What if you finally get your novel published and then it fails miserably in the market? What if it crashes and burns? Will your fiction-writing career be over?

Dale posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

Hi, Randy. Something’s been bugging me for a while now, and people I asked have given me a bunch of different answers; I hope you’d be able to clear this thing for me and those with similar doubts.

Namely, what will it mean for my future fiction-writing career if my first published book ultimately fails (being of course my failure) to make a name for itself, or worse — is a total disaster. I assume (should I write another novel) that agents and editors would then look at my work with this presumption: “I shouldn’t even waste my time looking at a manuscript by someone who failed so gravely the last time.”

How is it? Is an author’s first failure their last? Or perhaps there is a way out to make yet a good name for oneself?

Thank you for your time.

Randy sez: Dale, your fear is every fiction writer’s fear. And with good reason.

Let’s be clear that everything I say here is my opinion only, it could be wrong, yada, yada. There will be some people who wildly disagree with me. But then, I wildly disagree with them, so that’s OK.

My opinion is that editors and agents care most about your most recent book. If it was a success, then that’s great and you’re everybody’s pal. But if it was a miserable failure, then that’s horrible and you’re damaged goods.

Generally, your agent won’t abandon you after a book crashes and burns. But he will be doing damage control when he goes to sell your next book. Your agent will make the case that your book failed because:

• Your publisher gave it a lousy cover.
• Your publisher failed to send out review copies.
• Your publisher dropped the ball on distribution.
• Your publisher screwed up on pre-sales.
• Your book came out too early.
• Your book came out too late.
• Your publisher had a dispute with a major retailer and didn’t get copies into any of that retailer’s stores.
• A thousand other excuses.

Any of these could be correct. I have seen books fail for each of these reasons. I’ve seen books fail spectacularly when several of these things happened together. I’ve seen really excellent, brilliant writers have a massive book failure because their publisher screwed up.

But none of that matters, because everybody knows it’s the author’s fault.

Yeah, that sucks, but that’s the way things are. If your book fails, you get the blame.

So what are you supposed to do about it?

I suppose you could quit the fiction writing game, but if writing is in your blood, then you’re not going to do that because you can’t. When fiction writing is in your blood, you’re going to write fiction because that’s just what you do and you can’t help yourself. Quitting is not an option.

You could accept a smaller advance from a smaller publisher and hope that your next book does well and you can rebuild your career. That’s a live option, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you have another miserable failure, then you’d have to step down to an even smaller publisher and an even smaller advance. In principle, you could circle the drain two or three times before you finally go out.

You could adopt a pseudonym and start your publishing career over, either in a new category or in the same category. There is nothing wrong with this option. In fact, you can make a case that even if your career is going great guns, you should use a pseudonym if you radically change brands. That way, you don’t confuse your readers. If you’ve been publishing serial-killer novels under the name Hack Slade, and you switch gears to writing sweet Amish romances under that same name, expect a wee little bit of astonishment and confusion from your fans.

You could bail out of the traditional publishing game altogether  and become an indie author. Then you aren’t beholden to any publisher. You don’t have to convince the gatekeepers that you’re worthy of being published. You just publish. You become your own boss. You make the decisions. You get the money and the glory if it succeeds. This is a viable option, and plenty of authors have done this. I know authors who’ve gone indie precisely for this reason.

There are people who will tell you not to worry about all this. If you’re good, then your books will just magically sell well and you’ll do just fine.

I don’t believe this, for a couple of reasons:

1. The publishing industry is the opposite of Lake Wobegon (where all the children are above average). In the publishing industry, MOST books sell worse than average. You might think this is statistically impossible, but it’s true, because book sales don’t follow a bell-shaped curve. If book sales followed a bell-shaped curve, then about half the books would sell better than average and half would sell worse. But the actual sales curve is horribly lopsided. The James Pattersons and Dan Browns of the world pull the average up massively. MOST books sell far below average.
2. Publishers are made up of humans, and humans make mistakes, and sometimes they totally screw up a book. I’ve seen it happen to brilliant authors. Odds are good that if you write more than a dozen books, one of them will tank because the publisher dropped the ball.

Let’s be clear that I’m not anti-publisher. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve met in the publishing industry are smart and decent and hard-working (with a few exceptions).

I’m not anti-publisher. I’m pro-author. And the fact is that authors have a tough time in this industry. There are a lot of reasons for that, and it’s a subject for another day, but it’s possible to write a good, solid book and have it sell poorly.

When that happens, the author always gets the blame. Always. Always. Always.

Write that down: “Always.”

Oh, did I mention that the author always gets the blame?

The solution is NOT for us to fall down weeping incoherently or to wring our hands helplessly.

Authors are not children. We don’t have complete control of our situation, but we have three things under our control:

1. Develop your craft as well as you can.
2. Develop your marketing skills as well as you can.
3. Take complete responsibility for your writing career.

We can’t afford to complain when things go bad. And things are almost guaranteed to go bad. Crap happens. A lot.

I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: There has never been a better time to be an author. We are living in the Golden Age For Authors.

We authors have more options than ever. We can work with a traditional publisher. We can go indie. We can be hybrid authors. We can do what we want, write what we want, sell to a world-wide market at little cost and little effort.

Yes, when things go wrong, we get the blame.

But when things go right, we get the credit.

Don’t worry about what can go wrong.

Dream about what can go right.

And then go make it happen.

Dale, I hope you feel a bit better about your future. Just saying it out loud has been good for me. It’s reminded me that yeah, I’m the person driving the bus. I’m in control of my career. And you’re in control of yours.

Go to it.

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.

Writers these days have two roads to fame and glory — self-publish or go with a traditional publisher. How do you decide which road to take? Will self-publishing ruin your reputation? Will traditional publishers cheat you out of your hard-earned money?

