The Value of the Written Word: Pay the Writer
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Harlan “Pay the Fucking Writer” Ellison
The Value of the Written Word: Pay the Writer
Words should be exchanged for cold hard cash. I’m a staunch believer that if your words get printed, you should be paid for them. Sadly, we no longer get paid for everything we write. With the advent of the Internet, our words have become democratized. Blogs/Substack/Medium, like this one, are all the rage, but so are YouTube videos, X Tweets, Instagram Posts, and more. I’ve even written for some stellar publications that no longer pay (they shall go unnamed). Payment, they say, is exposure, or perhaps the reader will pay indirectly by buying one of my books. I find this appalling on one hand, but reality on the other.
Writers have always had to beg and grovel to get ahead. Why should that change now?
Proliferation
What’s a writer to do? Quite simply, write. I’m not necessarily a speed demon at the typewriter, but I can easily write 2,000 new fiction words a day while also leaving time for blogs and/or magazine articles. What’s 2,000 words a day equate to? Approximately one new novel per month. That’s a lot of books. My ability to do this day in and day out means that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do in writing school, when the profs were having a good belly laugh before going home alone to masturbate.
Proliferation is Profit but...
Just because I can, theoretically write one novel per month, doesn’t mean I should be publishing one novel per month. Over the course of three years, I’ve published maybe thirty products, most of them under my own imprint, Bear Media, and some of them with publishers like Thomas & Mercer (Amazon Publishing Imprints), Down & Out Books, and Polis Books (I’m what they call a hybrid author). My belief was that the more content the better. That might hold true for the romance genre, but as it turns out, it doesn’t necessarily hold true for the crime, hard-boiled mystery, and thriller genres.
Flooding the Market
I believe at present there’s something like 16 million books available on Amazon. You might ask yourself, How the hell can I compete? The market is flooded. But I firmly believe that I’m only competing against my own genre(s). Maybe there’s far more thrillers available today than when I first started, but many of them are subpar or aren’t really competition anyway. However, when I flood my own market with too much of my own work, I actually rob myself of royalties. Even if the Beatles had put out a new record every month for ten years, there would have come a time when they would have been stretched just a little too thin, and sales would have suffered. One must give one’s readers (and listeners) a chance to keep up. One must give them a chance to breathe, or so I’ve discovered. But still I publish relentlessly, one way or another anyway. It’s a lust thing.
Proliferation to Profit Conclusion
After speaking candidly with one of my publishers back 2020 I agreed to only publish one full-length novel per quarter. Thar should have given my readers both old and new, a chance to catch up with all of my published works. It didn’t mean I might not put out a novella or a short story or two in between, but full-length works would be released one once per quarter. In theory, it should have made everyone happy, including my publishers and my wallet.
But I couldn’t help myself. After skipping a month or two or publish long works, I went back to my once per month schedule. So shoot me.
In this new golden era of writing and publishing, proliferation is extremely important if not necessary. But it just might be equally true that man was not made to eat a full meal, every hour on the hour. He was made to eat three squares per day. Anything beyond that, and you just make yourself sick.