Let’s face it, many writers actually avoid writing. In fact, I know lots of writers who have given up completely, but they all seem to do it in different ways.
Some writers stop writing by “courting the muse.” They may wander to foreign countries while spending years researching a novel, or take long nature walks every day, or spend a lot of time at the gym, all in the hopes of feeling inspired. All of those things are great in moderation, and most authors actually know that inspiration almost always comes when you are down in the trenches, working your butt off on a new manuscript. But still they court the muse in all the wrong places. Hey folks, those aren’t muses you’re courting, they’re succubi!
One of the most horrible succubi is the one named “self-promotion.” Now, it’s true that as authors we need to do some self-promotion, but many writers carry it to extreme excess. I find that as a writer, I’m always being invited to conventions or book signings, for example. I love doing those kinds of events, and I love being invited to do them. But it would be very easy to destroy my life by going to them.
Let me give you an example. I was invited recently to give a talk in Wyoming about my book In the Company of Angels. Now, the place I need to go is a seven-hour drive from my home. So I need to plan on 14 hours of travel time. Then of course there is gas and wear-and-tear on the car, and we have to come with the fact that I will lose two days off of work. So the total costs for this self-promotion to me is roughly a minimum of $1000. So I’m happy to do it, but this is the kind of thing that I can’t do very often—once or twice a year.
But I know authors who do it once or twice a week. Some folks become so enamoured with being celebrities that they eventually lose any free time to write. Quite literally, they are going to a new convention or speaking at a library or writers group twice a week, and eventually they become what I call an “author” instead of a “writer.” A writer is someone who writes for a living. An author is someone who writes infrequently, as a hobby.
There’s a side note to this that has to do with bookselling. Very often when you’re an author and you go to a convention, the convention will have a designated bookseller who is supposed to handle your books. This bookseller will almost always “have trouble” getting your books in, and so they will ask you to bring your own books, let the bookseller sell them, and then reimburse you. The problem is that when you as an author get your books from your publisher, you get them at a 40% discount. But then you have to pay to have them shipped to you. And if you’re going to carry a bunch of books on a plane, you may have to pay expensive baggage fees. Then when you get to the convention, you are asked to sell them to the bookseller at a 40% or even a 30% discount. Guess what? You’re screwed. You end up selling every book at a significant loss, and if you sell a thousand dollars in books, you end up losing $200. It’s not a wise business plan. A note to folks planning conventions: I love booksellers, but I want to make a profit too, particularly when I do all the work and take all of the risk. The same thing often happens with schools. I had a school a couple of years ago that desperately wanted me to drive for many hours to talk to the kids, but they wouldn’t let me bring books to sell and of course they had no money to pay for my expenses. It turned out that the principal of the school was morally opposed to the idea that the author make any money. Unfortunately, I just had to say no to that deal.
There are a lot of writers who have entire “time-wasting routines.” They turn it into an art form. They have to make sure that the email has been checked, along with their bank account, and that the cats are fed and petted, and the bed is made. They need to make sure that the news is watched and a favorite video game is played, and that they’re music channel is set to the right station on the stereo, and that they’ve got their three-mile jog in, and all of their 5000 Facebook friends are doing well. They have to be fed, have their favorite beverage nearby, poop, and be sitting in a perfectly comfortable writing chair. Only then, can they write, only then.
The problem is, that their routine keeps growing longer as they get older. I have one friend whose routine consisted in part of getting himself “loosened-up” by sitting on his porch and drinking beer. He couldn’t get loosened-up enough until he got to about his sixteenth beer, and by that time he was ready for a nap.
Screw your freaking routine! Sit down and focus on your writing. When you’ve worn yourself out on brain work, then you can have fun at the gym or find out how fat your accounts are. The writing must become your priority.
You as a writer are a one-person global enterprise. You produce and sell your fiction. You market it to publishers and movie studios in hundreds of countries around the world. No one else can or will create your art for you, and it won’t get done without you. So you need to treat your writing like a business, or all too soon you will be going out of business.
***
Military SF Mega Storybundle with 15 action-packed books for as little as $15. Titles by me, Kevin J. Anderson, Jody Lynn Nye, Robert Asprin, John Ringo, Brad Torgersen, Michael Z. Williamson, Steve Rzasa, William C. Dietz Aaron Allston, Rebecca Meluch, Travis Shane Taylor Jonathan P. Brazee, David Afsharirad, LJ Hachmeister and more. Part of the proceeds benefits the Challenger Learning Centers for Space Science Education.
