat at every stage in that program. Now, it was time to surrender.
She stared at me with steely fury and told me I was making a mistake. I was meant for the honors program. For Iowa. Loans could be paid back. My father’s financial troubles were not mine. I was acting out of fear.
I shook my head and told her she didn’t understand. I didn’t elaborate. Much of my life had been spent in poverty. Debt terrified me, yes. But for good reason. And though I had no real inclination of what I was heading into out there in the real world, I operated on what I knew, and what I knew was the world had never really been particularly kind to me and was unlikely to change its perspective.
She took my portfolio. And my surrender. I got the seat in Advanced Fiction writing to complete my coursework for the minor at the very least.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
In February of 2009, I celebrated my 21st birthday by getting far too drunk and ruining my relationship with my Bosnian boyfriend. My last escape plan had, wildly, been Bosnia. Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus pacakge into law. It was loved and hated for every reason.
In the summer of 2009, I entered my final semester at UNC with less hope than any senior ought to have. I had no plan, no ambition, no idea of what came next. I’d been working toward a singular dream since I was 4. Now, it was dead, and I was soon to be flung into the worst economy and job market the world had seen in a century with a somewhat useless degree and no direction.
While my friends studied for MCATs and GREs and LSATs, and others started courting past internships and alumni for employment prospects, and my writing peers entered the honors program and started on their theses, I got lost. On the quad, I had nothing to say to chatter about Iowa applications and GRE studies and The State of the US Job Market.
They were trying to thrive. I had, as always, chosen to simply survive.
During my final semester at UNC, I had my first psychotic break after going 5 days with little to no sleep. My psychologist wanted to have me committed, but my dad flew to North Carolina to take care of me. I was diagnosed as bipolar by a psychiatrist who spent less than 12 minutes with me based entirely on my family history and information that I had not been sleeping, despite the foot stamping of my psychologist who insisted it was my C-PTSD and chronic nightmares combined with my recent relapse with flashbacks inducing this episode.
He was right. The depakote the psychiatrist put me on caused me to gain 50 pounds in a matter of months and did absolutely nothing to help. I never lost that weight. A nearly two decade long struggle with medication and diagnoses began. Depression set in heavier.
In December of 2009, I graduated as expected. A semester early. I came out with only $8,000 in student loans and a dead dream. My dad had a new job he loved at an energy company working to clean up and close down its coal plants safely and efficiently. As an environmental engineer from coal country, it was perfect.
For me, there was a $9 an hour clerk job with no benefits at a law firm and the bottom of a rum bottle.
It would be six years before I read or wrote again.
Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird, that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes, Dreams
I like to say it was the lit fic that did that. It makes it easier, I guess, to blame the writing for the lack of writing. But recently, an opportunity to write a short for a literary magazine was brought to my attention, causing me to shake off the spiderwebs of that dead dream, and as I wrote, I realized it wasn’t all the lit fic. With each word that brought me back to that campus and those dreams, with every keystroke that reminded me of the girl who yearned for the smell of ink on her fingers, who danced in the sreets when Obama broke a barrier, who fought until surrender, I grieved.
Author’s Note: While I write both young adult and adult fantasy, this post will focus on my adult fantasy. Also, I am using the term “women” here to encompass a general target audience in publishing (and to make a snazzy title) but don’t intend this term to be narrowly construed and will use gender neutral language throughout.
My college writing program was highly competitive and well-known. Our school of journalism was equally so. As a consequence, sometime during the fall semester of my sophomore year, I found myself at a Starbucks, sitting across from a 4’11”, journalism major from New York who’d emailed me out of the blue requesting an interview with me for a story she was writing about the creative writing program.
I had no idea this petite girl with a less than petite attitude would become one of my closest friends and future roommate. Honestly, I thought we might not ever see one another again because most of the time we spoke she never took notes, so I assumed she didn’t find me particularly interesting. But when I told her I “used to” write fantasy, she pushed her chai tea to one side and picked up her pen. Apparently that was more interesting than anything else I’d said about the writing program, how it worked, or lit fic.
“Why fantasy?”
It was a question that has followed me ever since. My answer hasn’t really changed, though, even if it has probably become more nuanced.
What I told her then was fantasy gave me a way to address things that mattered to me in a way that didn’t seem so on the nose, something I was constantly getting scolded for in my writing classes when it came to my lit fic. “This isn’t a morality tale, Aimee.” Was a not infrequent comment on my short stories. At the time, I hadn’t learned the subtlety needed to nudge in a real world setting.
Possibly because I’d spent my entire life reading fantasy. Possibly because I sort of hated writing lit fic.
But fantasy gave me that outlet and let me make it as bold as I wanted, because with fantasy the reader is steps removed from the real world. They can disconnect when their ideas are being challenged and come back later. It’s a softer way to influence. A more fun way, too.
What I would add now is that issues can also be targeted and isolated in fantasy. You are the builder of your world. You can throw out some things from our world to focus in on others. (That bit admittedly took me much longer to figure out and is always going to be a work in progress).
I’ve written before about fairytale retellings and why it’s important we market them to adults and shelve them as fantasy. But while I was in Boston for work last week, I was (naturally) asked about my books, and why I write fairytales for adults.
What a question. A good one. More complicated than you’d think.
It took me back to college. To that question about why fantasy. But also to a comparative literature class I took about fairytales and how they affected the socialization of children across the years. Spoiler: Walt Disney was pretty sexist, and racist, and all the isms, really.
Yet, fairytales have a structure that appeals to me as a neurodiverse individual. Plus, their goal is the same goal I seek in writing, well, anything: Influence. They are quite literally morality tales.
Children aren’t the only ones who need morality, though. Adults do, too. But it’s different. Like the adult life, it’s messier, grayer, more complicated. So what do I do with that? Well, I take the structure of a fairytale and I bend it, twist it. As my Pitch Wars mentor would say, I often fracture it.
After all, it’s only when something has been broken that it can be put back together.
My tales are more than once upon a times and happily ever afters, but strip them down and all the elements of a typical fairytale still remain.
