Catch 22s in Publishing

This is the CATCH 22 of being a published author; years ago, I felt no one could possibly understand the problems and bumps in the road a PUBLISHED author must face. What's HE got to complain about, after all he has one loaf of bread under his arm, and yet he is complaining he has no bread. Who wants to hear it?


With more and more authors now being published with indie publishing and the advent of the Kindle platform, more authors who are published are experiencding such round robins as --"You gotta get out there and market your books" but you can't be so foolish as to get out there and say anything positive about your own work."

This is the crucible. You are responsible for any and all that goes wrong with the book in traditional publishing, but you HAD no control over all the most important decisions from cover art concept to title to ad copy, PR, marketing, etc. But if and when the book TANKS, guess whose ""WRITING" is the problem? The 'true' cause of the failure to 'communicate'?

Then you go Indoe Author and YOU are responsible for all those same decisions, and the book TANKS -- guess who is all out willing to take the responsibility for the causes of the "tanking"? With the freedom of Indie Authorship comes responsibility and accountability. Down to editing, rewriting, all of it.

At the same time, there is a PERVASIVE view that unlike a carpenter or archetect or painter or sculptor, a WRITER has NO BUSINESS liking his own work out lout and in public, that for some damn reason we have to keep it under our beds, this idea that we actually love what we have spent years crafting...what our hands and minds have wrought. That we should have no opinion on our own works anymore than a Hollywood actor ought have a political view, that 'How Dare We be so presumptous! O r that we dare love our 'children' and show any PDA (public display of affection). Or that we dare pound home the fact that we had a BALL writing this last one, or that we dare think it is our BEST work, or that we extremely DARE call it our most literary attempt. Our greatest most ambitious work.  Our most challenging work.

Actors are asked how they feel about a role they played and it is OK for Matt Damon to say that while the Bourne Identiy earned him more recognition and money than did Good Will Hunting, that the part he played in the film he co-wrote is his best work. It is OK for a cosmotologist to go on and on about what a fantastic job she did on someone's hair or nails, but GOD FORBID (for a pervasive number of idgits) that an author dare have a single word of praise for his own work, his own efforts, his blood, sweat, tears, and years of honing his or her skills in a culture that heaps praise and huge amounts of money on silly, insipid celebrity books.

I wrote and rewrote Children of Salem so many times it was rejected by every major publisher in New York twice and thrice in various drafts. I kid you not. I was so devoted to this story that I rewrote it countless times over a 30 year period, but I can get stoned at any time should I say, "This is, of all my books, my most literary work, my most amitious work, one that challenges the reader on every page." No good, BSP, but nowadays it is Kosher to lay out fifty bucks to have the same book reviewed by ten people on Amazon? It is OK to hear it from a paid lacky reviewer but not OK if I believe this aloud?

When I do get attacked, being a Scorpio, I generally sting back. I got into it with one group for a long time because I dared describe some readers, some reviewers, and even some editors as "hack readers" citing the fact that so many are so ready with the phrase "hack writers". Man did I catch hell. More recently, I used the term 'short-sighted readers' who just do not GET what I am doing and man, you'd think I was plotting the demise of the Pope. But when we pay reviewers to review our books, what does that make of the reviewer? Hack writers were called that because they wrote FAST in order to get paid per word fast. If that practice made writers 'hacks' then what does this new practice make of reviewers?

In short, so many goofy people online you have to ignore and just plow the rows you are cultivating, and to hell with short-sighted people and hacks or TROLLS of any sort. Like the sort who take exception to what you choose to place on YOUR facebook wall, for example. Exasperating to run into anyone with such temerity in the real world much less online. Then you have the trolls who devalue your writing based on the price you are willing to sell it for! The same book at 25 bucks is the same book at 99c.

Rob Walker
Children of Salem, Titanic 2012, Dead On, Dead on Writing
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/

Patience & Persistence Makes a Writer

MARK TWAIN, my spiritual mentor since beginning my long journey as an author and the guy I stole more from than anyone else I have stolen from, he has a great many great quotes but this one I purely love: "KEEP AWAY from people who try to belittle your ambitions. SMALL PEOPLE always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too, can be great."

