Dear Ally, How Do You Write a Book

by Ally Carter

  I also know people who just write too quickly to publish everything under one name. There’s a limit to how many times a year a bookstore can promote a new book by Author X. To some extent, there’s a limit to how frequently fans will buy a new book. Being a fast writer can have a lot of advantages, but publishers can be leery of putting out too many books too quickly. That’s why Nora Roberts, the queen of modern romance, started publishing thrillers as J. D. Robb several years ago. She was just writing so quickly that her publishers were afraid she might flood her own market, so a whole new name—a whole new author brand—was born.

  Sometimes people might use a pseudonym if their name is incredibly hard to spell or, maybe, if they have the same name as another author or celebrity. (If your name is Jonathan Greene, then, yeah, a pseudonym might be in order.)

  The final reason someone might use a pseudonym is for reasons of privacy, though I have to say it’s pretty hard to keep a name secret. It can be done, but you have to be amazingly diligent and careful, and you’ll probably need a few layers of paperwork between you and the public. It can happen, but you’re going to need to know very early on that that’s your goal and then you’ll have to plan accordingly.

  Finally, a question whose answer isn’t “it depends”! Nope. This time there is one correct, non negotiable answer, and that answer is:

  Never, ever, ever give a publisher money.

  Ever.

  I mean it. Don’t do it.

  Don’t give a publisher a dime! An agent either.

  In fact (this may blow your mind), publishers are supposed to pay you. And reputable agents always work on commission, meaning that they take a percentage of what you’re paid (usually 15%), so you don’t pay them either!

  (As I said earlier, but I’ll say it again because it’s important: Paying my agent 15% of my income is something I will never complain about! She earns her commission and then some, so don’t think that being in this business without an agent will save you some money. I promise, in the long run, agents more than pay for themselves!)

  Writing is a passion for a lot of people. But it’s also a dream, and where there are dreams, there will never be a shortage of people looking to take advantage of the dreamers. Which means the world is full of “publishers” who are more than willing to take your money. Some may call it an editorial service. Some might say that the author has to pay for the art. All of them are scams, run by people who want to take advantage of people who want nothing more than to see their words in print.

  I know it’s hard, getting rejection after rejection. I know it’s tempting to want to put your manuscript in book form. Maybe once it’s out there … Maybe once it has a great cover … Maybe once it looks like a real book, publishers will want it?

  The bad news is that none of that is true.

  The good news is that you can save your money.

  Ebooks changed the world.

  No. Really. They did.

  Before ebooks, self-publishing was mainly what I talk about above—paying a “publisher” (a term I use very loosely) to “publish” your books (which basically meant typesetting and printing books with not-great covers) so that people could try to sell those books to their family and friends. But then ebooks came about and a whole new avenue of self-publishing opened up.

  All of a sudden, authors could self-publish their books and actually sell them to readers instead of driving around with a box of really badly done books in the trunk of their car.

  Self-publishing went from being largely a scam (with a few exceptions) to a legitimate business strategy. Now some of the smartest, savviest, and best writers I know are self—or “indie”—publishing.

  So is it something you should do?

  Well, like many of the answers in this book, that depends.

  1. WHAT GENRE ARE YOU WRITING?

  There are some genres where ebooks are incredibly popular and common, so indie publishing is a viable option. Are you writing romance? Science fiction? Then indie publishing could work out for you since those are the genres where ebook sales are the strongest.

  2. WHAT AGE ARE YOU WRITING FOR?

  Kids and teens don’t read ebooks. Yeah. I know. A few do. But on the whole, most readers under the age of eighteen vastly prefer physical books to ebooks, and since we live in an age where self-publishing is pretty much dependent on strong ebook sales, that means that indie publishing isn’t ideal if your primary audience is going to be teens or young adults.

  A lot of indie authors will also have a way for die-hard fans to order physical, hard-copy books, but they aren’t really in stores (where teens browse), and they’re very rarely in libraries. They’re never in Scholastic book fairs. And a huge part of the YA and teen market is dependent on school and library sales, book fair sales, and a whole host of other things that you have to have a physical book to do.

  Now, are there self-published YA books available? Absolutely! Have they made money? Yes. Some have no doubt made a lot of money. But it seems like (at this point in time) most of those books are being bought and read by adults who like to read YA fiction—not by teens themselves. Which makes this a very different market.

  So if you’ve written a YA book that you think will appeal to adults more than teens, yeah. This could possibly work for you. But if you’ve written a YA book that you think will appeal mainly to teens themselves, then this might not be in your long-run best interest.

  At least not now. In a few years, this may very well change.

  3. HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT MARKETING, DESIGN, AND OTHER BUSINESSY STUFF?

  When you decide to self-publish, you become your publisher. You and you alone. Which means you’ve got to hire a cover designer and a copy editor and pay for both up front and out of your own pocket (which is different from paying a “scam” publisher like we discussed earlier). You’re going to have to either pay someone—or learn how—to do the technical stuff that goes into turning a Microsoft Word file into an ebook that’s up on all the major vendors.

