By
A.P. Fuchs
Disclaimer: The following is based on personal experience and on observing the experiences of those I have the privilege to call colleagues in the craft of writing.
Writers are good friends. We help each other out when we're down. Lift each other up when something good happens either in our career as an author or in our personal lives. We tell each other what books are good, where we are with our own projects…and also which markets are currently open to submissions. It's the later I wish to discuss, not for the sake of my literary friends (though it is directed at them)—but for the reader, the person who is the reason why we publish books and present our stories to the world.
Sadly, it's easy for those of us who write those stories (especially us small press folk) to write them for other writers and/or our writing friends. I do not mean that we sit there at the keyboard and write stuff that only Joe Author would like or throw inside jokes into our work that only those who are acquainted with them would recognize. What I mean is that sometimes the notion our “buying” audience is not Jack and Jill Reader, but rather the circle of friends we've formed via online forums, local writers groups, open mic poetry nights….I think you understand.
See—and I've talked about this before so I won't repeat myself—today it is super easy to get published thanks to the e-publishing revolution (eBooks and self-published POD books being the norm in the e-publishing industry). Because a lot of authors are publishing themselves, the task of marketing is entirely on their shoulders instead of partially on the publisher's as well. Many of the small presses or e-publishers do little, if any promotion. So what's the author of the work to do? Budget's tight, marketing experience is limited, overall knowledge of how the publishing/distribution/sales/profits system works is very small (some authors don't even know how it works), so the first place the author will market his/her work is to his/her writer friends. As warned above, there's no way to prove this as God's honest truth, but it is a trend and that many, many writers would agree with. And because of this trend, though the reader is remembered, he/she is not the focus and are not in the spotlight they deserve. Once the author's sold, say, 50-60 copies of his/her book, most of them are tired of marketing by then and move onto the next project, hoping that sales will still continue but usually just trickle in.
Next thing, and this is where the title of this little “here's what's wrong with the industry” tangent comes in, is the subject of anthologies. In short, since writers in a particular genre are friends, often you'll see many of them repeatedly appearing in the same story collections together. Out of a lineup of 20 or 30 authors, there's usually a chunk of anywhere between 5-10 authors whose names just seem to pop up in the table of contents time and time again. The purpose of an anthology is diversity, hence it being a compilation of works from many different authors. The 5-10 authors who keep showing up in the contents listing might be great storytellers, might even have a few fans, but it just seems the reader is always forced to read those same writers' brand of whatever genre(s) the author writes in. And to let you in on something, you know how I said writers market to each other? The majority of these collections are bought by the authors to see what so-and-so wrote. This may come off as a generalization but I know there's a writer and/or reader reading this, agreeing with every word.
In summation, writers need to consciously get away from each other in order to sell more copies of their novels and also to stop sharing the table of contents with the same guys/girls and start digging up new ground in other publications. The reader will thank them for it as there will be more options of purchasing their current release (where the author consciously and with effort markets to the reader), and also for an increase in the voices that present themselves in a collection's table of contents, the chance to read new stories by authors they've never read before.
• End
Copyright © 2004 by Adam P. Fuchs