I have had my collegaues in the teaching profession say to me, "Rob, you actually think anyone can do what you do, don't you?"

"Of course and why not? When it comes to writing fiction, guess what? Doing of it is the teacher, and I pretty much taught myself, set up my own curriculum and went at it. So why not another? Why not my students?"

Of course not all students succeed, and not all great young writers prevail. It is a myth to believe that well crafted writing alone will lift an author to the top of his profession. Most never get past all the frustration and need for patience, the time it takes to evolve into a talented writer who can actually make shapely fiction. For it takes years, and for most of us, a lifetime as truly, there are few things in life that require as much self-teaching and practice and skill-building as crafting solid fiction.

Dearn R. Koontz once advised me to slow down, adding, "Robert, you don't do your best work until you turn 50 anyway."  He was right of course but at the time I was teetering on 50, and very frustrated and feeling I had put in way too much time on a dying propostion to begin with...contemplating quitting altogether. Who needed the headaches and the heartaches and the belly aches from hunger and depression at not achieving the gold ring?

What Koontz meant and what I know now is that it has taken me 30 years of continuous writing to get to the level of proficiency I am at currently. Sure there are those amazing wonders among us out who careen to the top of the bestseller list with their first publicaiton but scratch the surface and 99 percent of the time, you will learn that first publicaiton came only after six, seven or even ten previously written UNpublished novels.

I feel indeed I am doing my BEST work in a checkered career now, that my more recent titles -- all of which have been written within the last few years as Kindle Originals are my best to date works, books I could not have written when I was young and full of eager impatience to be published. 

With each book I have written, I have gotten better over these many years, and to get so good as to be speed writing with confidence, most of us have to go through the harrowing period I call the Valley of Death thorugh whch Job himself must suffer...that it takes the patience of the biblical Job to prosper in any of the major arts - be it film, sculpting, painting, computer graphics, poetry, biography, fiction. Whatever your addiction craves to create.

Frightfully now, up on Kindle bookshelves, my readers can go wayyyy back in time, look over my early works, and see how terribly weak they are compared to my latest works. What a difference; it is like when Martin Cruse Smith went from doing a schlocky vampire vs. Native American horror novel to writing such as Gorky Park, not that any of my books are Gorky Park. But I began writing thin books, thin in size and in depth, lacking setting and character but with a lot of plot. Only over time and with experience(s), did my novels fatten up completely to the point they turn some folks off due to sheer page numbers.

My newer work, however, are character-driven, filled with fully realized characters rather than the thin shadows of my early, past creations.It is instructive even for me to go back in time and read the kid's early stuff--and to realize that while the kid had something on the ball and a lot of gall, hutzpah, smarts...that the work was thin by comparison to the old gent's stuff.

Don't believe me? Look at my first published novel alongside Children of Salem or Titanic 2012. There simply is no comparison. While the kid I was had sparks of passion, perhaps even a bic lighter flame of smartness, the depth of all the elements coming together in the later works is just so much more of...of everything readers want and need..In orther words, Dean Koontz knows of what he speaks. It takes a life devoted to writing to reach par.

I am soon to be 63 and I began writing as a kid, maybe around fourth grade, and wrote my first short stories as a child, my first novel as a high schooler, modeling it on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn-- a sequel!  The arrogance of youth, but in tracking Twain so closely as to "write Twain", well the genius became my spiritual mentor, and I never forgot what he taught me about writing.

Still it was I who unearthed Twain; he did not come to me in a drean or a zombie state. It takes a powerful yearning to want to imitate and emulate a writer of Twain's caliber. So when the Chicago Tribune review of City for Ransom compared my work favorably to Twain, Dickens, Doyle, and Poe I felt in great company. I began to feel I was getting pretty good at what I chose to devote my life to.

It takes enormous patience, the sort of infinite patience required of a teacher these days, the sort that requires a higher PQ than IQ...a high Persistence Quotient.

Thanks for visiting and do leave a cogent comment; would love to cogently respond to you as well or simply to hear from you.

Robert W. Walker
"What Moves Kindle Bks. off Shelves" -- Kindle Community forums
http://www.robertwalkerbooks.com/