Chapter Fifty-Six
Best of Both Worlds
Cultivating Success as a Hybrid Author
At our last house, the lawn died. One day it was green and lush. A week later a brown circle appeared in the grass. Another week went by, and the whole yard suffered a withering demise, as if we’d angered the lawn goddesses and grass gods, as if our garden gnomes and lawn mower hymns were not enough.
At our current home, the lawn isn’t so much a lawn as it is a mighty gathering of weeds. Hardly a blade of grass in the bunch. It’s hearty and hale. Drought doesn’t bother it. Disease can’t kill it. It’s so green, you might call it “emerald.” Mow it over, it looks like any other lawn.
A lesson in the power of polyculture over monoculture.
Monocultures don’t exist on their own. We create them. And they don’t work well. Plant one thing over a single field—corn, soy, whatever—and it becomes vulnerable to disease and pests. Diversify planting across a single field, however, and resistance to pests and diseases rises sharply.
Diversity means survival. That’s true in agriculture. It’s true in our stock portfolios. It’s true on our dinner plates.
And it’s true in publishing. Survival as a writer means embracing diversity from the beginning. And that means thinking of yourself as a “hybrid” author.
PUBLISHING OPTIONS: PROS AND CONS
A “hybrid” author sounds like one who was grown in a lab. Some mutant of Stephen King and E.L. James breaking free of its enclosure, terrorizing Manhattan with deviant prose.
Thankfully, it’s a whole lot nicer than that.
A hybrid author is one who refuses to accept that there exists One True Way up the Publishing Mountain and who embraces all available methods of getting his or her work out there. The hybrid author takes a varied approach, utilizing the traditional system of publishing and acting as an author-publisher (a term I prefer to self-publisher because it signals the dual nature of the role you now inhabit).
Any form of publishing comes with benefits and disadvantages, and it’s important to know these ahead of time.
For the traditional system of publishing, the pluses include the following:
- You receive money earned up front (an advance).
- You get professional quality control (editing, design).
- You have theoretical access to big marketing efforts.
- You have likelier access to ancillary rights (film, TV, foreign).
- You have a better chance of being reviewed in mainstream media
- You have a better chance of being distributed to bookstores.
- The money flows to you (you don’t pay production costs).
And here are the minuses:
- It can be difficult to get projects that lack measurable commercial appeal through the gatekeepers (editors, agents).
- Publishing is glacially slow.
- Sometimes the marketing support never materializes and is left largely to the author.
- Physical space on bookstore shelves is dwindling.
- It’s a risk-averse environment.
- The system does not adapt quickly to change.
- Contracts can occasionally be restrictive.
Being an author-publisher has its own panoply of ups and downs. Here are the pluses:
- You retain creative control.
- A greater percentage of money (about 50–70 percent) remains with you.
- You become part of a strong community full of resources.
- Some genres do gangbusters in this space (romance, military, science fiction).
- It’s faster than traditional publishing.
- New options and distribution platforms are appearing all the time.
- You retain all rights.
- You can adapt faster to change.
- You can take greater calculated risks.
- You can potentially explore formats (digital shorts, etc.) and/or reach audiences deemed too niche by big publishing.
And the minuses:
- There’s an investment up front (typically $500 to $5,000 to get the book “out there” in a professional fashion) and no guarantee of return on that investment.
- You have reduced access to ancillary rights (film, TV, foreign), mainstream book reviewers, and physical book retailers.
- Some genres are weak in this arena (literary, YA).
- Self-publishing is easy to do poorly.
- Authors often find that all their eggs are in the Amazon basket.
YOUR NEW MANTRA: “DO BOTH!”
You look over those lists of pluses and minuses and think, Jeez, which one should I choose? Forget that. Jump up, freeze-frame heel kick, and yell: “I want to do all the publishing!”
Because you can. That’s what being a hybrid author is all about: It’s about leveraging the advantages of each publishing form against the other. That diversity maximizes the benefits and mitigates the disadvantages.
Step 1: Write Something Great
The first step to being a hybrid author is to write something amazing. Put your heart on the page. Bleed into the story. Practice your craft. Exercise your awesomeness. Write the best book (or novella, or short story, or comic book, or whatever) you can.
A great story is your first step and is also the best first defense against any problems that pop up on either side of the publishing fence. Anything less and you’re doing yourself—and your future readership—a grave disservice.
Step 2: Write Something Else That’s Also Great
Being a hybrid author means making multiple works available across a variety of platforms … and that means you can’t just write one thing and nest on it like a bird.
You’re a writer. So you’re going to have to write.
Write two things. Three things! Write all the things. Write one story, and then, as you work to edit it, write another. To be creative means to create.
Step 3: Share—One for Me, One for You
A lot of today’s most celebrated hybrid authors began in one publishing arena, found success there, and moved into the other when it made sense. Hugh Howey began as an author-publisher before his bestseller status garnered offers from agents and big publishers. Lawrence Block had decades of experience (and success and acclaim) in the traditional space before deciding to see what he could do on his own. Both now utilize both options simultaneously.
Finding success in one arena is of course a viable pathway to success in another. Maybe you’re too busy right now to run your own small business (and be assured, self-publishing is exactly that) and so you’d rather leave your work to the vagaries of the traditional system. Or maybe you don’t feel like waiting two years for your book to be on shelves and so you want to grab the reins and ride the horse instead of sitting in the cart. You can pick the one style of publishing that seems to suit you up front, and go that way, diversifying once you’re more established.