Despan posted this question on my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page:

I need help and advise.

I was planning to self publish, hoping to evaluate the performance of the book in terms of sales and readership before trying to use the traditional publishers. then while i was doing my research, i realised that you have traveled both routes – published by traditional publishers – Zondervan and also by Bookbaby (self-publishing.) I would like to be advised on the best route for a beginner like me.

I would be happy to be assisted please.

Thank you and God bless you and your team

Randy sez: You’ve put your finger on the question that many writers are asking these days, Despan.

I should clarify one point, however. I’ve published with several traditional publishers, but my self-publishing has been with Amazon/Barnes&Noble/Smashwords/Apple, rather than with Book Baby. I have nothing against Book Baby, but I haven’t worked with them. The two books that I’ve self-published have been second editions of books that were originally published with traditional publishers.

A large number of my published author friends have done exactly what I’ve done with their out-of-print novels — they’ve edited them, paid a graphic designer to create cover art, packaged it up as an e-book, and posted it for sale on the major online retailers.

Some of my author friends report no luck with these ventures. Some of them report very good results. I’d classify my results so far as fairly good. I think that as I release more e-books, they’ll all do better. One of the best ways to promote an e-book is with another e-book (since all your books should list all the others).

In the case of out-of-print novels, it’s a no-brainer to self-publish it. The cost is pretty minimal. The potential revenue is huge. Few traditional publishers are willing to republish your out-of-print novel, so that’s rarely an option.

But what if you’ve got a novel that has not yet been published? Should you self-publish it or go with a traditional publisher?

I suppose the answer to that depends on your goals.

If the main thing you want is to see your name on the cover of a book and you really don’t care if it earns any money, then your quickest way to get there is to self-publish it.

If the main thing you want is to get the ego boost that comes from being validated by a traditional publisher, then you can rule out self-publishing. You have to go with a traditional publisher.

Being a selfish guy, my main priority is to earn the most money for each book.

Let’s all remember, of course, that publishing a book is a very low-probability way to earn a lot of money. So let’s be clear on this — I didn’t decide to become a writer for the money. I became a writer because writing is in my blood and I can’t help myself. Having made that decision to become a writer, I want to maximize the money that I’ll earn. It just seems dumb to make decisions that would minimize my earnings.

I hope we’re clear on that, but just in case we’re not, I’ll repeat it. Writing will probably not make you rich. But if you know that and still want to be a writer, you should at least try to earn the most you can from it.

Here is my #1 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that it’s good enough that you could sell it to a traditional publisher.

Why? Because if your book is so bad that you couldn’t ever hope to sell it to any traditional publisher on the planet, that probably means that readers are going to hate it. Yes, there are a few rare exceptions to this, but mostly it’s true. Would you read a book that every traditional publisher thought was terrible? I didn’t think so. Treat readers the way you want to be treated.

So let’s assume that you’ve got a manuscript and you’re pretty sure it’s good enough to sell to a traditional publisher. How do you proceed?

That leads to my #2 piece of advice on self-publishing: Never self-publish a book unless you believe that you could market it at least 20% as well as a traditional publisher.

The reason for that rule is simple. Traditional publishers typically pay royalty rates of 25% of net revenues on e-books. Your agent will take 15% of that 25%, leaving you with about 21% of net revenues. I rounded that 21% down to 20% for simplicity. So if your publisher can sell 10,000 copies of your novel, then you only need to sell about 2,100 self-published copies at that same price point to generate the same amount of revenue. Of course, you might lower the price and then you’d need to move more copies, but you get the picture.

What if you know you’re horrible at marketing? I’d say in that case you’ve got no choice but to go with a traditional publisher. Of course, most traditional publishers these days expect their authors to do the lion’s share of the marketing. So being horrible at marketing is a bad idea these days. Don’t be horrible at marketing. Learn how to be an effective marketer.

What if you know your book could never sell to a traditional publisher? I’d say in that case you should work on your craft. Writing a novel is easy. Writing a good novel is hard. Give yourself the time and training to become excellent. You wouldn’t try to become a brain surgeon with 50 hours of training. Nor a fighter pilot. Nor a chess grandmaster.

Learning to write fiction well takes hundreds or thousands of hours of work. That may sound like bad news, but the flip side is that it’s also bad news for all those other wannabes you’re competing with. If you put in the time and they don’t, then who’s going to win?

I have a few other bits of advice if you want to self-publish your novel:

• Get your novel edited by a professional freelance editor. I believe that no novelist on the planet should be his own editor. You need an objective hard-eyed critique of your fiction. I don’t do freelance editing, by the way, so please nobody ask me what my rates are because I’m not available at any price. And yes, I follow this advice myself. I always hire talented editors to critique my work.
• Pay a graphic designer to create the cover art for your book. Very few authors have graphic design skills. Find somebody who does.
• Don’t spend massive amounts of time and money trying to do social marketing. This is merely my opinion. I’m aware that the vast majority of writers believe that social media will take us all to nirvana. Being a numbers guy, I’m skeptical. But I don’t have time to elaborate here. I often teach marketing at conferences, and it takes a few hours to lay out my vision of how to do marketing right. Social media is a small sliver of that, and should not suck huge amounts of time out of your life.

Well, Despan, I hope that helps. I talk to editors and agents all the time, and if I can distill what they tell me down to one thing, it’s this: “Be a brilliant writer.”

Easy to say. Horribly hard to do. But if you become a brilliant writer, you have a lot better chance of succeeding in the wild and crazy world of publishing. There is no certainty, ever. But brilliant writers have the odds in their favor.

Good luck!

If you’ve got a question you’d like me to answer in public on this blog, hop on over to my “Ask A Question For My Blog” page and submit your question. I’ll answer them in the order they come in.