30 Years in the Writing Biz...and What's to Come!

30 Years in The Biz & What’s Ahead

I’ll tell you folks the same thing I always tell those interested in writing, in making a living from the writing biz.  If you want to be a writer and make a living from the craft, I advise you to…marry rich.

That said, the second most important thing you can do is write a brilliant book.  If you do so, and if you get it noticed and acquired by HarperCollins, all the rest of what I tell you is pretty moot.

Now I’ll tell you how by far the majority of us have come to make a living as fiction writers, a living lying for a living.  And that’s mainly by butt-to-the-chair in front of the keyboard, day in and day out, and by promoting our careers and work.  I say day in and day out, but the fact is two pages a day and in six months you have a novel.

I’m going to give you lots of background on the book biz, the publishing biz as it relates to the part of it with which I’m familiar…and that’s mostly mass market fiction which you should know right off is read 80% by ladies, whereas non-fiction is read mostly by men but women are charging those ramparts as they become more and more prevalent in the work force.

And I can only speak about the portion I know fairly intimately and that’s mass market publishing in America.  You should know that of the ten top publishers in the world, only two American companies are among that lofty group.  Those two are McGraw-Hill at number 8 and Wiley at number 9.  Scholastic is close at number 11 and HarperCollins (for whom my wife now writes), is number 11.  Of course most or all of those companies take advantage of the American market, even if not based here.  And they publish lots of different products, school books, law books, etc., etc. Harliquin, Kat's publisher, now an imprint of Harper Collins, is the worlds largest publisher of women's fiction. Romance is 55% of the mass market biz, well ahead of mystery, thrillers, fantasy, sci fi, and others.

Kat, my wife, and I have made our living from the book biz for 30 years and have seen radical changes in the business during that time, including probably the most radical change since Guttenburg invented the printing press.  And that, of course, is the internet and digital publishing and your ability to get published in about 3 hours if you’re good with a keyboard, and I presume you are if you’re a writer in 2017.  And that includes paperbacks, mostly in trade paperback size, via print on demand.

But let’s regress to 1987, 30 years ago, when Kat looked over my shoulder as I wrote my second book and first western, and said to herself, “I can do that.”  And did, so many successful books ago that she doesn’t like me revealing the number, but I’m sure she won’t mind me divulging her 20 plus appearances on the New York Times bestseller list.

She started writing and, because of her chutzpah and drive and willingness to charge into a Los Angeles agent’s office, Kat sold her first book 6 weeks or so before I lucked out and an editor have a spare moment and grab my manuscript, my second by the way, out of his submission room, which likely housed a thousand or so like it and liked mine enough to make an offer.

When we started in the biz, and wanting it to be a real business and having some experience in business as both of us were real estate brokers, and I was a licensed real estate appraiser and contractor who'd build 200 houses and over 200,000 square feet of commercial space, we knew that marketing was a good part of the success side of any business, including writing.  We quickly figured out not only who bought books but who sold books in America, and to most folks surprise, even then, it was not bookstores.  Mass market fiction was the majority of books sold in supermarkets, drug stores, convenience markets, and truck stops.  In fact 80% of mass market books were sold in those outlets…but how to get to them, thousands and thousands of them, with a marketing effort? It didn’t take long to figure out, by standing and looking at book racks that there were distributors who stocked all those book racks, and no matter how many great reviews you had, it was those folks and their drivers who determined if your book was placed at eye level or where only a dachshund could see it and reach for it.

It wasn’t long, after some diligent work, that I had a mailing list of 1,200 book distributors all over the U.S. which was by far the majority of those folks.  And all the while Kat and I were stopping in every bookstore we stumbled across, sticking our hands out and giving those folks a good smile, a piece of promotional material, and hoping they’d remember us and stock our books…but the distributors were where the action was.  A book buyer at an Anderson News or ARA would buy books for the racks in a hundred or more supermarkets and drug stores, and make the decision where they were placed in the racks.

We soon discovered that the distributors were early morning folks and had a weekly driver’s meetings, most at 5 or 5:30 in the morning, and those were the boys and girls a mass market writer wanted to impress.  Now Kat, even though she’s at work by 8 AM, is not a morning person, so my dragging her to a 5:30 drivers meeting where she had to be charming was not always my easiest assignment…but we went to dozens.  I took along my collection of antique weapons and passed them around. Kat had her good looks to impress a lot of truck drivers, then 90% male, but I had to have another stichk. Anyway, we brought the donuts, they provided the coffee, and we talked guns and romance and what we were working on to distributors and bookbuyers all over the country.  And hoped we kept them interested.