Or you can form a plan for attempting both. Reserve one of your works to be published yourself. Assign a second work to have a go at the traditional system.
How to choose the project best suited for each model? This requires a bit of educational guesswork mixed with polling your intestinal flora (a.k.a. “gut feelings”), and at the end it’s important to note that neither path offers a guarantee at success. The trick is trying to suss out which of your works will gain the most success in each space. This isn’t math, where you can plug in variables and calculate an answer with certainty, but you can look to strategies other authors have employed that make good sense.
A strong foot forward is to reserve your riskier work to publish yourself and to designate the more, well, traditional work for the traditional space. If this seems counterintuitive, remember that riskier works are much more difficult to get past the publishing gatekeepers. Publishers are more comfortable publishing known quantities. They like the kinds of books that they know will sell. (And frankly, if you have the means to reach a niche audience on your own—say, through your participation in specialized online communities—you might be better equipped to do so than a publisher would be, so why not retain more of the profits from your efforts?) Traditional publishers also like certain genres and formats, and manuscripts of certain lengths. A publisher might not be likely to accept these things from a first-time author, for instance:
- a novella (note also that new platforms available to self-publishers, such as digital shorts and e-singles, have no real counterparts in the traditional space)
- a short story collection
- a nonfiction work by an author without a big platform
- an epic fantasy of inordinate length (200,000+ words)
- a novel that is not easily labeled with a genre
So if you determine, “I think my chances of this particular story passing through the traditional gatekeepers—and then performing well—are low,” then you’d likely be better served by self-publishing that work while sending another, less risky story out into the traditional channels.
For instance, you might note that YA fiction does not do particularly well in the digital self-publishing space because teens have been slow to embrace e-readers. Further, YA is really big right now in the traditional space, and the advances reflect that. So you might reserve an adult work to publish yourself while submitting the YA book to publishers.
KEYS TO YOUR SUCCESS
Sounds simple enough, right? But as with everything, to be truly successful, there are some caveats to be aware of.
Caveat 1: Hybrid Authors Benefit from Having Agent Representation
You want an agent. First, you’ll need one to get your work in front of most major publishers in the traditional space. Second, an agent can also help you carry your self-published work into other spaces later on—you have a greater chance of selling alternate rights (including print!) for all of your works with an active agent.
Note also that some publishers have certain contract terms—particularly noncompete and right-of-first-refusal clauses—that can be unfriendly to hybrid authors. Thus, it’s important for you, an agent, or a lawyer to negotiate those, along with any other restrictive language that grants them unnecessary rights to your work (particularly in digital).
The way to secure an agent is to pitch him a single project for which you are seeking traditional publication. But once you have an agent’s interest, you need to discuss up front that you intend to be a hybrid author. That means seeking out agents who are not only comfortable with that, but savvy in that arena. An agent interested only in the traditional space and unaware of the options available to author-publishers will not be the best representative for you. And a bad agent can do more harm to your career than no agent at all.
Caveat 2: Hybrid Authors Need to Self-Publish Well
Self-publishing is easy to do, but difficult to do well. Still, you’re going to need to do it well in order to give your book a chance to succeed. Fortunately, there are myriad resources at your disposal to help you. Use them. Here’s a preview of what you’ll learn: Self-publishing well probably means putting some money on the table. It means professional editing. It means a great cover artist. It means putting out a book (or e-book) that looks as good as—no, better than—what you’d find on the shelf at Barnes & Noble. A poorly done effort will harm your chances in the traditional space, which means: No hybrid author for you.
Self-publishing well also means developing an author platform that you can rely on to increase the visibility of your work. This often starts with a strong social media presence—not one devoted to marketing, but one devoted to you being the best version of yourself and engaging authentically with your potential audience.
For hybrid authors, it’s vital that all of your social media outreach and other platform-related efforts lead to a central online space (a professional author website or blog) that showcases your other work. If your books are going to be coming from multiple sources, the one place interested readers can visit to learn about all of your offerings begins and ends with you.
DOWN THE ROAD
The hybridization of your writing career isn’t just to get you going: This is a long game, not a short stint.
Should you be able to get a series of book releases in the traditional space, you could use the gaps between them to release other material yourself to strengthen the loyalty of that readership. Or, should you get a positive response to your self-published works, you could leverage that to gain more support from the publisher(s) for your traditional titles. The energy and marketing of your releases feed off of one another. Meanwhile, with hope you’ll be banking small-but-steady (and ideally growing) income from a variety of sources.
Note that diversity as an author can also mean working with a variety of publishers, big and small. And experimentation (Kickstarter! Kindle Worlds! Serialized fiction!).
Of course, to do this, you need a healthy crop of stories. Which takes us back to Step One: Write. Finish what you start. Make it great. Then do it all again.
Chuck Wendig is the New York Times best-selling author of Star Wars: Aftermath, as well as the Miriam Black thrillers, the Atlanta Burns books, and the Heartland YA series, alongside other works across comics, games, film, and more. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the co-writer of the Emmy-nominated digital narrative Collapsus, he is also known for his popular blog, terribleminds.com, and his books about writing. He lives in Pennsylvania with his family.