It's hard being a writer these days because anyone can self-publish on the Internet and so the chances of standing out has diminished monumentally. On one hand the Internet is a good thing for those seeking an outlet to express themselves (isn't everyone?), but it makes it difficult for a serious writer to gain a following.
Okay, so what makes me think I'm a serious writer? I am and I've trolled through Amazon's Kindle site (on which I am also published) and, while some books are good, many are not. As an exercise, one day I scrolled through the section under which one of my novels should appear and, after 74 pages of not coming across it, was forced to do a search. Those that appear first have a star rating of four. That means they've had reviews and there are pages of novels with ratings. To be able to leave a book review on Amazon, you need to have purchased at least $50.00 worth of books. I'm not sure if that's US or AUD dollars but most people read novels on Kindle Select, where you pay a yearly subscription of about $14.00 and can download as many books as you want. That means they can't leave a rating so how do these novels manage to get one? I'll get to that later.
A good third of the novels in the Romance genre have men with ripped torsos on the cover, no heads mind you, just torsos with a woman embracing the lower body. The titles, too, boggle the imagination, "My Alien Lover" being one example, and there are three books by different authors bearing that same title. Give them their due, none of them have a ripped torso on the cover. Now I haven't read any of them and can't comment on the standard of writing but this shows that not even the title you choose is likely to be unique. It's not like a username where, when you join an internet site, there can be no duplicates. No indeed, if your story is titled "The Greatest Story Ever Told", it may be one among many, thus nullifying the superlative.
So why have I published two novels on the Amazon site? Well, long story made short, I wrote my first novel thirty years ago in three very large exercise books. I then put it aside and undertook a degree. After that, while seeking employment, I transcribed my almost illegible handwriting and saved the file on Word. I then reread the manuscript numerous times and edited it. I have to say that doing an Arts degree helped with that as I am very voluble. My father, a former journalist, also read and edited it. Finally I sent three chapters off to a literary agent in Sydney, Australia.
My parents were staying with me on a visit when I received a positive reply from the agency. Dad was over the moon. The agency asked for the rest of the manuscript. Shortly after I flew to Sydney from Brisbane where I lived, and handed it to them. Some weeks went by and they asked me to rewrite a short section in the middle of the manuscript. I agreed wholeheartedly as that section was too long. A month or two later I returned to Sydney with the altered manuscript and presented it to the woman who had shown interest. There was just something in her manner this time that worried me. Later I received a letter saying they didn't have sufficient faith in the story and, also, that they had been taken over by another agency that wasn't accepting new authors. So close and yet so far. It had been a long established literary agency, Sydney's best known, and my book turns up and the agency is bought out.
I then sent the manuscript overseas, I sent it everywhere. It traveled more than Gulliver. One day I phoned the University of Queensland Press. It had published Peter Carey's "Oscar and Lucinda", but they were no longer publishing new authors. I then phoned a woman at the same University who taught Creative Writing. She was most helpful but bemoaned the fact that she couldn't even get her own students published anymore.
I don't know when the Internet started to have an impact on publishing houses but things were getting harder. The nineties were still happening as this was going on and I think, although it was early days for the Internet, its spectre was hanging over the publishing houses. Eventually I became tired of chasing a runaway train and got on with living and making one any way I could. I was then nearing fifty, no one had wanted to employ me as a fresh, mature age graduate when I was forty and eventually I took any administration jobs that were going and part-time work was the only kind I managed to get.
I began another novel and quite liked it but the impetus wasn't there knowing how hard it was to get published. Meantime I leased a taxi for my partner of many years and one day, when all the other work dried up, I took the bit between my teeth and got in and drove it and what a wonderful source of stories I discovered. People's lives unfurled before me, information from so many sources filled my head. I didn't get a story line from them but I did learn interesting facts with which to fill out my characters lives, but not for the novel I'd started to write. I'd had a brainstorm and found my new novel and, no, it wasn't based on any of my customers tales. It came from my head. I'd needed a story that was different and I had it.
Waiting in a taxi gives you a lot of time to write and, in two years, I had finished my book and, again, it was handwritten. I transcribed it of course, edited it and then followed all the instructions that literary agents and publishers put on the Internet as guidelines for submitting your work. I thank the Internet for one thing: no more hard copy mailing of manuscripts. Now writers could submit by email but there seemed to be so many more literary agents and the readers in the agencies all had specialties and wouldn't take this but would take that or were not accepting more work at this stage.
