Let’s start with a disclaimer. I think self-publishing is a viable form of publishing. There have been many cases where self-published authors have done amazingly well, and those stories seem to be growing at an exponential rate. And, I think there are certain circumstances where self-publishing might not be just a good alternative but actually a better alternative to traditional publishing.

So, let’s get that out of the way. This blog is not an anti-self-publishing piece. Instead, it’s a word of caution.

Articles describing the glories of self-publishing are popping up every day. Technology and infrastructure has advanced to the point where it’s perfectly possible for someone to present a book to the world and have it selling hundreds of thousands of copies in just a few months. This has happened, and it will continue to happen.

Combine that success with the woes of the traditional publishing routes. Disruptive technologies and waning readership have hurt both publishers and booksellers. The poor economy has made publishers skittish about accepting new, untested authors. Agents are more and more in demand. Contracts are harder and harder to get.

Looking at those last two paragraphs it seems like self-publishing might be the best way to go, right?

Here’s my worry:

Publishing has always been hard. It’s always been a struggle to rise through the slushpile, whether that slush was with an agent or a publisher. It’s always taken a long time, and it’s been a fight the entire time. Authors write and rewrite that first chapter, paragraph and sentence to get their submission seen.

And then it gets rejected anyway, so you write another book and you send that one out. And it gets rejected. Authors wore rejections as a badge of honor. At one time there was even an award (riffing off the Writers of the Future award) called Writers With No Future, where the winner was whoever could produce the most rejection letters, by weight.

This isn’t to say that rejections are wonderful. But rejections make you work harder. They make you go back to your manuscript and revise, or rewrite, or throw it away entirely and write something even better. The submission and rejection process is the fiery furnace that refines your writing, removing the impurities and leaving the gold.

While there are always stories like Stephenie Meyer, who sold her first novel, there are many many more stories like my friend Brandon Sanderson, who sold his sixth novel (and at that point he was already working on his thirteenth). My brother, Dan Wells, sold his sixth novel. One new author whose story I love is Brodi Ashton: she sold a three-book deal to Balzer and Bray for lots of money after only two days on submission! Of course, that was only after being rejected by 92 agents, after her first book with that agent didn’t sell, and after she got a new agent.

The moral of the story: success almost always comes after a long, hard fight.

Aspiring authors will inevitably think: but that sounds terrible! Why would I ever want to go through that?  The answer is just what I said above: the struggle is valuable, because it makes you work harder, and it makes your writing better.

So, what does this have to do with self-publishing?

When you finish your first manuscript, you probably think it’s pretty good. Maybe it is. I’m not saying it’s impossible to create something great on the first try (though I am saying it’s really, really rare).

So, you take that first manuscript and you shop it around. You submit to agents, and you get some rejections and it really sucks.  And then you turn to the internet, and you read that some other author has sold five hundred thousand ebooks by self-publishing! You read that another author made $200,000 in a single month! Man, screw this traditional publishing crap! Self-publishing is both easier and more lucrative!

And maybe you’ll make a million dollars. It’s definitely possible.

But unless you have gone through all the years of work and refinement and revisioning and rewriting, then odds are you won’t. Because it’s the work that makes your writing good, and good writing is what sells.

Again, I’m not anti-self-publishing. But to me it has all the dangers of a get-rich-quick scheme: It’s very tempting, because you see other people who have done it and made a lot of money; it’s easy to get into; it seems like an appealing alternative to a very difficult path. And, just like a get-rich-quick scheme, 99% of people who try it won’t get rich. Some will lose money. Some will get their name forever plastered on a poorly written book, and spend the rest of their career hiding their past.

So this is not a blog to tell you not to self-publish. It’s just to warn you:Be wary of the hype.  If you’re going into self-publishing, you have to be a great writer—as good and polished as if you’d worked your way through years of rejections and rewrites. And you have to be a great businessperson, because you don’t have professional editors, marketers, salespeople, accountants, graphic designers, distributors and retailers in your corner. It’s all you.

If you can handle that, then dive right in. The changes to the industry really are amazing, and the right person with the right book can be very successful. Just know what you’re getting into, and make sure you’re ready before you do it.

Kylee Bird as Billie

On Saturday night I went to a play, which I want to talk about partly because I think writers can learn a lot from it but mostly because it bugged me.

The play in question was “Born Yesterday”, performed at Hale Center Theater here in Salt Lake City. I want to say right up front that this blog is not intended to be critical of Hale at all, so if it ever comes across that way, know that I didn’t intend it. (Little-known fact: in another life I was very involved in local theater, and was in a Hale show back in 1996.) Anyway, my complaints are about the writing, not the production.