Main Components of a Fairytale
Characters
There are three main types of characters in fairytales: goodies, baddies, and allies. The main character “goodie” is typically young, poor, unhappy, and “pure.” They’re likeable. The one you’re rooting for. The Disney Princesses. The baddie is usually the direct opposite of the goodie. They’re often old, rich, miserable, and “evil.” Often, they’ve stolen from the goodie and intend to keep that just how it is, thanks. The wicked stepmothers and vain witches. Then there’s the allies. The allies are across the board in fairytales. Sometimes they’re animals, sometimes they’re friends, sometimes they’re love interests. Dwarves, princes, helpful mice, a well-placed good witch. The baddies have allies too. Flying monkeys come immediately to mind.
You know what I’m on about, right? There are really neat formulas here. We as readers like the goodies and dislike the baddies. There’s not much gray area, so down the yellow brick road we go.
I mean, unless you’re reading one of my fairytales. Then you might not actually know who’s a goodie or a baddie and the traditional roles might not be what you expect. Because that’s life, right? Sometimes we don’t know who to trust and… oh, I’m spelling out my moral again. Guess you’ll have to read the books someday!
Magic
Fairytales have loads of magic. Not only magic systems with evil (and good) witches but also magic numbers (3 and 7 are big ones). And, of course, magical creatures. This puts fairytales in the fantasy genre.
My magic systems are often based on morality concepts I want to explore. What is selfishness? What is really selfless? What happens when the goodie wants to be a baddie? And what makes a baddie a baddie, anyway? They also often deal with power. Who has it, who wants it, and what it takes to get it.
Obstacles or Tasks
The basic structure of a fairytale requires the goodie to overcome tasks or obstacles that often feel or seem insurmountable to reach their happily ever after. Usually they need magic and allies to accomplish these tasks plus one of their handy and winning traits that makes us love them, like courage or cleverness.
Most stories have obstacles or tasks, if we’re being honest. My fairytales are no different. The tasks are just more adult than in a traditional fairytale. Because they’re for adults! Don’t fall in love with this guy even though he’s sexy. Do this job even though you hate it. Kill this dude so you can reclaim your position. You know, normal life stuff.
Happily Ever After
Most fairytales have a happily ever after BUT NOT ALL. Especially in older tales, this was not as much of a genre convention as it came to be. Depending on your definition of happily ever after, you might see this differently, too. If you’re like my partner and have a taste for dark justice, you might see the version of Snow White where the wicked queen is made to dance wearing red-hot iron shoes until she dies as a suitably happy ending. But probably few see The Little Mermaid telling where the prince marries someone else and the Little Mermaid throws herself into the sea, turning into foam as an HEA.
Today’s fairytales, however, do typically require a happily ever after. Mine have them, but they’re never what you expect. #LitFicTaughtMeThat
The Moral Lesson
This is probably the biggest concept in a fairytale, and the reason I love them as a medium for retelling. Fairytales teach the morals of the time period in which they’re told. It’s why they’re told and retold again and again. It’s why we don’t tell the version of Snow White with the dancing on hot iron shoes, or the version of Sleeping Beauty where she isn’t woken by a chaste kiss but by the kicking of her babies because–surprise!–she’s been sexually assaulted in her sleep. It’s why the new live versions of Disney feature a Princess Jasmine who wants to be a Sultan, and a Black Little Mermaid. It’s why our new fairytales expand to a Queen who loves her sister and is ultimately rescued by her, not a prince; a Polynesian “Daughter of a Chief who isn’t a Princess;” a demi god who self-corrects he’s a hero of men, no women, no all; a Colombian family who is magical but traumatized; and a Mexican boy who wants to chase his dream of playing music.
My tales have moral lessons, too. For the millennial primarily. Things we didn’t get in our versions of Disney. But also things that are important to us now, as adults navigating a world that, in many ways, is different than the one we were prepared for.
I joke that my brand of adult fantasy is “fairytale retellings for women with work issues” because I primarily write retellings centered on women who have some kind of issue with work. All Her Wishes is about a fairy godmother who hates her job. My current retelling is a genderbent Beauty & the Beast about a sorceress who is pissed about a promotion gone all sorts of sideways.
At their hearts, though, my books aren’t really only about work, or even mostly about work. They’re about finding your power and your place in the world. My books have morals, but not the ones I grew up with. Ones I’ve learned along the way. And the thing is, while it might be children are easier to influence, they’re not the only ones who need influencing.
I guess in the end, I ignored those comments about morality tales.
Authors Note: So first of all, my font on the backend seems to have changed. I have no idea if this will change things how you see them, but apologies if it makes it harder to read for anyone who has any reading challenges. Please let me know if that’s the case and I’ll try to fix it!
ANYWAY! HAPPY PRIDE Y’ALL! This post has been brewing a bit, and it’s moderately tempered because I am An Old. Therefore, it doesn’t speak for everyone (obviously) but it’s occurred to me recently there’s this history between Boomers and Gen Z and it’s… mine? But it’s not only the Millennial history it’s currently being played out in small towns and places that are not the internet all over America right now, so this Pride that’s what I wanted to talk about, I guess.
Trigger/Content Warnings: Discussion of homophobia, gaslighting, religious persecution, bigotry, domestic and sexual assault, and trauma.
I came out as bisexual when I was 34 years old. On Twitter. Sort of.
That’s the tweet. But it’s not the whole story.
Some of my closest friends (many of whom are bisexual as well) knew for awhile. My partner knew. My therapist and I had talked about it, but it was shut down for Reasons I’ll talk about in a minute. I didn’t come out to my family, although I’m sure some saw that tweet. We never talk about it. We probably won’t ever talk about it. To them, it probably doesn’t matter as I ended up with a man, so I look straight and appearance is everything. If my dad knew, he’d disown me. Though he’s an atheist, his Christian roots and hatreds run deep. The rest of my family is deeply religious. Appalachian coal country, Trump loving, right wing, bible thumping religious. IFYKYK.
I’ve struggled with my sexuality since high school, but I never talked about it. The one time I got brave drunk enough to mention it to a friend, I was promptly told not to worry, everyone dreamed about other girls every once in awhile. It was fine. I wasn’t a lesbian.
I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It’s a purple area. Fiscally conservative, socially liberal. Not restrictive in the ways my parents who’d grown up in western Pennsylvania deep in church culture understand restrictive. Still, I didn’t know a bisexual until college. Not an out one anyway. I had gay and lesbian friends. I had friends who came out as one or the other. No trans friends. That was it. Gay or lesbian. I graduated high school in 2006. Which I guess might sound ancient but isn’t really.
