Honestly, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no point trying to help amateur writers at all. Time and time again, I try to inject some real world honesty into the, unfortunately, fantasy land that far too many of them want to live in and time and time again, I’m met with hostility and anger, not thanks.
Yeah, well fuck you too.So recently, someone started a thread about traditional publishing and was asserting that you should just send whatever you have willy-nilly to agents without any concern about quality, content or the kinds of things that a given agent is looking for. It was absurd on its face and I injected some much-needed fact into the mix. They were pretending that everyone that was submitting manuscripts, they were all automatically on the same level and therefore, everyone was just competing directly with the other authors and it was purely the best writer that would win.
Yeah, but that’s not how any of it works. You have to have realistic expectations and these people just don’t. So I pointed out that there were a lot of factors involved that simply had nothing to do with your personal writing skill. You had to submit something that the agent handled. Romance agents aren’t looking to represent science fiction and vice versa. They don’t all have the same contacts with the same publishers. You’re just wasting your time sending something that the agent doesn’t want to see.
Secondly, while the quality of your writing is certainly important, it isn’t a head-to-head competition. The agent may have just taken on someone who wrote a story very similar to yours. They aren’t going to take on another one. The book that you wrote might not be salable in the publishing world at the moment. If it isn’t likely to sell, nobody is going to be interested. It’s why it’s so important to know what’s popular in the market at the moment and write that kind of material. You might be the superior author in the slush pile but if your book has no chance of selling, you’re going to get passed over.
While a lot of people were up-voting my posts, there was a fair amount of grumbling, especially from one of the moderators who sent me a private message exhorting me not to be a “dick” to the struggling authors. It’s not fair to overload them with reality! Let them struggle in their own little world!
Sorry but that’s not how the publishing industry works! Giving people patently false information, even if you think you’re doing it for good reasons, is ludicrous, yet this is how most amateur writing forums operate. It’s all about fee-fees and the facts can go fuck themselves.
It’s no wonder why successful, published authors just give up. There’s no point to wasting our time trying to help people who really don’t want the help. They want magic. They want automatic success without any effort. They don’t want to know the harsh reality of writing and publishing.
Of course, the mod is one of those so-called “struggling artists”. You know, the ones who have never actually finished writing a novel in their lives. The ones who seethe in jealousy when someone comes along that can do things that they can’t do. They don’t want to know what they have to do to succeed because it’s not emotionally comforting! Instead, they’d rather gather together for a group hug and pretend it’s all going to be fine because that’s what they really want to think.
Cool, then I’m going to stop wasting my time. The simple fact is, writing is hard. Don’t lie to yourself and think that it isn’t. In fact, I was talking to a bestselling self-published author a couple of days ago and he seemed surprised that things in the amateur world were so bad. Why? Because he gave up on them years and years ago and now doesn’t talk to anyone who either isn’t published or isn’t paying to take one of his courses. The people who are willing to shell out cash, those people are going to take it a lot more seriously than the people stumping for comfort on free online forums. They will never succeed because they simply aren’t interested. They have horribly unrealistic expectations and they don’t really care to learn.
It’s why I think I’m going to give up as well. I’ve got better things to do than bang my head on a wall in frustration and every single published author I ever talk to anymore, all of my friends who have been cranking out work instead of making excuses, they all seem to have come to the same conclusions. It’s just not worth our time.
I mean really, how sad is that?