And we did booksignings, at supermarkets and drugstores and Targets and K-Marts and at the National Truck Stop Operator’s show in Las Vegas and rodeos and, yes, at bookstores.  Kat and I sold over 600 books at Davis Monthen AFB, a supermarket, and Fort Uachuca in Arizona in one weekend and that was a record for that distributor at the time—we didn't draw the crowds that Steven King, or Louie L'Amour or Daniel Steel would draw, but sold books to folks who came in to buy a quart of mile or pair of sox.  By the way, military bases are among the best places to do a booksigning, if you take booksignings seriously and work at it, and I have a handout for you if you’re interested in being very good at the task.  And booksignings work…where you might sell a dozen or two books at your local book store, Kat and I talked our local distributor into setting up a signing at Costco, and as they serviced six Costcos our books went into all.  I don’t recall how many we personally sold at the Missoula Costco, but the distributor informed me we sold 6,000 of our books at the six.  That was a good day.  If you read my handout you'll discover that most book marketers and bookstore owners have no idea how to do a booksigning.

A bad day?  If you want to destroy a marriage get your wife up at 4:30, drive her to L.A., a hundred mile trip, meet with two dozen grumpy truck drivers at an ARA, then drive back to Bakersfield for an interview at noon on Television, then drive another 50 miles or so to Tehachapi to a University Woman’s early evening meeting, then home about 11 PM…and all o that on a Valentine’s Day.  Your wife's favorite holiday.  I won’t try that one again…in fact have been advised not to.  Maybe warned is the right word.

But this talk is about the changes in the biz.  

Those distributor companies have been acquired and acquired and acquired by only a couple of companies over the last 30 years, and now there are about 25 book buyers in the country who matter, and unless your Patterson or Grishom or Mrs. Harry Potter it’s very tough to get front and center with them.

And it has long been a strange business.  Most of those mass market books, those paperback books, you see on supermarket or drug store racks…if your local outlet even stocks books, have about a six-week shelf life.  If they don’t sell the distributor takes them down and they become returns.  They go back to the distributor’s warehouse, have their covers removed, and the covers are returned to the publisher for a full refund.  Hardbacks have to be returned whole for a refund, but paperbacks are cover-returned, book shredded.  I’ve always thought that a great waste, as do most folks in the business, but that’s long been the business.  If you're lucky enough to ever get a royalty report from a so-called legacy publisher, you'll see a column, reserve for returns.

And it’s always been very difficult to get your work on the racks in the first instance.  To get noticed, and appreciated, and purchased, by the major so-called brick and mortar, or legacy, publishers in New York, and to garner that big advance.  And, you’ll learn, it is no less difficult to get noticed, but this time by book buyers, now that you can go around them and go the web route.  And the web route is getting noticed by the actual end user, not a distributor.

In the past you had to print and mail your manuscript to the publisher and hope, hope, hope your romance didn’t land on the male hunting and fishing editor’s desk, or your western on the lesbian or gay imprint editor’s desk, or it would be promptly returned and you’d never know why.  

It’s always been a subjective business…I can tell you a dozen horror stories about books being rejected time and time again and ending up being best sellers.  Think Tom Clancy, Grisham, Daniel Steel, etc. 

Just quickly, The Hunt for Red October was rejected by every major publisher until it got a small advance from a speciality publisher, the Naval Institute Press; Grisham waited 15 years between A Time to Kill, for which he got a lousy five grand advance, and The Firm which only garnered an equally low advance but it's sales resulted in A Time to Kill then garnering a two million dollar sale of movie rights. And Steel sold her first book, only to have the next six rejected.  And I can go on and on.

Tough and thick skin is a requirement for most writers.  For instance, one day I got a letter from my agent…who I had thanks to Kat’s efforts…and enclosed was a copy from an editor with the comment, “This novel has no redeeming value.”  Gee, I wonder why I remember that quote, word for word.  After an afternoon and night with my head under the pillow, and thinking of putting it in the gas oven sans flame, I braved my way back to the mailbox and dreaded opening another letter from my agent, this one with another letter from an editor who said, “This guy is the next Louis L’Amour.”

Okay, back to work.

So, as the number of folks you could promote face to face diminished, other marketing opportunities have arisen.  When we had that mailing list of 1,200 it would cost thousands to print and mail a promotional piece.  Now, with the web, if you’ve done your homework, if you’ve worked hard on social media, if you’ve developed not a mailing list, but an email list. With a few keystrokes you can contact many, many potential bookbuyers with your promotional piece.  Kat’s facebook fan page alone has nearly 30,000 likes, mine is approaching 10,000, and we each have the maximum 5,000 on our friend pages.  And that’s not to speak of followers on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn, and so many more opportunities are available, so many new social sites this old fa...fellow can't keep up. 