In college, I hooked up with more girls than guys. No one batted an eye. Everyone did wild shit in college. It was “for the guys.” For their pleasure. So they could watch. I’m not shitting you. Nor am I endorsing this behavior, I’m simply explaining why everything got all confused in my head. Never mind I hooked up with plenty of girls when dudes weren’t present but okay I guess? My friends all said the same thing. Don’t worry, I wasn’t a lesbian. I was just drunk. Wild. Free. Everyone did it.
Everyone did seem to do it. Not everyone seemed to think about it the same way I did, though. To get jealous when the girl’s boyfriend came to take her away. To wish he would disappear. To watch them, fantasizing about being anywhere but there, hoping she’d pick me instead of him. But it was fine. I had a boyfriend, too. I was normal. Yeah, he beat the shit out of me, and insisted I do weird things I didn’t like, and paraded me around like a trophy, and told me I earned him “points” in the frat house because they could see my ribs and vertebrae in my bikini which was so hot, and fed me drugs to keep me thin. And yeah, his frat brothers cornered me and tried to do things with me I didn’t like, and yeah, I had bruises around my neck, and yeah, I had to do more drugs to cope with it all, but that was normal.
To me, it was. This was the life I’d watched. It was the family I’d grown up in. Still, I didn’t know any bisexuals.
Until I did.
For anonymity, I won’t use her real name. Let’s call her Jessi. A girlfriend of another frat brother. Fuck, she tore my world apart. Dominican, with these hips for days and this beautiful, golden brown skin that reminded me of the sand when the ocean kisses it. She had this amazing, thick, curly black hair that I wanted to sink my fingers into, and this smile that made shy, awkward me feel welcome. I loved being around her. She was gregarious, laughing loud and easy. Smart, sophisticated, calm. Most of all, she understood me without me ever saying a word. There were times we’d all be hanging out and she’d look at me and her smile would shift into something sad, and I knew she hurt for me. That she saw things others didn’t. She saw the pain I hid.
When my boyfriend told me Jessi liked me and he was okay with us “trying things” I did the absolute most obvious thing a damaged girl like me could do.
I stopped talking to her.
It wasn’t about Jessi. It was about him. He was grooming me for something I didn’t want, which I’m sure you’re all smart enough to put together. Because that’s what everyone thinks about bisexuals, right? But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him. I wanted her. But I wouldn’t have been “allowed” to have only her. So I said I didn’t “swing that way” and I stopped talking to her. Even when tragedy struck and her boyfriend was hurt in a terrible accident and everyone begged me to call her because she was crying for me. I swallowed another pill and shut my phone off. I had class. I was busy.
Busy being an asshole. Busy breaking my heart.
I regret not telling her the truth. Being too cowardly to find out if she was in the same position. I regret never asking if those smiles ripping through my pain were because she was trapped, too.
I hate that I ran. From her. From me.
Over the years, my friend group expanded to include more members of the LGBTQ+ community. My friends came out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, demi, aro, ace, transgender, genderfluid. I learned new names, new pronouns, new ways to conceptualize how love and sexuality worked. Mistakes were made. A lot of them. Shitty things were said and graciously forgiven. (Spoiler: Still happens). The world got brighter, bigger, bolder.
I cheered with my coworkers as we gathered around computers to watch SCOTUS overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, making marriage equality real for everyone, including our colleague who once swore she’d never marry her partner, now wife. We watched a generation sprout beneath us whose parents made them rainbow cakes for coming out parties, then where coming out didn’t even seem necessary. In some places, anyway.
We also saw shootings at LGBTQ+ nightclubs. Grieved when our friends in religious communities didn’t get rainbow cakes and coming out parties but were ostracized and disowned. I worked on paperwork to help that colleague legally adopt her own children because you never know and there were cases popping up all over the states where atrocious things were happening to tear LGBTQ+ families apart using means so manipulative if I put them in a book they’d be called unbelievable. Then, they’d ban the book. We went to Pride events and protests. We threw glitter while our friends took bullets. Change came in spits and starts, in two steps forward and back. It still does. I think it always will.
All this time, I hid from myself. My friends. Not my community. An ally. Not a member.
Alcohol was one shield. Drunk girl at the bar hooking up with another girl was still nothing to see here. I was wild. A partier. “Just like that.”
When I got sober, things changed. My touch aversion returned with the ferocity of a dragon. I couldn’t even touch my dog without getting nauseous. I confessed to my therapist I thought I might be asexual, and quite possibly bisexual.
Trauma, she said.
Another shield. It was fine. All I had to do was fix the trauma, and I would be normal. I would be a straight, cis, white girl with all the potential the world had to offer laid at my feet. If I worked hard enough, eventually I’d find the brain lost in childhood, and it wouldn’t be another thing I had to be afraid of. I wouldn’t have to run from myself anymore.
It’s an ugly thing, to be ashamed of yourself. That’s why Pride is so important. Why we call it Pride. It took me a long time to realize that. Some days I’m still realizing it.
The symbol for the LGBTQ+ community is a rainbow. Under it are so many beautiful, colorful stories begging to be heard. But so many of them aren’t neat. Or clean. They don’t start with rainbow cakes and glitter. Too many don’t even end that way. Out isn’t as solid as it sounds. It can be nebulous and shifting. It’s still not safe.
Our history isn’t perfect or pretty, but it’s something to be proud of. That it was ugly and horrible, and we got up and kept fighting anyway. That we still do. My history isn’t perfect or pretty, and in it are things I’m not proud of. There’s shame I carry, not about myself and who I am, not anymore, but about how I hid from who I was and still do. About how long it took me to get into the fight.
It’s shame I want to shed. To acknowledge and release. In our beautiful, colorful, bold, proud, community there are so many stories that aren’t neat with so many reasons not to be. There’s enough shame without us taking on or giving more.
I am enough. You are enough. We are enough.
Doing enough. Being enough. Giving enough. Loving enough.
So on this Pride, I want you all to BE proud. Of who you are and what you’ve done. Whether you’re leading a campaign in Washington DC or a Pride event in Portland. Whether you’re hiding in a closet (metaphorically or literally) in Kentucky and simply surviving. If you’re still trying to figure out where under the flag you fit. If your sexuality might have been informed by trauma or you were born knowing exactly who are you, screaming it to the world. If you’re testing your pronouns. If you have a toe out or do drag. I want you to be proud of your life. Of your breath. Of your beauty.
