Publishing: The Age of Unpredictability

Every now and then, I encounter someone who's been working on a book or comic or short story collection, and they ask me for advice on how to "break in" to the publishing industry.

There are some authors who like to answer this question with a sardonic, embittered "Don't quit your day job," but I always hated that. So I tried to have a good answer ready for developing writers. (Incidentally, I hate the term “aspiring writer.” My friends, if you write, you’re a writer. That's how verbs work.)

I would explain that the publishing industry changes quickly, and the path I took to becoming an author wouldn’t be repeatable today. Then I would point them to some resources I consider valuable and suggest a couple of strategies. I might gently advise that they don’t leave their regular job anytime soon, but I would try to emphasize that the world will always need stories, and the more voices, the better. Above all, I always tried to encourage. Because when you are a person who wants to write a book, the entire universe and your own brain have already conspired to make that as difficult as possible.

Lately, however, I hear "I want to be a published writer" and my heart sinks a little.

As you probably already know, the last five years have been particularly tough in the publishing industry. I'm not just talking about me, specifically–nearly everyone is struggling. Publishing has never been exactly what you'd call "predictable," of course, but it used to have a little consistency.

For example, let's say it's 15 years ago and you managed to get a really good mystery novel published.  You would probably keep writing more mystery novels, either in a series or standalones. The royalties from the first book would help pay your expenses as you wrote the second book, and the royalties from the first two books would enable you to write the third, and so on.

To grow your audience, you'd attend mystery conventions, interact with mystery fans, make friends with other mystery authors and editors, write blogs and newsletters, etc.

I'm not suggesting this was an easy career, or even a stable one – now and then, you might have a book that just didn't find its audience, or wasn't up to your usual standards for whatever reason, and that one failed. If that happened, you put your head down and tried to make the next book better. If you had a long string of duds, and didn't figure out a way to course-correct, you might make a serious pivot (moving to a new genre for good, for example, or starting over with a new pen name) or choose a different career.

In this model, writers would typically stay in one lane. The idea was that every writer had a "brand" or persona for their writing, and you shouldn't dilute your brand by bouncing around too much. You might occasionally dip a toe into another genre (John Sandford has written a YA novel, believe it or not), but for the most part you would stick to what you're good at/ known for.

And that was the job. For a long time, that was my job, but with urban fantasy novels instead of mysteries.

Don't get me wrong, this model had many flaws– the elaborate gatekeeping system meant that first step of getting a book published was statistically almost impossible. Many writers got restless doing the same thing, yet couldn't find success in other genres (There's a reason why I never wrote a sequel to The Big Keep). But that small amount of consistency made it at least possible for many writers, myself included, to have relatively stable careers.

"But Melissa," you might be saying, "no one expects stability in a writing career! They're meant to be unpredictable; that's why it's exciting!"

That's true. But there's relative stability, and then there's the complete inability to predict what your financial situation will look like in two months.

As it turns out, "career stability" is a lot more important than it sounds.

A stable career, even one with some unpredictability built in, meant you could also have plans. Can I accept this invitation to my friend’s wedding? Can I fix the broken air-conditioning in my car? Will I be able to get my child the orthodontia she needs? Can I save enough money to pay for a crown before my back molar rots off? Back then, it was much easier to make these decisions, because you could at least guesstimate how much money you might make in the near future.

There are still a few writers who are able to sustain this career model, but they’re mostly the people who were particularly successful before the pandemic. For the rest of us, everything has changed. The entire industry is grappling with technological advances, piracy, a recession, and declining attention for reading. We are now living in the Age of Unpredictability. Nobody knows anything. Nobody can guesstimate their income. And meanwhile, AI is looming over our shoulders like the shadow monster in The NeverEnding Story (or the shadow monster in Thunderbolts, for you younger folks), eating job after job and diluting career after career.

None of us are quite ready to admit we're becoming obsolete, but the AI writing might be on the wall.

Publishing has gone from an uphill climb to something closer to alchemy. It's not about working hard or honing your craft or even making connections. You still have to do all that, but now you also have to have a combination of pre-existing financial security, luck, zeitgeist timing, and time. More and more writers are quitting or cutting back to take additional jobs (yes, plural). If, like me, another job isn’t possible because you have a disability or are a caretaker, you might be SOL.

It's a tough way to live. No one tells you this when you’re querying that first novel, but people who make royalties can’t usually go on disability, or even declare bankruptcy. (Ask me how I know.) If you compare my book royalties from 2024 to my royalties from, say, 2022, it's less than half. That's not because I was downsized or fired or worked fewer hours. It's because my industry fell out from under me.