“Born Yesterday” was first performed in 1946, which means it was almost certainly written during World War II. This is significant because it really feels like wartime propaganda. There’s nothing in it that mentions the war, but there’s a ton of generic “America Is Awesome” fist pumping. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Here’s the plot: imagine “My Fair Lady”, except that instead of learning how to say “In Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen,” Eliza learns to say “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal”. The Eliza in this show is named Billie, and instead of a poverty-stricken flower seller she’s the ditzy girlfriend of a jerky millionaire. He’s spending several months in Washington DC to bribe a senator, and he wants his unmannered Jersey girlfriend to stop embarrassing him in front of high society. So, he hires a tutor. The unintended consequence is that by reading political philosophy she realizes that her millionaire boyfriend has been oppressing her and she dumps him for the tutor. The End.

Did you ever watch those Very Special Episodes of 1980s sitcoms? On Growing Pains or Family Ties or Saved By The Bell the teens would be in high school and their teacher would give them (and us) a lecture on the evils of racism/drugs/gangs/whatever, and then–wouldn’t you know it?–these teens have to face those very problems later that same day! Good thing the teacher just gave a five minute lecture on drugs, and informed both the character and the audience that you shouldn’t take amphetamines.  “Born Yesterday” is like that.

The problem is in the preaching. I don’t doubt that a plot like I described above could work just fine–the problem is the execution: the characters sit around and discuss all of this philosophy, and we (the audience) are back in 8th grade U.S. History. I’m not saying that listening to an hour of Hobbes and Locke and Burke is a bad thing; what I am saying is that you shouldn’t pretend that it’s a romantic comedy. If you want to write non-fiction and tell me about oppression and democracy, then do it. But if the first act is a funny character-based comedy (at Hale it was very funny), then the second act just can’t be a sit-down discussion of authority deriving from the consent of the governed. That’s called a bait-and-switch. Or, it’s called telling, not showing. Or, it’s called poor writing.

The crazy thing–the absolutely maddening thing–is that the funny stuff was really, really funny. At first I thought that must have been attributable to the lead actress (Kylee Bird) who was fantastic. But even thinking back on the jokes and the punchlines–they were good jokes. The humor wasn’t solely in the delivery. So, how was the writer so schizophrenic–half hilarious and half ham-fisted?

It doesn’t help that all the preachiness goes nowhere. The ultimate message of the show is that the crooked millionaire shouldn’t get special treatment from a crooked senator. Frankly, we didn’t need an hour of Political Science 101 to figure that out (and I doubt the people of 1946 did, either).

So, I guess my point is: don’t preach in your writing. This may be hypocritical because I think my third book invoked political philosophers a time or two. I like to think I handled it better. (Though I don’t think my jokes were as funny.)

This blog is a rant disguised as writing advice. Therefore, when I say “When you’re writing something, be sure to do your research”, what I really mean is “Man, don’t you hate TV shows that assume we’re all idiots?”

I realize that there is a necessary balancing act between too much research and flying by the seat of your pants. A story too concerned with 100% accuracy can often appear infodumpy, and if the writer includes too many details it can really bog down the pacing of a story. I also understand that you’re never going to make every reader/viewer happy. (If you’re ever looking for people who care too much about minutae, read the “Goofs” sections on IMDb. My favorite is this gem from Bourne Ultimatum: “In the opening minutes of the film, Bourne has his nightmare in Goa and goes to the bathroom. We hear the fluorescent lamp ballast (choke) buzzing at 60Hz, however if Bourne is in Goa, India like the film says then it should be buzzing at 50Hz.” Obviously, you’re never going to please these types of people.)

But, despite that caveat I want to firmly declare: there are times when you simply have to have your facts straight.

The most egregious genre (or, at least, the genre I’m thinking about at the moment) is cop shows. We Americans are raised from little kids to know what’s in the Constitution, and when we’re in the fifth grade we study the Bill of Rights, and we all know what an illegal search is. I’m not complaining about the little-known trivialities of police procedure–I’m complaining about when a cop breaks into someone’s house to search it. That’s illegal. They may find evidence that catches the bad guy, the TV show ends happily, and everyone in the audience is thinking “ALL THAT EVIDENCE IS GOING TO BE THROWN OUT OF COURT, YOU MORONS.”

This is likewise a problem when a cop beats a confession out of someone, which is done all the time in stupid cop shows, generally when something is time sensitive, like a bomb is going to go off, or a kidnappee is locked in a box somewhere. If a real cop did this, the criminal would sue, the cop would get demoted or fired, and the bad guy might not go to jail after all.

This drives me crazy.

Lots of cop shows get around this by making a private detective do the dirty work: they’re not cops, so they can do whatever they want! True, a private detective cannot perform an illegal search and seizure (because he can’t even perform legal search and siezure), but that private detective can definitely go to jail for breaking and entering. Of course, that would never happen, because the ultimate message of cop shows is: as long as the bad guy goes to jail, the ends justify the means. Beat up a criminal, break into a house, coerce a confession, entrap a suspect–that’s all okey dokey.