Author’s Note: This isn’t a subtweet blog or in response to any discourse, in fact I started drafting it over a month ago, long before the current *state of affairs*. And I might deeply regret dipping my toes back into this water, but with rising difficulties in trad publishing and more and more new writers being inundated with the “Just Self-Publish” advice, I feel it’s time for me to take that on in full.
Please specifically note this blog is not intended for people who are happy self-publishing, have found great success self-publishing, or have otherwise made up their mind about self-publishing. This is for people who are exploring multiple possibilities, are feeling like “just self-publish” might be the answer to querying challenges, or are otherwise interested in different perspectives regarding self-publishing. It is not intended to be an attack on self-publishing as a method of publishing or to pit self-publishing against traditional publishing. They are both legitimate paths forward with different pros and cons. This post is simply an accounting of my self-publishing journey (which was not a Cinderella story), the potential pitfalls I have noticed with the self-publishing narrative, and why it was not a good fit for me.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Alcoholism, rehab, struggles with RSD, financial difficulty, brief discussion of poverty, some brief discussion of writing community gaslighting.
My Self-Publishing Story
It would be disingenuous to talk about this topic from any lens besides my own. As always, I caveat that I am not giving one size all fits advice for anyone. Your story, your journey, your decisions on your path are your own. What I provide here is only information regarding mine. Where and how it went wrong. Why I did what I did. What I wish I’d known. My hope is only that this information can help someone make better informed decisions than the ones I made.
The Decision
In January of 2016, I went to rehab when my struggle with alcoholism nearly took my life. During the early days of my recovery, after not setting eyes on a book for about six years, I’d started to read again, then write. Soon, I finished a book. A book that, for the first time in over a decade, I felt ready to try to publish.
I assumed I’d query this book. That’s what I’d done many years before. What I’d been instructed to do during my creative writing courses in college. “Never pay for something in publishing” was the age old advice. But as I researched agents, query letters, synopses, I stumbled upon blogs about self-publishing. Things had changed. There was a new, legitimate option for writers that didn’t involve agents and publishing houses and years of rejection and waiting.
Control over my own story, the articles told me. No querying rejection. Immediate results. The ability to make all the decisions. And, if I followed the formulas, success. No agents taking 15%, publishers taking even more. I would get 70% of my earnings. I didn’t have to sell nearly as many books to see a return with percentages like that. And getting a return wasn’t so hard, anyway. Good cover, good editor, good mailing list, some great content, and the book would damn near sell itself. Follow the “steps” (to a neurodivergent individual, read: follow the rules), and I’d be all set.
I fell hard for this pitch. Fragile in the early days of recovery, terrified of rejection, and desperate to control my own story after so many years of… not doing that, it seemed perfect. Plus, there were rules. I was great at following rules. I’d been doing that my entire life. Don’t speak. Don’t cry. Tiptoe. Be quiet. Keep your elbows off the table. Chew with your mouth shut. Get only As. 4.0 GPA. Join the proper academic teams. Get a 1450 or higher SAT score. Go to work. Mind your manners. Your voice. Your tone. Not too loud. Or too soft. Don’t mumble. Or stutter. Don’t squirm. Hold your shoulders just so. Maintain your weight. Keep your eyes down. Not like that. Go to the right college. Get the job I tell you. Admit you have a problem. Don’t do drugs. Actually, do the drugs we tell you. Don’t drink. A power greater than you can fix you. That power might just be rules. Follow them at all costs.
Oh yes. Rules I could do.
The decision to self-publish came pretty quickly from there. No querying. All the control. Plus rules to lead me to success. Great.
The Flaw
At the time, there wasn’t much information available about self-publishing failures. Or at least it wasn’t popping up when I searched for self-publishing. Was I explicitly looking for it? Not really. But I wouldn’t say I did zero research, either. I read blogs and articles, followed indie authors on Twitter and signed up for their newsletters, read everything the big self-publishing names were putting out there and none of these folks were saying you’re more likely to fail* at self-publishing than succeed.
*Okay, before anyone jumps at me, let me go ahead and define what I see as “failure.” This is purely economic for me. I see a failure as not making back what you put in (at the very least). If your goal is to simply put a book into the world, and you don’t care about the economic reality of it, you can absolutely succeed and lose money. And if you go into it with your eyes wide about that and have money to burn, I wish you so much success! What I hate seeing is people who, like me, thought they would see a return on their investment instead lose huge amounts of money without realizing this is the more common story than the one of financial success (much like traditional publishing, truth be told but in traditional publishing the author isn’t out the money personally). However, despite my personal definition of failure, it’s also true that a vast majority of self-published authors will never sell more than 100 copies of their book (when I self-published this statistic was 90%. I don’t know what the current number is, however I expect it’s still high, so this is another thing to consider if you’re looking for readership if not economic success).
Certainly, I could have looked harder for information related to self-publishing “failures.” But the overwhelming mass of information out there was so positive it seemed almost impossible to go wrong if you stuck to the self-publishing script: Good book, good editor, good cover design, good website, good marketing plan, good mailing list, ARCs, bloggers, next book on the way. Bingo, bango, you were almost ready to quit your day job.
Spoiler: I was not on my way to quitting my day job. Nor was I alone, though I would spend the next many years feeling very alone and being persecuted for trying to speak this truth.
Buckle up, y’all, we are about to get all kinds of statistical. And transparent. And as per usual, long as fuck. Like really please go get a coffee or bookmark this or find a comfy reading place. I do not know how to write less than a million word blogs I’m sorry.
Book One, Creation and Cost
The Wheel Mages
In November, 2016, I published my first book, The Wheel Mages. But before publication there was development. For this book, I had an alpha reader followed by four beta readers. After five rounds of editing amongst betas, I sent it for professional developmental edits. It went through two rounds of developmental work with an editor (a RevPit Editor actually in case anyone wants to know the credentials). First round developmental edit cost: $700. Second round developmental cost: $250. Total developmental edits: $950. Then, it was professionally line and copyedited. Cost: $1725. My developmental editor helped me create the tagline, back cover material, and written promotional information for online retailers as well. Cost: $150. I had a professional graphic designer create the cover and some graphics for marketing. Cost: $175.