So, how do you support yourself as a writer in the Age of Unpredictability? Personally, I'm very relieved and grateful to have finally found a tolerable "day job," even though it's only part-time. But, like many of my once-established peers, I've also had to take an approach I’m calling Everything Everywhere All at Once. Instead of focusing hard on one book at a time, we’re juggling different projects and pitches in multiple genres—hell, in multiple formats (hello, comics!). We’re spreading ourselves thin across Patreon, Substack, Ko-Fi and Kickstarter, trying to drum up work. We're all looking for freelance writing gigs, but so is every other writer, so the competition is insane and demoralizing...especially because there's just one industry that's hiring a lot of freelance writers at the moment.

I have never known such existential dread as when I realized that one of the only available jobs for writers these days is training AI to replace us.

The problem with Everything Everywhere All At Once is that it adds a million things that aren’t writing books to our job descriptions. A lot of time now goes to project management instead of projects, and that’s before you get to the problem of marketing. We’re stretching ourselves thin trying to promote our work on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Google ads, newsletters, our websites. Most of us don't have an actual marketing background, so we have to learn all those things in order to spend time on them in the hopes that they might boost sales a little. Of course, we don’t know if any of these extracurriculars will catch on or even help, or if it’s all just a big time suck that takes us away from putting a story into words.

This is uncertainty is, by the way, particularly excruciating on a day-to-day basis, when you try to decide how to spend your time. If you account for emails, meals, childcare, and personal hygiene, on a regular weekday I have between 4-5 hours of serious writing time. In 2019, I would spend maybe 30 minutes of that time promoting a book that was coming out (using about three different social media platforms, not 10) and the rest of the time I was writing the next book. At certain times of year I might need to do some editing or coordinate travel to conventions, but that was about it.

Now, every single day I have to decide which of five potential projects is the most likely to make me money the soonest. Of course, the comics industry and the fiction industry run at different speeds, with different trends and players, so maybe I try to work on TWO projects. If I haven’t worked on either of them for a bit, I have to read through a bunch of old stuff to remember what I’m doing.

I will never know whether I was right about these choices, or whether my time would have been spent better elsewhere.

Because of all the unpredictability around finances, I have to keep an eye on the future at all times, so I also spend additional time hustling new work, working one of my side gigs, networking, pitching. I always have to figure out the thing after the next thing, even though I don’t know which thing the next thing will be. I think many, if not most, of my writer friends are in a similar situation. It's exhausting and inefficient and it leaves my brain with way too many tabs open.

When I had a stable urban fantasy career, I used to run the numbers on a book deadline and try to hit a certain word count each day. Once I hit that goal (back then it was usually 2,500 words), I was done with work. I could do chores, hang out with my kids, and watch TV without feeling like I was neglecting work. Now, although I know that working more does not necessarily equal more success, it’s the only thing I can control. I feel compelled at all times to work harder, do more, write more, branch out more. Grow, grow, grow, because that back molar isn’t going to fix itself and quarterly taxes are due in a month.

The hardest part of all this isn’t the work itself, by the way. It’s the miasma of permanent anxiety you have to live in while you do it. The mental/emotional strain is enormous, especially at the same time so many things are falling apart in a global/political sense. (I’ve spent all this time teaching my kids to survive in a neurotypical world, but maybe I should have been teaching them how to survive the end of the world?)

It is, and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough, exhausting.

I'm disheartened that I spent twenty years establishing myself in a professional landscape that grows bleaker all the time. I feel guilty about every moment I’m not working. I have no idea what to say to developing writers who ask me for career advice. But I still refuse to say "don't quit your day job." Writing, and a creative career in general, shouldn’t be something you warn people against. Not just because creativity and imagination are important, but because it wouldn't work. Too many of us couldn’t stop if we tried.

The best explanation of a creative career I have ever encountered is still Lenny Bruce's rant from the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel pilot.

I don't have it in me to encourage right now. But maybe that's okay. Deep down, past all the dread, I do still believe we need stories, and I still believe more voices are better. And I know paradigms will never shift if everyone just trudges along with the status quo.

So for now, when I meet a developing writer, I'll choose to smile, wish them luck, and make an excuse for why I can't get into a longer answer. Because I might be too exhausted by all this to change anything myself, but I maybe I can hold the way open for the person who can.