I often wonder about situations far too prematurely. I mean, I keep thinking about my dream agent when my manuscript is nowhere near ready yet. That’s the kind of useless preparation that I know wastes time. I should worry about agents when I actually need one. However, there are some types of preparation tha a writer can take to increase her chances of a successful career. Some of them are self-explanatory, but others are not.
1. Decide what genre you want to be your main genre. Plan according to that genre.
This was the most difficult choice for me, as I want to write what comes into my head, and what comes into my head does not always fit into a tidy little box. My favorite books are crossovers and almost never from the same category. Ultimately, I decided on Fantasy.
This means have a set of works ready to go BEFORE approaching an agent. I have a sotyr that practically writes itself. I know it has breakout potential the way “The Nanny Diaries” did. But it’s not in my genre, so it’s not my focus or the manuscript I plan on submiting first. I want to have atleast three finished drafts and one finished manuscript before I even approach an agent. Why not submit as soon as I finish one? I’m tempted and impatient. I know I could. There’s the possibility that an agent might want to see more work or likes the second idea better. Do I want to attract attention only to fail on delivery?
2. Start building your platform NOW.
Develop an online presence. Keep a blog and write in it twice a week. Comment on other writer’s blogs, read about their motivations and struggles, and put useful blogs into a feed reader and organize them. Make sure to link back to your own blog when you can, and only comment when you feel you can add meaningful throughts to the discussion at hand. Make new friends. Follow social trends to try them out, even if they may seem distasteful to you at first; you can always quit later if they eat up too much of your time.
I see a lot of writers complaining that blogging and social networking is taking up too much of their time. One of the concepts that these people do not understand is that you have to sacrifice to achieve your goals, and by that I mean literally sacrifice. You can’t magically add time to your schedule if your schedule is already crammed full. You have to replace other activities in your free time to spend time online.
Maybe this means knitting is something you do during the news instead of by itself. Perhaps this translates into watching only one primetime TV show a night instead of three or going bowling every other weekend instead of every other day. (Who goes bowling anymore? I know there are bowlers out there still. A few of them.)
Four things you’ll have to balance that should always come out on top of online networking: writing, family, exercise, and reading. These are self-explanatory. If you do a lot of reading online or read fanfic instead of books some of the time, set aside a block of time in which to read and do nothing else. Don’t even check your email. Pre-load the stories you want to read on your screen or save them to your hard drive, then disconnect the internet if you have to.
3. Plan according to your habits.
If you know you’re a procrastinator like I am, a person who does a whole lot of work one day and none the next, you should realize that agents and editors will expect your to build a readership in your first few years as a client. That means you’re going to have to turn out more than a book a year in most cases — in romance, it could be significantly more often than that. Give yourself a cushion. Start ahead of the game with at least two other projects ready for revision and submission.
4. Focus on the long-term.
What are your goals as a writer? What do you want to accomplish in your career? I had a lot more focus in high school than in college. Among many other factors, the main reason was because job and career planning were built-in to the system. Schools coordinated with colleges and universities and announced deadlines, sometimes years in advance. There were job fairs, company and college representatives who visited, auditorium presentations, field trips to corporations and work environments, standardized testing (which was stupid but at least served as a set of road markers), application and scholarship deadlines.
Much of this does not happen while in college, and once you leave school, you are completely on your own. I functioned poorly outside of this system because I put too much trust in it to take care of me if I just followed the rules. When it was no longer possible to follow the rules and maintain my physical health, my world fell apart. I had to re-learn how to discipline myself without outside help. That ate up nearly half a decade of the best years of my life.
Make a list of goals. Ask yourself where you want to be in one year, five years, ten years. Do you want to be doing the same job you are currently a decade from now?
· Make separate lists for emotional, physical, financial, and career-oriented goals.
· Set the bar high. Not impossibly high, but outside of your comfort zone and well beyond what others expect from you.
· Separate each goal by several lines or lots of space on the papers. You should now have four lists of goals on four pieces of paper, with one to a few items per paper.
· Fill in a list of mini-goals between each goal. These mini-goals are steps that require signficant effort on their own but that make the journey from the present, or where you are now, to where you want to be more realistic. For example, if one of my goals was to have a book deal or an agent within two years, I would list learning to write a lot every day, outlining a story, beginning a manuscript, finishing a manscript, revision, more revision, edits, critique group work, more revisions, checking the appropriate query formats, production of query letters, submission of query letters, and lather, rinse, repeat.
· Keep these list visible or within reach of your writing space if you don’t want them visible to anyone. Look at them once a day before you go to sleep.
5. Keep ahead of the crowd in your field.
Stay up to date on thelatest publishing trends. This doesn’t mean scrap your vampire novel if one blogger says editors are sick of vampires. It means push yourself to have an unique pitch and a fantastic story.
It also means look at e-publishing and see if your genre is in on the game. This goes doubly for romance writers. If you want to dip your toes into the genre, you can writer for several good e-publishers and make some serious cash. The money is still in print publishing as of when I’m writing this article, but don’t think for a minute that can’t change. It’s already changing. Make the best decisions that will keep your options open.
Keep abreast of the happenings at popular blogs so you aren’t surprised to wake up one morning and find out that Borders dissolved overnight, for instance, or that an agency just split into two new ones. These events can and will happen, and if you’re following the right blogs, you will be one of the first people to know.
Learn how publishing operates. Understand what returns, advances against royalties, remaindered books, and P&L statements are. Don’t be lazy and waste an agent or an editor’s time by asking questions that would have obvious answers if you had simply Googled them.
Bonus: There is no spoon.
There are exceptions to the rules. It does happen. Someone writes a fantastic query that doesn’t follow any pattern or preconceived notions or agent guidelines, and it gets universal accolades. There are books that can fit into several genres and sell in all of them. BUT — and this is a big but — you should only break the rules if you are absolutely confident that doing so will work in your favor. Very few people can do this. It is a far better plan to color within the lines and to not piss your potential bosses off by acting like you’re the next Stephen King. You’re probably not.
This doesn’t mean you should obsess about running five words over 250 in a query or twenty words over 100,000 in a manuscript.
There is no single way to succeed in a writing career, just as there is no single path to small business success, political triumph, or massive social change. Any number of factors can work in your favor or against you: timing, availability, social climate, personal prejudices, economic trends, location. The best you can do is try to check off as many mini-goals as you can in a reasonable time frame and keep going.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot — don’t give up. If you know you have talent and several people outisde of your family and friends tell you so, the best thing you can do for your career is to never give up. Most potential authors will set out for a writing career with the expectation that they will not make it, or they go too far in other direction, quitting their other jobs before they can afford to do so.
Yes, buy a one-way ticket to New York and don’t look back. But set up a desk job and an apartment there before you land.