For the first book, I beat my head against a wall repeatedly doing the formatting for the print copy myself. I used Vellum for eBook formatting, which I believe the subscription was somewhere around $100 for unlimited use at that time but don’t quote me (it’s $200 now for ebooks only, and they have a new version that does print and ebook formatting for $250). I launched a website (Cost: $99 a year for WordPress and $19 a year for the domain), Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram in advance of the release and pushed for preorders of the book. I signed up for Goodreads as a Goodreads author. I bought ISBNs from Bowker, 10 of them which at the time I believe cost about $200 (the more you buy the less they cost per ISBN, but you can only buy in increasingly large multiples). I tried to do a pre-sale campaign (which failed, miserably, but I wasn’t horribly deterred, it was my first book, I had things to learn, naturally).
In addition to those fixed costs I can reasonably track, I also spent hundreds on Facebook ads, Instagram ads, buying personal copies to hand sell from CreateSpace (and waaaaaaay more to give away to book bloggers, bookstagrammers, etc. all in the hopes someone would review and promote). I paid I don’t know how much in shipping to places as far as Indonesia. I did giveaways, took days off work to attend events no one showed up to, drove (and a couple times flew) hundreds of miles to hustle wherever I could, go to workshops, industry events, network, etc.
Total fixed costs: $3,418
Total Estimated Costs with Auxiliaries: ~$5,000 (or more)
*Note: I have repeatedly said on Twitter I was in a “strong” financial place and was privileged to be able to set off on this self-publishing endeavor. In preparing this blog, I was reviewing all my financials to get the exact costs because somewhere along the way I lost my spreadsheets, and while I was certainly much better off than many, I was not actually doing as well as I thought. I’m in no way discounting anything I’ve previously said about that,but do note my relative privilege from where I started (I grew up below the American poverty line for reference) tinged my view of where I was in 2016. In an effort to be completely transparent about the financial reality of this journey for me, in 2016, when I started down this path my entire life savings consisted of $5,458. By February 2017, it had dwindled to $776.78. My credit card debt went from $0 to around $5,000.
First book I ever autographed. To my dad. The inscription reads: Dad, Remember the little girl who always said she’d be a writer? She made it. Love you always and forever, Aim. I am still super proud I was able to do this, but honestly it’s good I didn’t sell more copies because this signature would have REALLY been difficult to do in mass.
Book One, Sales
In 2016 when I published The Wheel Mages, things were a bit different in the self-publishing space, so I originally launched on Amazon Kindle, CreateSpace (for paperback), iTunes, and Smashwords which distributed to multiple other online retailors, the most notable being Barnes & Noble. In the first month (November 29, 2016 – December 29, 2016) I sold 58 copies: 27 on Kindle, 23 CreateSpace, 7 hand sold by me, 1 on iTunes. I made a total of $136.81 and €2.18. My goal had been to sell 100 copies in the first month (sweet summer child I was).
The second month (December 30, 2016 – January 29, 2017) I sold only 12 copies: 4 on Kindle, 4 on CreateSpace, 4 hand sold by me. I made a total of $33.50 and £1.85. Bonus fact about European sales and Amazon (at least from 2016): They won’t send you any money until you make more than 100 of whatever currency. I never saw any foreign currency from my years of self-publishing.
The sales declined from there. In months three and four combined I sold only 13 books. I stopped keeping track. In June 2017, I pivoted from the multi-platform model, pulled my book from iTunes and Smashwords, and relaunched on Amazon’s KDP Select Program.
Self-Publishing Side Quest: Amazon’s Murky KDP Select Program
For those unfamiliar with self-publishing, Amazon is the uncontested leader of the self-publishing world. As such, it offers its KDP Select Program for authors who opt to publish exclusively with Amazon and put their books in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (“KU”) database. For $9.99 a month, readers can access unlimited downloads of any and all of the 3 million or more books in the KU selection. These are primarily self-published works.
Because the books are offered for free to readers, authors are paid in a somewhat unconventional way. The $9.99 per month paid by each member (minus Amazon’s cut, of course) is put into a total “pool” each month, the transparency of which is murky at best (or was when I was part of the program). That pool is divided up by pages read not books downloaded. So if someone downloads your book and never reads it, tough luck. If someone downloads your book and just flips through the pages without reading a word but it’s logged, cool! You get paid! If you stuff your book with blank pages and random things that make it longer, you uh… also get paid. Amazon has made efforts to crack down on this latter practice which was getting exploited and was hurting the program because readers were unenrolling due to frustration about blank and incomplete pages.
Some positives about the program are that people can’t return your book which actually costs you money in publishing because of complicated weirdness I won’t get into right now. The program also unlocks some great promotional tools on Amazon like the ability to run free promotional campaigns. I found this to be helpful when my second book was coming out (offering the first book for free to get people to preorder the second one is a time-honored marketing technique for series’ writers. Out of 397 free copies given away I gleaned a whole FOUR EXTRA preorders! When you’re hustling though, every sale counts). Also, I actually made more money with the KDP program.
It’s honestly weird to be posting this many pictures of these books I’ve been trying to avoid talking about for so long, but were they pretty or what?
Bottom Line: The Wheel Mages
Fortunately, despite the fact I stopped keeping track, Amazon has a dashboard! Which I can still access. Which is mildly horrifying, but see how much I love you all! I even went there of all places.
I took The Wheel Mages and its sequel The Blood Mage off the market in May 2020 for a few reasons. I wanted to focus entirely on my traditional publishing career and put the self-publishing path behind me, and I was afraid my self-publishing history was hindering my ability to get an agent (I think it wasn’t, but sometimes you need to close doors to prove to yourself the book you’re querying is just not the right book). Prior to that time, I had dabbled with the idea of maybe figuring out a way to finish the series, but I realized I had no desire to return to self-publishing and leaving an incomplete series out there for people to consume and be disappointed by its perpetual incompleteness was pretty rude. Finally, though I’m proud of the work I put into those books, and I think they taught me a lot about working with editors, and being professional, and how a book is put together, and all that goes into the business and marketing and failing at marketing, there’s a few things about the books I’d do differently now. I’m a different person, a better writer, I like to think a better human. I love those books but closing the door on them was the right thing for me.
Plus! I got the thing every author wants, FANART! I mean basically my author goals were achieved so there was no more work here to be done.
