New Realities of Being a Writer

I checked the Amazon.com ranking of Antarktos Rising and found that it ranks 6000th plus, pretty damn good considering that most books published by mainstream houses rank something like 10,000 to 50,000. What does all this mean? First, it means that a well-written POD book CAN reach an audience. Second, it means that you need to use the internet to promote your work. There is no substitute for having a loyal fan base, and this applies equally well to mainstream writers, too. It also shows the new realities of being a writer in the Web 2.0 world.

Quality is the key. If your book is not well edited, if the plot is poorly conceived and executed, if the idea is not cool or interesting, and if the characters are boring and uninspired, then all of this will sink your work. The more work you put into these basic elements, the more staying power your book will have. Quality means staying power. Quality builds great word of mouth. It is well worth your while, therefore, to pay someone qualified to edit your manuscript. It is well worth the effort to belong to a writing workshop group. It is well worth the effort to take some online classes through places like UCLA extension, which offers online certificates. (These can be expensive, UCLA being, last time I checked, around $ 3,000.00, but you get contact with other writers and with world class writing professors, and that’s priceless.) The worst this you can do is to become isolated and trapped in your own world where there are no challenges to your writing. No challenges means no motivation for improvements and there lies the path to stagnation and madness.

Quality has another aspect—the target audience. You must remember that what is quality to thriller readers is not quality to literary readers. Your book, in other words, must be able to attract some group of readers. Of course, as I wrote in another post, you cannot really make yourself write any specific kind of book unless you are predisposed creatively to write that kind of a book. So, you must know yourself as a writer and know what you are able to write well. Focus on this and polish it, perfect it, then put it out there and they will come. In the olden days, you gained exposure through magazines. Writers wrote short stories and got them published in magazines, building an audience for their work. Not anymore. You may go that route, but you must also use the new communication venues like the Internet to build exposure for your material and yourself.

Today, you can use venues like Facebook, Myspace, You Tube, and so on to create exposure for yourself as a writer. This is crucial because without such exposure, you are essentially unknown, and very few people will risk buying the work of a person that they don’t know. Through his videos on You Tube, Jeremy Robinson has created interest in his book and this interest has translated into impressive sales as he nearly reached the Amazon.com top 100. So have an internet presence. Have a blog. Give away some of your work?

Another avenue of exposure that you can pursue is giving some of your work away for free. (Check out the Bookcrossing site and leave your books at various places like libraries or bus stops for unsuspecting readers to find. Bookcrossing is the biggest book club and a way to gain exposure for your work. And it’s fun!)

The give-your-work-away-for-free is the model that writer Cory Doctorow is pursuing. If you visit Craphound.com, you will find that nearly all of his books are available for free as downloads. Of course, Cory can afford to do this, but the point is that it builds a great deal of goodwill among readers if you give some of your work away for nothing. When you do have something in the bookstores or on Amazon, all those readers are your built in audience and they are more likely than strangers to give you a break. Good will is crucial to any business, and as a writer, you are a brand and a business. If giving away your stories or books gets you exposure and potential paying readers, then do that. There is nothing worse for a writer than obscurity.