I stumbled on a great post this morning. Well, stumbled isn’t quite the right word, the blog showed up in my newsfeed like it was supposed to, but still…The Tripod of Publishing: Know Your Priorities.
Combine that with this Why, Oh Why, Did I Get Rejected?, and you have one of my favorite things to ramble aimlessly about in the hopes that I’ll reach a good pausing place.
Publishing is a business. The goal of any business – unless they’re a non profit organization – is to make money. If you’re not there to make money, it’s really more of a hobby. That’s not to say that people in the business are just in it for the money. I suspect that unlike a lot of professions out there, those people us authors interract with actually love their jobs. But unless they’re independently wealthy, they still have to pay the bills.
Writing is an art. That statement bothers me, because it’s too generic, too much of a blanket, but it will do for now. So many of us write fiction because we have a passion to create, to put our thoughts on paper, to share them with the world.
Business and art don’t mix. It’s like oil and water. Or acids and bases. Or Red Sox and Yankees fans. Or .net and perl programmers.
All right, stopping with the analogies now. You get the point. The thing is, if you’re a writer, and you want to be in the business of publishing, you have to know where your boundaries are. Your priorities. What are you willing to bend on and what aren’t you? If someone offered you a six-figure advance, would you modify that intelligent YA novel to be more mainstream? If someone wanted to buy your book, but only if you let them put their name on it and you could never fess up to being the original author, would you do it just to see your words in print? Or for the money?
I’m not saying you have to know the answers to these questions up front, or that you’ll ever even have to. But having a good idea of where your ethical and moral base are will help make some of these decisions easier if they do ever come up.
Is there anything pertaining to your writing that you don’t think you would bend on? Anything that is an absolute deal breaker if you can’t have it/have to change it?
Those are some good questions to consider.
In general, a writer should be willing to edit/change certain things in their novel because if they won’t change anything editors/agents will find them hard to work with and they don’t want that. But if something is very important to the writer, I think, then it’s perfectly acceptable to not want to change it.
I won’t change the main and important secondary characters’ genders or sexual orientation. Noah’s love interest will not become female nor will he, just to sell a book. I write gay characters and think that more need to be published in genre fiction. And to be honest, if I were to change those things just to be published I would feel like I was selling out. Publication isn’t the most important thing to me, so if that one detail meant it wouldn’t happen then I’d accept that. Not that I think it will. Minor characters, I’d consider changing cause I know in some stories I’ve written/started, there aren’t enough female characters in the cast.
Ghost writing a book (not having name on published product) is a different story. I’m sure I’ll tell you about that some day. 😉
So instead of reviewing any novellas, I’m now reading your blog and the blogs you linked to. Thank you very much. You are a bad influence. Stop writing interesting blogs and get reviewing!
Blog serendipity…
http://creativebarbwire.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/imagination-gone-wild/
I’m considering self-publishing because I don’t think I can get any of those big advances anyway – I’m not marketable enough, I don’t fit in any box, etc. I know I’ll have to hire a copy-editor for grammar and typos, but for the rest… I want to stick to my vision before it becomes too muddied! 😉
Happy writing (and thanks for the great link)!
Barb
@Dawn – ghostwriting, really? Now I’m curious ^_^
@Laura – I’m working on it, I promise. 😛
@Barb – I love your blog, but never have any comments to add. What you’re saying about self-publishing is, to me, a good reason to consider it. It sounds like you’ve put some careful consideration into the entire thing and I wish you the best of luck with it 🙂