Added to this they all have different guidelines for submission. Writing a novel is easy compared to the rigamarole you have to go to following their rules. They want different length synopses, different chapters and often you have to change the manuscript you wrote in MS Word to a PDF file. Added to all this they want you to sell your idea to them in less than so many words. I felt very confident about this one but selling something just isn't that easy.
Let's be honest about what writers are. They are not salespeople or they would be in a shop selling something or in an advertising agency writing copy. Writers are usually sensitive souls with artistic natures. The advice you are given when trying to find a way to have your manuscript accepted is to join a writers group and network. Let me be quite clear, if I liked groups or networking I wouldn't be a writer. I much prefer talking to myself than other writers. Also, writers are competitive. Do you think you're going to get lashings of praise from people who want their novel published before yours is? Not bloody likely unless you look like a film goddess and the other writers are bespectacled and pimpled nerds.
I resist all forms of interaction with people in order to publish my novel, except over the phone. When I began to phone literary agents one was a very experienced, nay old, female agent who asked me how many words my manuscript was. I told her and she fairly shrieked down the line, "Too long." My instinct was to ask, "How long is a piece of string?" but I didn't.
Instead I asked her what is considered too long. Her reply was that novels should only be 70,000 to 100,000 words. Well I was gobsmacked. In all my school years reading Austen, Hardy, Bronte, Hemingway et al, my English teachers not once said that a novel could be too long. I mean, how did "Gone With the Wind" get published if this is the case?
I asked her why. "Publishing costs," she said and you need to have an Internet presence, a blog, good marketing and awards help. Well how in hell are you going to get awards if you can't get published? She even told me that if a writer had all that and she took their work to a publisher, that wasn't necessarily enough.
After speaking to her I did shorten my manuscript by thirty thousand words and that took me three edits, but there I stopped. To do more would not have been true to the story, however, it did improve the work but it was still above her allowed number of words.
What galls me most is when I go to a bookstore and see a well known writer's umpteenth novel or a sports star's autobiography in the newly released best sellers list. Don't you see the irony in the latter? A ghost written 'autobiography' no doubt. Publishers want a sure thing and that's how they get it. One of my taxi conversations was with a woman who had worked in public relations to whom I mentioned a certain very well known author who still managed to churn out one book per year in his twilight years, always on the bookshop shelves for Christmas. This author had once worked in advertising and she knew of him. She told me his novels are now mostly ghost written by other writers. He writes a plot sketch and another writer will use his style, which they have studied, to fill it out. I'm not sure if I became a well known author I would allow other people to 'write' my books for me, no matter for how much money. It just seems like cheating.
Let me return to the star rating of novels on Amazon. I looked further into this and discovered that there are people out there in Internet land who have the ability to rate books on that site and, for a fee, will read your manuscript and rate it on the site. Obviously they have bought enough books on the site and are probably writers themselves. My guess is that this is more lucrative than selling their own work on it.
I have also tried using advertising on Amazon to promote my novels. One month I spent a mere AU$100.00 as an exercise and did get a surge of readers but they all used Kindle Select, the subscription site, and I only made royalties by pages read and, while most readers did read the novels in their entirety, the royalties didn't add up to much. I made around $2.50 in total and I'd had about fifty readers as I recall. I've made about $3.00 selling one hard copy book on the site but few people buy hard copies. To get a star rating would no doubt help but I'm not paying someone because what I spend would no doubt cancel out what I earn.
A dear friend read my latest novel and genuinely said she'd give it four stars but she couldn't as she hadn't spent the prerequisite $50.00 on Amazon books. I was still enormously grateful that she took the trouble to read it. I don't know about the experience of other writers but my friends and family resist reading my novels as if they'd catch Covid from doing so. At least my son read my first one when he was eighteen years old and really liked it. I was delighted that he bothered to read it to the end.
I would love to get a rating from someone who is able to give one on the Amazon site, nevertheless, I am deeply suspicious of these ratings especially given some of the titles that receive four stars. I will never find out how it works as the Internet is a large and mysterious entity and, while I do love it for some reasons, life was often simpler without it.
END.