  You’re going to have to pick your keywords and categories and other metadata.

  You’re going to have to set a price point.

  And if you don’t know what any of those terms mean, then you’re either going to want to do a whole lot of research on indie publishing or just go the traditional route. Because you can’t succeed at indie publishing without knowing those things and a whole lot more!

  Then, once the book is up—once it’s one of about a million other books that people have uploaded—you’re going to have to find a way of marketing and promoting your book and setting it apart from the pack.

  But don’t most authors have to promote their books even when they’re published by a big New York house anyway? Yes. They absolutely do some of it. Sometimes they do a lot of it. But with indie publishing you’re doing 100 percent of it, all the time.

  Again, I know people who have become very successful indie publishing, and without exception, they’re all really smart, really dedicated, really savvy people who went this route because it was a great business decision.

  I don’t know any über-successful indie authors who are only in indie publishing because they didn’t want to mess with getting an agent.

  4. HOW QUICKLY DO YOU WRITE?

  Without a doubt, one of the things that most successful indie authors have in common is how quickly they’re able to turn out new books. There are a lot of reasons why that is (and some are very complicated, involving the algorithms that online booksellers use to determine where a book falls in its ranking), but the key thing to remember is that successful indie authors are turning out multiple books a year. (I have a friend who published twelve books a few years ago! Yes, a book a month.)

  If that matches your process …

  If you feel like you can write a whole bunch of books pretty quickly …

  If you are kind of a publishing geek (like me!) and you think, Yay! I can do my own metadata! …

  If you want to write for adult read
ers in genres where ebooks are selling really well …

  Then self—or indie—publishing might very well be for you.

  But self-publishing is NOT for you if …

  —You think it will be less work than working with a traditional publisher.

  —You think having a book for sale online will automatically impress agents or editors.

  —You think putting published author on your application is going to automatically get you into Harvard.

  —You think it will be easy to stand out among the massive number of books self-published every year.

  There really is no easy road to success in this business, I’m sorry to say. But paths to success do exist, and if you’re smart and patient and if you work really, really hard, you could very well find one!

  DEAR CARRIE RYAN,

  You know more about self-publishing than anyone I know. Is that something you’d recommend to teens who are just getting started writing?

  This is always such a difficult question to answer because it depends on what the goal is. If your goal is simply to publish a book, then I say go for it. If it’s to sell a lot of copies of that book and build a career … That’s when I’m a little more hesitant to recommend that route when you’re just starting out, because now you’re becoming your own publisher, which is a lot of work.

  I feel like sometimes young writers turn to indie publishing because they’re too impatient with the process. They want to skip to the end. But I don’t think that’s the best way to build a solid, long-term career. When you’re starting out is the time you should be experimenting with writing: taking risks, trying new voices and styles. You’re building the foundation for what comes next and that’s not something you can shortcut around. I have reams of unpublished fiction in a filing cabinet in my garage, and I’m okay with it staying there. If indie publishing had been an option when I wrote it, I might have tried to go that route, but I doubt I would have found much success. My writing just wasn’t that great—I had to move on to new projects, I had to learn and grow and study craft and figure out how to revise.

  Also, it’s easy to forget that indie publishing is a business. If you want to sell a lot of copies of a book, it’s going to take work and it’s very different work from writing. Some people love being their own publisher—there are many benefits (like having complete control). But some authors want to focus on the writing and not worry about the rest (like sourcing covers, setting pricing, designing ad campaigns). So right now my advice is that if you want to indie publish, make sure you know what you’re getting into. It’s not a shortcut but its own path with unique challenges and rewards. And of course there’s always the option of going hybrid: being both traditionally and indie published.

  One of my absolutely favorite things about being a writer is that you can do it from anywhere. I mean literally anywhere! You could write and publish a book from the moon as long as you had the time and a decent internet connection.

  In the movies and on TV shows, writers seem to always live in New York (or maybe Los Angeles), but that’s not necessary in real life. Publishers don’t care where you live. They care about the book you’ve written. So get to writing that book!

  DEAR JULIE MURPHY,

  You live a heck of a long way from NYC. How did you find an agent? Any advice on the subject?

  I found my agent the old-fashioned way—querying! Of course there’s lots of value in attending conferences and meeting agents in real life, but I think it’s also okay to be honest with yourself and know your strengths. For me, that meant I didn’t feel confident in my ability to pitch an agent in real life. I feel like those are always the flashiest stories, but I came straight out of the slush pile and so did many of my peers.

  This isn’t something that might happen. This is something that will happen. I’m sorry to say it, but rejection is like death and taxes—it’s something that no writer can avoid forever.

  I’m not going to tell you not to take it personally, because it’s always going to feel at least a little bit personal. But just know that there are a lot of reasons why publishers (and agents) might reject a book.