Anyway, numbers. For The Wheel Mages from it’s launch in November, 2016 through May 2020, it sold 891 total units through Amazon, 822 on Kindle and 69 in print (not including those I sold originally through iTunes and CreateSpace and the hand selling I did at events and my family members, bless them, did). There were 13,114 pages of this book read. All of that super impressive seeming information amounts to… $253.35 in royalties.
Cost: ~ $5,000.00 (or more)
Sales: $253.35
Loss: $4,746.65 (or more)
Book One, The Emotional Cost
Two and a half years of work. Drafting. Editing. Marketing plans. Ten hour work days that turned into eighteen hours when I put my second writing job on top of it. Trips to the post office to send out ARCS to everywhere and anywhere. Reading blogs for submission information on how to get bloggers to review my books. Querying them. Hundreds of emails. To bloggers. To Bookstagrammers. To influencers. Launching a Twitter. An Instagram. A Facebook. A website. A blog. Creating content for the blog. Spending money on Instagram ads. Facebook ads. Amazon ads. Creating a newsletter and newsletter content. Learning MailChimp. Creating free content to entice people to sign up for the newsletter. Joanna Penn. All the indie authors telling me just do more, just spend more, just try harder. Just market better. Just push harder. Write more. Faster. Learn the algorithms. Do the formulas. You’ll win if you follow the rules.
There wasn’t a win. There never would be. But I didn’t know that yet. I kept going.
Going to local events at libraries where not a single person showed up. Staring at empty chairs with a PowerPoint I’d spent hours on and a box of books to sign and sell while five minutes went by, ten, fifteen, thirty. The librarian awkwardly asking if I needed gas money at the least, she could really only spare $15 though. Never mentioning these things because that would be faux pas and wrong and unprofessional. Certainly never getting the benefit of going viral for them. I didn’t need it. I had formulas and orders to keep going.
Going to other events where people did show up but awkwardly shuffled past the weird girl with the fantasy book to talk to the nice lady with the memoir or the elderly gent with the WWII nonfiction. Where people asked me how long I’d queried before I got my agent and I proudly proclaimed, “None!” and they scoffed at me and chalked me up as a hack. Going weekends without rest as I traveled to local bookstores trying to hand sell to kind bookstore owners who smiled sadly and shook their heads. Soliciting librarians who said they had no idea how to shelve self-published books even when I said I had ISBNs from Bowker just like everyone else. Miles on my car. On my heart. Learning how to create this website even though I hate website development. Learning how to format a print book. Talking to designers, reading sample pages of editors, interviewing developmental editors. Going to workshops, being laughed out of industry conferences or simply refused admittance in the first place, told I wasn’t welcome in professional spaces because I wasn’t a real author. Winning awards at RWA only to be told that didn’t matter. I wasn’t a romance author. I wasn’t a fantasy author. I wasn’t a young adult author. I wasn’t an author.
And that was only book one. Because I am persistent and there were rules, I signed up for a second round!
Unboxing videos just aren’t the same when you’ve bought the copies yourself. Still, I did have a real book with real author copies that arrived just like a real author. Because I was and still am a real author with my name on a real book I worked very hard to get there, thank you very much! And other self-published authors should be treated with the same respect.
Book Two, Creation and Cost
The Blood Mage
While I was running around trying to sell The Wheel Mages I was also editing the already drafted and beta read sequel, The Blood Mage. This hulking beast of a 130,000 word round two went for developmental edits in January of 2017. The first round edits cost about $900. The big takeaway: The book was too long and the entire third act needed to be cut off and put into another book. The planned trilogy had to become a quartet. The good news for me (at the time) was that meant more books to sell. Also, because editing costs are calculated by the word by most editors, the costs for the rest of that book would be less when I cut 30k off the ass end of it. It also made the book a lot stronger, obviously! And was a ton of unexpected work, but hey, so was this whole self-publishing thing.
I got back to work on editing, on marketing book one, on my day job when I could remember to think about it. During this time I was also exploring more marketing techniques, trying to get my newsletter presence established (fail), attempting to establish myself in the self-publishing community more, and learning a lot about preorders and ARCs. I had a plan for book two! I would do the things. I’d learned from book one’s mistakes. Book two would be better.
My second-round developmental edits cost about $330. Total developmental costs: $1230. Copy and line edits for this book were about $1840. My graphic design package was a bit more as well as costs increase so the cover and marketing materials were about $250. This time I decided not to beat my head repeatedly against the wall and paid for a professional formatter for the print book (which, if you can spring it and you too find this process completely fucking miserable, worth it, the product is just so much better). Cost: $150. Good news, I already paid for Vellum, the website, Bowker, all that. So no new fees there.
Bad news, marketing is still marketing. And this time I was convinced I had a Real Plan, so I put more upfront money into print ARCs and ad campaigns (although by the time I launched my second book in July 2017 I had signed up for KDP Select, so I had access to Amazon’s free promo campaigns). However, I’d also learned a lesson this time around about international shipping (sorry international peeps) and did eARCs only for international folks.
Total Fixed Costs: $3,470
Total Estimated Costs with Marketing Included: ~$4,000 (or more)
Fun stats from the past: This book took 3 months to draft, 7 months of editing, 11 total drafts, cutting 30,000 words, and rewriting the ending twice before it was published. Sounds uh… like my Pitch Wars book. At least I am consistent in my chaos drafting and extreme editing I suppose.
Book Two, Sales and the Bottom Line: The Blood Mage
I launched The Blood Mage in July 2017 (approximately 7 months after the launch of the first book). Some brief notes about this: That’s slow for self-publishing. Part of the issue was the unexpected redevelopment of the entire end of the book. Part of it was trying to rework my marketing plan when I pivoted to KDP. Part of it was ignorance and poor planning. I did try to do a preorder campaign in advance on Amazon as mentioned (where I gave The Wheel Mages away for free to drive preorders of The Blood Mage but that resulted in only 4 additional preorders). My ARC campaign failed miserably. No one reviewed the book in time or in coordination. There wasn’t enough driven hype at all. Basically, everything I thought I had carefully planned was a total failure.
As a result, The Blood Mage did as many second books do, and underperformed its predecessor by a significant margin. Between its release in July 2017 and when I removed it from print in May 2020 it sold 170 total units. 145 on Kindle, 25 in print (not including author purchased copies for hand selling, ARCs, etc.). There were only 3,935 pages of this book read. In its lifetime, total royalties amounted to a stunning $151.24.