I maintain ten Facebook pages, each appealing to a different sort of book buyer, if they appeal at all. I think with about 20 keystrokes, including Kat’s followers and ‘likes’ if you know that term, I can reach 100,000 folks.  When, when, when could you ever have accomplished that with a little effort and very little, if any, money? I've had over a million views of my youtube videos on every subject from our books to building my greenhouse or putting a concret floor in an existing garage.  And I'm a reviewer...not a book reviewer, but a restaurant and hotel reviewer.  Why? Because we travel a lot, and like a lot of husbands I spend a good deal of time waiting on beautification so I have time in the room with my computer, and I plug my webpage link in every review. My reviews—and I'm a leading reviewer on Trip Advisor—have had nearly 100,000 views.

It’s a new world in the writing biz…again.

Now, with an hour or so of study and a couple of hours of formatting, and either buying or creating a cover, you can go to Amazon, Smashwords, Nook Press, or others, and in short order your book is available for purchase by a few million folks, or few billion folks.  When could you have ever gotten checks from India, Japan, Brazil, Canada, and on and on. When could you ever have gotten a bonus for pages read?  Yes, Amazon knows how many pages are read on every Kindle our Kindle program on every phone and iPad and computer out there, even the ones in Zimbabwe.  And if you have multiple titles, unlike those days when I would be thrilled to see three of my titles on a Barnes and Noble shelf, you can click on my name on my Amazon author page and see nearly fifty titles. That’s called shelf space in retailing and still costs major companies lots of money to attain for their product. It will cost you a little education and a little time.

That’s the good news. The bad?  On Amazon you have over five million books with which to compete.

So now the problem is not to get published, but to get noticed.

When web publishing first became an opportunity a decade or more ago, I jumped on the proverbial bandwagon and quickly learned how to get my work on the then available sites. Soon I was knocking them dead making a hundred bucks a month, if it was a good month.  As I had learned in the real estate biz, just having the product wasn’t enough, at not enough if you wanted to make real money.

So, did I want to write, or spend a good part of my time promoting the work I wasn’t doing enough of because I was promoting rather than writing?

I had an old friend who’d long been selling on the web.  He wasn’t an author, he’d never sold a book in his life.  He called me regarding a political blog I worked on and said, being like minded, that he’d like to build up my following.  I jumped on the opportunity and very quickly my following was ten-fold, then it dawned on me…my buddy, an expert at SEO, search engine optimization, could help me sell books.  Soon, even splitting my income with him, I was making 50 times what I’d done on my own, and had much more time to write.  Sometimes it's not what you know but who you know...and are willing to share with.

Then, shortly, I saw the opportunity of publishing others.  Of letting their work see the light of day again, and of making them and ourselves some money along the way.  Having lots of writing buddies who had literally hundreds of books in their backlists, many of them westerns and just as topical today as they were 30 years or more ago when many of them were written…after all they were set in 1870 and that year is that year, we were soon in the biz.  And we were in the biz without a 20 story high-rise in Manhattan, and without any employees, only a handful of piecework independent contractors.

As it happened the major NY publishers had all but given up on the western, so we were left with a very big piece of a relatively small pie...but more than big enough for a couple of ol' country boys.   And these books had mostly been professionally edited and rights returned to the authors.  

To make a long story short in the 3.5 years I was a co-owner of Wolfpack Publishing we sold 4 million books—now nearing 6 million—and more satisfying to me, sent lots of four figure monthly checks to friends, some of whom hadn’t made a dime in years from all their efforts.  Nothing pleased me more than sending a ten thousand dollar plus monthly check to an 84 year old friend who had made no money in the last ten years off his 400 book backlist.

That’s truly illustrative of how the biz has changed over the last 30 years.

During that time, and since, with my old partner now at the helm and now knowing book sales intimately, we dominated Amazon’s classic western bestseller list with most months over 50% of the top 100.  I just checked as I’m making these notes and Wolfpack has 10 of the top 20, 26 of the top 100, and my latest which enjoyed 3 months at No. 1 or 2, is still No. 10 and I have four of the top 100.  Interesting, as two of those four were written 20 years ago.

It’s a new world in the writing biz.  It's a new and fascinating world in the publishing biz.

A lot of you folks, most I imagine, are here because you'd like to be published.  The good news is that can happen for you in a very few hours via self-publishing, but it's lost much of the glory it had when your work was vetted by some legacy publisher, edited by a pro, and offered to the world by 235 salesmen and ladies as was our first books...salespeople who covered the U.S. and worked for Kensington and Bantam in our cases.  That route is still out there If you're diligent and patient, and, yes, lucky.