  Maybe the market for that book just isn’t what it used to be, and if you’d sent them that same manuscript eighteen months ago, they would have happily signed you.

  Maybe they just bought a very similar book and they don’t need two books about faeries or dragons or girls whose braces give them ESP.

  Maybe they just don’t love the book. This one is hard to hear because it feels like they’re saying, “I don’t like you. I don’t think you have any talent. You’re stupid.” But really, when an agent or editor says, “I just don’t love the book,” what they mean is … they just don’t love the book. It’s like trying on a pair of jeans, and even though they’re well-made jeans that might look great on someone else, they just don’t look great on you, so you decide to buy a pair of jeans you love instead.

  Editors have a limited amount of room on their desks. They only get to work on so many books a year, so they’re only going to work on the books that they love! Which is good, actually. You want an editor who loves your book. You want an editor who is going to passionately support your book in-house and when everyone is sitting around, saying, “Which book should be on the cover of our catalog or featured in the big ad we’re taking out in Entertainment Weekly?” you want an editor who will scream, “This book! This book right here! I love it!”

  And most of all, just because one editor (or agent) passes on a book, it doesn’t mean everyone will. There are a ton of stories about books that got rejected all over town and then went on to be huge bestsellers or win fancy awards. So getting rejected by one publisher doesn’t mean getting rejected by them all.

  But now I’m going to talk about the final (and hardest) reason why a publisher might pass on the book: Sometimes the book just isn’t good enough. Yet.

  This isn’t something anyone wants to hear. Ever. But no one got better at writing by only being told how perfect their writing is, and I want y’all to get good at this! I want you to be ready for what’s to come.

  The fact of the matter is that this is a business run by professionals, and very few people write at a professional level right out of the gate. It does happen! Absolutely! But even people who published when they were really young didn’t publish their first books. No. Usually they have ten or twenty (or more) other books that they’d started and stopped and finished while they perfected their craft and honed their stories.

  So what do you do if a publisher (or agent) rejects your book? You write another book. You submit to another publisher or agent.

  And another.

  And another.

  And another.

  Until you write the right book at the right time and in the right way. Stick with it! It’s worth it. I promise.

  DEAR MARIE LU,

  How do you deal with rejection?

  By drowning myself in sugar. Okay, but honestly, though—I try to remind myself that I am not the same thing as my book. Early on, I signed with my agent with a manuscript about Mozart, but that story never sold. It was a combination of bad writing (my craft wasn’t quite there yet), which I could work on, but also because of bad timing (the market wasn’t interested in historical fiction), which I had no control over. That’s the thing about most rejections—many times, it’s not personal. And rejection never stops either, even after publication; there will be critical reviews, or low sales, or readers who didn’t like your work. So be kind to yourself. Even though I always put a piece of my heart into everything I write, my self-worth is not my work. You are more than your book. Keep doing your thing and improving your craft, and eventually you will find your way. Also, you never know if a rejected story might someday see the light of day again. Ten years after my Mozart story was soundly rejected, I rewrote it, and it is now being published by Penguin in 2019. You never know.

  If you’ve got two or more publishers interested in your book, congratulations! T
hat’s awesome. In that case, you’ll want to talk with each, get a sense for their marketing plans for the book. Maybe ask when they’d like to put the book on shelves, if they have any comparable (comp) titles that they’ve put out, and where they see your book fitting into the market.

  You’ll want to chat with both editors and ask what notes they might have for a revision. Where do they see you going with your career? And most of all, you’ll want to gauge which editor just feels right. This is a person you’re going to have to work closely with for (potentially) a very long time. Finding the right editorial fit might be far more important in the long run than which house is willing to give you what amount of money, though that should absolutely be considered as well.

  You’ll want to ask all these questions because this is a really big decision, and it is in every way your decision! Your agent will absolutely weigh in (which is their job), but the final decision is up to you.

  Agents work for you. You don’t owe publishers a thing until you’ve signed a contract. Your book isn’t just your book—it’s your career! So these decisions matter and they’re, ultimately, in your hands, so get as much information as you can. Consider it carefully, then make the call and …

  Go write another book.

  Seriously. You should always be writing the next book.

  Good luck!

  Every.

  Single.

  Day.

  But you know what? I’ve wanted to do this since I was twelve years old, and very few people get to do what they’ve dreamed of doing since they were kids. So I know I’m one of the lucky ones. And I try to remind myself of that as much as possible.

  DEAR RACHEL CAINE,

  How do you cope with rejection?

  I’m fairly secure about it now, but that’s at the end of a very long road (more than twenty-five years). Early in my career, I had no rejections, right up to the moment I was dropped by my publisher and unable to sell under my own name. That was tough, and it required thinking hard about what I wanted to write, and why, and what I was genuinely good at doing. I had to find my voice, and I think it took me several years to do it. I get proposals rejected from time to time, and I put them aside and look at them again to see what didn’t work about it, based on the feedback. But it doesn’t feel nearly as personal anymore.