Cost: ~$4,000 (or more)
Sales: $151.24
Loss: $3,848.76 (or more)
I love these covers. I do wish I had used the tagline on the front though… Hindsight, what’re you going to do?
Book Two, The Emotional Cost
I’m not sure when exactly I ran out of steam for self-publishing, but I’m pretty sure it coincided with running out money. As I mentioned, I grew up below the poverty line. When I started this journey it was because I was fresh out of rehab, seeking control over something. There was control, absolutely. None of that is a lie. Honestly, there’s maybe too much control for someone like me who prefers to focus on what I do best while letting others do what they do best, so I don’t have to worry about those other things.
What isn’t talked about quite as much is the loss of control that can and does happen much more frequently than we think: The loss of control of your finances.
After my first book didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, the self-publishing community rallied to reassure me there was plenty I could do to “fix” what I’d done “wrong” the first time around. Better mailing list. BookBub (which I could never get into). Better planned preorder campaign. KDP and free giveaways. Cutting editing costs (which, admittedly, I refused to do because I loved my editors, and the product they helped me create was one I was proud of). But the primary refrain I heard from the community was: (1) More paid advertising; and (2) More books. There were various tactics that went into this, backmatter, campaign strategies, cutting the cost of the first book in the series and heavily promoting it to get people to pay to read the others, but the overall concept came back to: More investment.
This was a business. I understood that. My day job was to work with businesses. I knew you often had to lose money for awhile before you could make money. But this business had a formula for success if I just got better at following it. I buckled down. Planned. Invested. Kept going. Cut where I could without hurting my product, invested more where I thought it would help most. Put in more time. Learned more. Invested in a business and marketing education. Hustled. Sure, it wasn’t as easy as I’d originally thought, but the best things never are. It would be fine. I was a good writer with loads of passion and persistence who was reasonably intelligent, and I had all these great formulas and information. There was nothing to worry about.
Plus I had these badass books! If anyone is super frustrated by the fact I haven’t told you what they’re about, it’s because you can’t buy them except occasionally by third parties on Amazon for 3x more than I ever sold them for because they’re “rare first edition out of print” things now. Lmao. Anyway, you can still read the blurbs on Amazon if you’re interested.
When book two did worse, I talked about it the same way I’d talked about book one (with transparency, my constant brand). But the self-publishing community response… shifted. Besides being told to write more books faster and market them better, people started getting aggressive with their unprompted and unsolicited advice. They began attacking my choice in editors. They were too expensive. I was stupid to pay. My mailing list was bad. My free content wasn’t worth signing up. My genre was wrong. My covers were wrong. My pitch was wrong. What exactly was my marketing plan, in detail? Did I understand this was a business and marketing was the biggest part of it? Did I think I’d get a better deal in traditional publishing? Didn’t I know they’d just steal all my control (and royalties) then do nothing to market my work? I’d be right back here. And really, how dare I talk about self-publishing like it wasn’t working? Or that it was difficult? Didn’t I care about the stigmas? Didn’t I know I was pulling the community down when they were trying so hard to look legitimate? Who did I think I was, complaining about going quietly bankrupt? Questioning the legitimacy of this process when there were gatekeepers out here gatekeeping everything? I should have known better.
It became very clear very quickly that because I’d not been successful and was being open about that I wasn’t welcome. And the only one to blame for my lack of success was myself. I’d done it all wrong then tried to give self-publishing a bad name.
I could honestly write an entire blog just about this experience alone. About the sleepless nights. The tears. The questioning. The sheer panic. I was deeply in debt, my life savings drained, with an incomplete series I knew I couldn’t finish, and a community that had turned on me. There was no one to help me. As it turned out, the control I’d been promised came at a cost: Help.
Spiraling happened here. I lost track of whatever was left of my marketing plan. I threw everything at the wall. I spent money I didn’t have. I begged everyone for a shot. I said things I deeply regret to people I admire to “prove” I was part of this community that didn’t even want me.
But the truth is, I did know what it felt like to be labeled less than. To be told my books didn’t “count.” To have people laugh at me, roll their eyes, dismiss me, tell me I had no business calling myself a real author, refuse to even consider reading my book or allow me to sit on a panel of local authors because “well, you aren’t one, really.” To be denied the ability to enter competitions or be treated like a peer by my fellow traditionally published authors, to listen with rapt attention while they talked about submission processes and editing and try to contribute to the conversation with my experience with real (!) live (!) editors (!) and cover designers and formatters only to be brushed off and told “different world, not the same” when it sounded really similar in a lot of cases. To be told by these same people that they had no interest in learning about self-publishing despite my interest in their careers and their struggles and traditional publishing’s latest Twitter tea because “self-publishing isn’t really serious publishing.”
I absolutely knew what the struggle was like. But I also knew it was unfair to say because of that we should give a false sense of reality about this path. That because it’s hard to be stigmatized we should therefore act like everything is perfect and when people try to point out things that are not perfect, we’ll make sure they know they are the issue, not the falsities about the method.
I knew I couldn’t allow myself to fall victim to that. I had to be better. Even if it meant abandoning the series I’d worked so hard to develop. Even if it meant disappointing the few faithful readers I had.
I decided to get my finances back in line and turn to traditional publishing. In 2018, I began querying a totally new project. In 2020, despite being no closer to an agent and preparing to shelve my second book from querying, I removed my self-published books from print and closed the door on self-publishing forever.
Gabbo helping me edit The Blood Mage. Look how smol she was then!
Conclusion
In total I lost about $8,600 or more self-publishing. Honestly, by the end, it was most likely closer to $10,000 but who knows. Probably if I’d been a better business person I would know, exactly, to the dime. Probably there are self-publishing people out there doing well self-publishing ready to throw flames at me and shoot 87 holes in my process and plans. But that’s the thing: There is no guaranteed success method, and we have to stop promising it. Business is unpredictable and unknowable. People make mistakes. Plans fall apart. We run out of time and money and capacity. You can set yourself up for better success, but it isn’t something that can be promised. That’s why entrepreneurs so often fail and fail and fail before they succeed. And that’s okay if you’re prepared to do that both financially and emotionally. It’s not okay if you have false expectations of what you’re getting into. There is no “just” in “just self-publish.” Self-publishing is hard. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming. There are stigmas attached to it that make it more challenging. It’s not something to enter into flippantly or without thought. It’s also not something to enter into without all the information including the potentially bad things.