Other than the immediacy of self-publishing, and the fact you can easily have a paperback to hand your aging grandmother and brag, “See grandma, I’m published,” self-publishing has some other advantages.  You won’t have to argue with some twenty-five year old Brown U. grad who’s been assigned as your copy editor about terms she likely knows absolutely nothing about. Why would she know anything about the term “my mule humpbacked away” and insist on changing it to “backed away” unless she’d spent hours at elevation thousand foot elevation cleaning up the mess of a muletrain wreck where it’s hard to breath and work while cussin’ a knotheaded mule?  It took me two months to argue that one thru.  Wouldn’t happen with self-publishing.

One of today’s current mantras is ‘political correctness’, and that’s PC at the cost of good history and I’m not only offended by the trend but thrilled that you can be ‘correct’ without being so-called politically correct in your writing if you self-publish.  Let me give you an example…I wrote a novel set around the Indian gaming business, and, of course, used the term Indian many times. My hero was a Montana Salish. After being told by the company that it was going to be a ‘very big book’ a ‘hardback’ I was called by the publisher and told, ‘Larry, you can’t use the term Indian in the book.  It’s not politically correct.’  After a moment of silence, and my adrenaline calming down, I respectfully asked, “Okay, what do I do about those thousands of casino billboards, TV ads, and Radio ads around the country that are paid for by the tribes and advertise Indian casinos?  Oh, and by the way, what to you suggest I call the Brueaur of Indian Affairs?” To her credit, after a moment of silence, she said, “I get it.”  And that was it.

Let me give you something to think about, political correctness only supports lying.  Lying about our history gains us nothing. That black child who reads Huckelberry Finn should know how his race was treated at one time…and not so he can revile those who did so, but so he can respect how far this country has come in a lousy 150 years.  All Americans, no matter color or creed, should be so very proud of that fact, and of their country.  But that’s another subject for another time, although it’s part of the 30 years in publishing I’m reporting upon.

So to continue, it’s not like the legacy publishers don’t make mistakes and believe me if you have wide readership you’ll learn about every small mistake in your book, self or legacy published.  Kat gets emails and letters saying “I’m sorry to report there are two mistakes in your book.” And I once got a pre-reading copy, known as a galley, (one printed for reviewers and book buyers) that had a scene wherein my hero had been wounded at the Battle of San Pasqual and entered the doctor’s tent to have the doc say, “Take off your pants and shirt…”  Only the typesetter had dropped the ‘r’ in shirt. …Needless to say, I requested they ship me all the galleys and I hand corrected all 80.

If that happens to you and you self-publish you can only blame yourself.  Damn the luck.

If you self-publish and are not successful and your dreams are not fulfilled, you can only blame yourself.

So, I can’t begin to tell you how important it is you write a technically sound book, a manuscript without spelling and gramatical errors, and I mean grammatical errors in narrative, not in conversation, for you don’t want to break the reader’s trance, and an error that stops the flow of them suspending their disbelief does just that, and breaking the trance gives the reader an opportunity to set your book down, possibly to never pick it up again…and you don’t want that to happen.

So, the quality of your manuscript is so very important, then you can worry about content and how to make your manuscript compelling.  And that’s a good part of my Sunday talk.  

To try and bring this all together there have been radical changes in publishing over the past 30 years, from a dependency on a few legacy publishers, the huge majority of whom were in New York City, to a plethora of publishers all over the world who may only have a lymeric or a tome or a library of tomes to self-publish.  From a time when you could recover rights from a legacy publisher because your book was considered out-of-print, to a time when those same publishers claim your book is never out of print due to digital publishing and its appearance on Amazon or other web sites.  From a time when there were a thousand or more bookbuyers who represented lots of retail accounts to today when 20 or so make the big difference. From only 2013 to 2017 bookstores diminished from 12,300 to 10,800.  When we started in the biz Waldenbooks had 1,100 stores across the nation…is there 1 today?  From a time when a large majority of American publishers were American owned to today when Kensington is the only closely held major American publisher…not that there are still not a lot of good small houses.  And from a time when only a select and lucky few could see their book on the shelf to a time when anyone can see their book on a computer, iPod, or iPhone screen, and it can be seen by billions of potential buyers all over the world.

So, yes, publishing has changed, some for the worse, much for the better.  And it’s still changing.

Now, ask me lots of questions as they’ll likely be much harder to answer than those I might have to ask myself to fill out the hour….

Join me on my webpage https://www.ljmartin.com, my facebook pages https://www.facebook.com/ljmartinauthorand https://www.facebook.com/writingwell

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