Dean Wesley Smith has another great blog post up explaining the shifts in the role of agents over the past 100 years in the publishing industry. Go read it. It’s good. It made me wonder how I ever managed to make the transition from naive wannabe writer to confident, self-made business person and technology expert (when compared to everyone but programmers).
I remember 2005 to 2007 as The Lost Years. On paper, I was extremely busy. I worked as a freelance copywriter and as a copy editor for an online magazine. I interned for Broadway directors. I landed principal roles in voice acting and auditioned for film roles, nearly winning a part in a video contest for a major film studio. I studied affiliate marketing religiously once I quit my copyediting job. I wrote short stories and poems and submitted them to dozens of magazines and writing contests each. During this time, I also designed my own clothing and improved my sewing skills through costuming, even applying to be on Project Runway (dumb idea). Oh, and I was also selling stuff regularly on eBay.
In reality, I was slowly falling into a pattern of frustration and despair in each field as I realized that the only vocations that I would be content with pursuing to the exclusion of all others were the ones in which I was unable to make a decent living (acting and fiction writing).
I was determined to build an SEO Empire to give myself several streams of income while I pursued my real dreams of acting and writing. Sure, it was ambitious, but I never do anything by half measures. What’s more, I’m fairly certain that if I had acquired some startup money and had dropped my sense of ethics, I could have learned enough coding to take advantage of the SEO boom of 2006. That didn’t happen, and I eventually gave up on gray hat stuff back in 2008 when Google changed a lot of its algorithms. The traditional writing path might or might not have worked out if the depression from being rejected hadn’t discouraged me enough to stop querying short stories. I wasn’t about to stop writing, but the constant flow of rejection letters, even the personalized ones, were extremely disheartening.
Unfortunately, with the traditional publishing system the way it was back then, new writers were taught that the only way to have their books published was to find an agent, and agents told us they only considered authors with previous publishing experience, meaning stories published in magazines and anthologies.
Meanwhile, I was writing copy and other non-fiction articles, sometimes venturing into journalism, and I HATED it. It was either boring or nerve-wracking, the hours were unsuitable to my health problems, or at least the steady work with the magazine was, and I was going to give myself a coronary if I had to write one more stupid 500-word advertisement for the Tickle-Me Elmo of the Year, especially since I was doing the work for someone else’s websites.
The voice acting was unlikely to earn me enough money unless I moved to Hollywood, because the networks hiring for good voice-overs for fiction wanted actors to actually record on site. I didn’t have the money to move. My sewing improved every year, but the logistics of managing my own production company were way too complex for my liking, and the alternative was to do the work myself, meaning even less time to actually design.
The only real alternative to freelance writing I had at the time was the eBay business. I was always good at mimicking what other successful sellers did; the issue was inventory. In order to rank in the search results for certain categories, I had to have a large enough stock of items for sale, and that meant buying and storing large amounts of merchandise without a guarantee of selling any of it. My personal collections notwithstanding, unless I owned a small bookstore or the equivalent, I was never going to be able to compete in any of the book categories, and selling on consignment presented its own problems. If you don’t believe me, look up the My eBay stores of that era and see how many are still in operation today.
Back to writing. As an experiment, I wrote up a query for a novel I had plotted but hadn’t written yet and submitted it to a query workshop. The people who responded with critiques were well-meaning but incredibly ignorant as to the conventions of the genre of the book. I wasn’t about to change my title because people couldn’t read and mistook one word for another when they were spelled similarly; if an agent was that stupid, she wasn’t going to be the right person to represent my book, anyway.
While I learned several tips for simplifying my pitch, the entire process felt like a complete waste of time to me. The amount of rewriting for that query lone could have produced a short story. Who was the moron who invented this ridiculous convention of spending so much time on a pointless method of pitching to someone who couldn’t even buy my book, and how could I find him and throttle him?
I think that experience was in 2008, and it was the first time I had an inkling that things weren’t… as they should have been.
Simultaneously, I was observing all of the changes on the Internet and the rise of social networking and social media.
Then I went back to school, miracle of miracles, so the little spare time I had was devoted to keeping up with blogs that covered the publishing industry. Then I found the early adopters, and through them, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and when I read Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing, the rest was history.
Those years were The Lost Years because I had trouble finding the one true path for me, not because I wasted my time in honing my skills, although it took me up until recently to understand that. Some people need more time than others to find their vocation. It might have been a different story, however, if I had spent the interim between then and now querying agents. That would have been an American tragedy.
As an author who also spent copious amounts of time working and re-working queries, I can fully attest and (sometimes do) rant on and on about the “system,” as it is. But, that said, I’ve found even in all those hours editing *just* my query, I’ve always been able to take something away from them. Either to improve my writing or to learn more about my story. I think the key, then, is just to make sure that something–anything–productive is always moving forward. Never settle, always push.