People often ask me if I could do it again what I’d do differently. My primary, tongue-in-cheek response tends to be: I wouldn’t do it at all. But that’s because self-publishing wasn’t the path for me. Why? Well, it was a lot of work I don’t love doing myself so I had to farm out or figure out which I hated. I also didn’t like losing that much money or bearing that much personal risk. And after years of being silenced, I really didn’t like feeling like I couldn’t speak about the shitty things I was going through or the misinformation I felt I was facing.
For example, you hear a lot in self-publishing circles that “You don’t get marketing help in traditional publishing, either.” And that can be true to some extent in some situations depending on what press you end up with and a myriad of other factors. What they don’t mention is there are marketing components you do get with most traditional presses that you have to do yourself self-publishing. Cover control is not always a positive. Covers are a huge reason why people buy books. It’s not just about what you think looks good. It’s about what sells. Nice to have a professional know something about that. Taglines, same thing. Back of your book blurb. Promo material. Getting your book on NetGalley ($499 per book to be listed for a self-published author, by the way). Access to the publisher’s mailing list of influencers and book bloggers all in one fell swoop without having to independently solicit them. There is a lot besides flashy book tours, big posters at Y’all Fest, Kirkus Reviews, pallets of printed ARCS, and an endcap at Barnes & Noble.
But in all seriousness, if I was giving legitimate advice about self-publishing from my (obviously) jaded perspective it would be this: Set real expectations and budgets. Define in advance what you’re going to consider success and really evaluate if it’s feasible to meet it. Also define what you see as failure. Draw a hard line around that and be prepared to walk away no matter what. How much risk can you tolerate? How much debt? How much until it’s too much? Know that in advance and when you get there, pull the plug and exit. Do not look back. Close your ears to anyone who says otherwise or tries to push you deeper forward into your abyss. You know your own life better than anyone else. Never regret protecting yourself.
If you’re publishing a series, budget for the entire thing in advance and have it ready to go (or mostly ready to go) before you hit publish on anything. That way you can rapid release and capitalize on the power of the series. Use backmatter to link to the next book and keep readers hooked. If you’re looking for financial success, publish in a genre you can do that in – romance is a great one and probably the biggest but there are others. Write short books. Do not rely on only the experiences of the successful but also those who haven’t been so you have a centered perspective. And always take all advice (even this advice) with about 1,000 grains of salt.
And as in all business, be ready at any moment to pivot.
Final request: If you’re going to be mean to me without having read this entire thing (and yeah, I know, it’s super long) please don’t. I’m really only trying to help people not end up in debt, depressed, and potentially multiple years behind in their writing career because someone made self-publishing sound like an easy solution to traditional publishing’s problems. If you’re doing great self-publishing, this blog isn’t for you. If you’ve already made up your mind, it also isn’t for you. If you know exactly what you want and you’re not me or even remotely like me and you love all the things I hate, this blog is not for you. And that’s okay! You’re doing great work and I support it! There are many paths forward, and we’re all beautifully unique in getting to choose them. I only ask we be allowed to provide information without fear of reprisal so those people may actually choose.
Final Fun Fact of the blog because I think the universe sometimes just neatly ties things together or maybe my brain does without me knowing. But the tagline for my first self-published book The Wheel Mages is actually: There is always a choice.
Xoxo,
Aimee
Ohhhh y’all didn’t know I had a Serious Author Photo did you? Yeah, I do. Because I was a real author and had a dust jacket which needed a photo.
Note from Aimee: The author of the following post had me weeping by the end of this poignant, perfectly timed piece. Another #PitchWars alum, the story is one that obviously strikes close to home for me personally but in today’s climate speaks loudly for us all and is a perspective I have yet to host here: a return to the trenches. That said, I do want to note (with the author’s permission) that the agency and agent discussed are not those being discussed at present.
Content/Trigger Warnings: Signing with an agent, agent ghosting, long-term querying (no stats specifically discussed)
An Almost-Darling
By: Anonymous
The beginning was thrilling enough that I thought I might be a darling.
I got into Pitch Wars with the book that was supposed to be my second attempt at querying. Thanks to a whirlwind showcase, I had an offer of rep before I’d sent a single cold query. The agent was a perfect fit—personable and enthusiastic, with a history of sales at a reputable agency. I had no doubts when I signed. Crank up the Hilary Duff, baby, because this is what dreams are made of.
We worked through revisions, made the book shine, and had one close call with an editor. But ultimately, sub went how it goes for most authors: a slow death for a desperately loved story.
Fortunately, my agent and I had picked my next project early, and I’d already sent them the revised draft. I received no response for a couple months. Worry pricked the back of my mind. Were they as enthusiastic about the idea as they’d been before? We had an encouraging check-in, followed by a few more months of silence.
I realized I was decidedly Not The Darling when I received a form letter from the agency, letting me know I’d been dropped. I had moved earlier that year, and because they didn’t confirm my address, the letter took over a month to reach me. My agent hadn’t even signed it.
I don’t know what publishing has in store for me, but I do know, without a doubt, nothing will be more shocking or humiliating than emailing to ask if it had been a clerical error, or if that was really how the only professional in my corner had chosen to part ways.
It wasn’t an error. The agent had decided not to represent my genre anymore, and I never would have gotten an explanation if I hadn’t requested one.
Several agent-siblings and I were dumped back into the querying trenches with nothing to show for our years of professional partnership. Just one little line at the end of the query. I was represented, but we parted ways amicably. Because you had to say it was amicable, or people might think you were the problem.
Months turned to years as I tried to recover emotionally and creatively from what happened. I queried another book. And another. And another.
I used to think even if publishing wasn’t a meritocracy, there was an element of forward motion. That one day, if I took my writing seriously, I could look back at the starting line, and it would be just a pinpoint in the distance. I don’t believe that anymore.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep trying to get published, and I haven’t been able to come up with a good answer, really. Most of the time, I have no idea if I’ll ever get a book deal. The vast majority of people don’t.
But I think somewhere deep, deep down I’m cupping my hands around a flickering candle of hope that after all this, I could still be the exception. I could be the one who gets the deal, and everything else she’s ever dreamed of. A decades-in-the-making darling.
Aimee Davis 