Which leads me to my real point: yes, we all know these laws, and yet we ignore them (with few notable exceptions) when it comes to our entertainment. Is this a sign of deep philosophical rumblings, where we Americans view our society with a kind of Old West justice–shoot first, ask questions later? Or is it, perhaps, that we catatonically gobble up any lazy piece of writing slapped on the screen?

(I know there’s a third option, which is “Sheesh, Rob! It’s escapism! Calm it down, fatboy!”  This, I suppose, is a valid point. It’s still apathetic–it assumes that escapism can only be found in lazy, crappy writing, when that is most definitely not the case. But I will concede that there are worse things in the world, like genocide, maybe.)

So, after all that, I guess my point is this: man, I hate Castle.

In a couple months I have to teach a class about writing dystopian fiction, so I’m reading as much as I can on the subject. The question that everyone seems to be asking is: why do teenagers love it so much?

While I don’t think that there’s a single answer, and I don’t mean to claim that all readers have the same motivations, some answers seem much more likely to me than others, and one answer in particular bugs me.

Before I start pulling out the quotes from other stuff I’ve been reading, let me tell you my theory (which, admittedly, isn’t terribly original):

Dystopian fiction is almost always about oppression and control, and there is no group of Americans who views themselves as more oppressed and controlled than teenagers. They’re at an age where they are becoming more and more capable–physically, mentally, etc–and yet they’re still not allowed to make many choices about their lives. They are in a very structured environment, moving every hour at the ring of a bell to a different room where they learn things they’re required to learn, whether they want to or not. Depending on their school, they might not be able to wear what they want, sit where they want, or even set foot off campus during a certain period of time. After school they may work at a job which gives them responsibility, but still no real choices–they can use their minimum wage salary to buy some consumer goods or some fast food, but they can’t use that small amount of money to change their situation in life. At home they have to follow their parents’ rules, continue studying things they don’t appreciate, and do chores–forced labor–for a system they have little or no say in (kind of a taxation-without-representation scenario).

I’m not saying high school or parents or homework are bad. I’m just saying that it’s easy to see how teenagers view themselves as oppressed and controlled.

I remember when I was in high school we’d protest everything. The school was less than a mile from the state capitol building, and there was more than one occasion when students would walk out and march up the hill shouting something or other. And it seemed like I was school board meetings every couple of months, joining my friends in the only way we could make our displeasure known. And lest you get the wrong impression, I wasn’t much of a hooligan–half the time I was protesting in favor of the status quo, protesting against other protesting teenagers. But the point is: teenagers want to fight for something. They want choices, and they want a voice.

Consequently, it’s not at all surprising that teens suck up books like Matched and The Maze Runner and The Hunger Games as though they were the last drops of water in the desert. These books are metaphors of the teenage condition, yet they all have heroic teens who break free from their oppressor’s controls.

So, that’s my theory about why teens love dystopia.  Here’s the theory that bugs me:

As author Paolo Bacigalupi put it in a recent New York Times article: “I suspect that young adults crave stories of broken futures because they themselves are uneasily aware that their world is falling apart.”

As my brother, Dan Wells, put it on his blog: “Dystopia is huge right now, especially in YA. This is probably due to the fact that we live in one–or, more correctly, this is due to the fact that YA readers are finally paying close enough attention to realize that we live in one.”

I have no quibble with either Bacigalupi’s assertion that the world is falling apart, or Dan’s claim that we live in a dystopia. Both of those claims are subjective, but I’d tend to agree with both, to some extent. No, my complaint is with the idea that our political and cultural climate is what’s turning teens on to dystopian fiction–and I especially worry that if you write a story with that mindset it could easily lead to pedantic, plot-driven fiction.

Teens may be paying more attention to world events, with knowledge more readily available at the click of a button, I think they’re also more media savvy, and if there’s anything that teens DON’T want, it’s to be preached to. I have many friends who read James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series with pleasure, until it became clear that the book’s underlying message was about the dangers of global warming, at which point they quit reading (and some of these friends are environmentalists themselves).

It’s not that this second theory about dystopia (from Dan and Bacigalupi and others) is wrong–it’s that it’s a dangerous mindset for authors to have as they approach their writing, because it implies the most important aspect of the book is the plot: that teens want to read dystopia because they want “What If?” scenarios and extrapolated futures. And I think that’s just plain not true. Above all else, most readers want (and teens especially) to be able to relate. They want an emotional connection to characters and situations. They want to say “This character is like me!” not “This corrupt government is like my corrupt government!” If that’s lacking, then no amount of frightening, not-too-distant-future dystopia will make the book worth reading.

Disclaimer: both Paolo Bacigalupi and Dan Wells are both fantastic, award-winning authors who write great books with great characters, and I’m sure they’d agree with me that emotional connection is extremely important. I’m merely saying that, as advice to authors, I don’t think you should approach YA dystopia with that kind of top-down look.