Off Brand (4th Time's the Charm?)

The story of the three times I bailed on writing. An inspirational cautionary tale...

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

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I have walked away from my dreams of a successful author career three times.

Yes, I regret those turns in the road. In retrospect, it is easy to see the full picture and how wrong I was to make the decisions I did. However, at the time, with the myopic vision of “currently in the now,” I think my choices made sense. I at least try to be compassionate to my younger self, okay?

What’s interesting, though, is how my choices often reflected the state of publishing at the times I made them. To use business jargon, they were reactive decisions, not proactive. I looked around, saw a certain landscape, decided it wasn’t where I wanted to be, and left.

Of course, now I have an “elevated” view and can see that the places I did not want to be were but mere way-stations along a trunk road. Instead of staying on it, I made detours:

One

The first time I dropped out of my dreams was in the late 1990s, when I was in my late twenties.

Full transparency: after the deaths of my parents a few years earlier, I did not make great life choices (understatement). I’m sanguine about it now, but as a 50+ year old woman, I look back on myself during those years with no small amount of horror: who on earth thought letting me roam around unsupervised was a good idea??? Where were the adults?!?!?!??? Who let this poor baby out into the world without a leash????!!!!??!?

Anyway.

Back to the late 1990s: publishing was moribund in the same business paradigm it had maintained for roughly 600 years. Of course there were changes based on markets and increased literacy in general, and the 20th century put its own spin on a lot of the culture around “literature,” but generally, writers worked at the condescension of publishers who held all the purse strings. Publishing houses worked in tandem with bookstores, who were their real customers (as opposed to actual readers).

The word of the day was, as always, scarcity. In the 20th century, this was a very literal stumbling block since the scarcity in question was not paper or ink or even readers but bookshelf space. Sure, a big-box store like Barnes & Nobles or Borders held between 50,000 and 200,000 titles at any one time, but that number was always just a fraction of how many books were actually in print, which on average through the 1990s in North America was at least 1 million titles a year (a lot of reprints to be sure, but still, a staggering number for the time). It was the best era so far for bookstores and by-mail book catalogs.

But shelf space was at a premium and if you did not have the force of a big publishing house’s marketing team and sales team wrangling to get your book on the shelves (much less facing out so potential buyers could see the cover), your book would die in obscurity. Many did, even after scoring a slip of shelving for two or three copies.

I looked at my massive, epic stories filled with queer characters and polyamorous romances and disability representation and realized that there was no space on those bookshelves for my books. What I wanted to write would not get me an agent or a contract, so I either could buckle down and write “to market” (the market being “agents and publishers”) or I could just…not¹.

I put away my ideas and my dreams. I kept writing, off and on, but mostly just to get the stories and characters out of my head.

Two

Falling into fanfiction in 2007 got me writing seriously again, and fanfic friends who managed to get publishing contracts with an independent press got me to submit my original work to the same publisher. My first original novel came out in late 2010, just after I started graduate school for my master’s in library and information studies.

I was actually very successful! My niche was M/M romance, mostly contemporary, and I enjoyed writing those stories a lot. I felt a bit stifled having to stick to that genre/niche, and I struggled to write novels short enough and structured correctly for the niche. But I loved it and felt validated by my success.

Then, going into my last semester of grad school in spring of 2012, I caught whooping cough from a colleague at the university where I worked. (Did you know there was a huge outbreak of whooping cough in 2012? Well now you do.)

Whooping cough.

Just typing that gives me flashbacks. It was bad, super bad, as in very terrible. I caught it at the end of December, 2011, and by the start of 2012 was gravely ill.

I coughed so hard that on January 17th, I damaged a lower disc in my back just from coughing. Worst pain in my life so far. I literally crawled on my hands and knees, crying in agony as I kept coughing, for two days. I spent the rest of the year walking with a cane. I also spent the rest of the year coughing, because whooping cough can be cured but healing from the damage takes a fuck-ton of time.

Long story short, I realized within a few weeks of my very final term of grad school that I had to choose where to put my limited spoons. Whooping cough took so much of my energy that I could not do whooping cough, grad school, and write a novel at the same time.

I had to choose between finishing the book my editor was waiting on, or finishing grad school.

I’ve talked in depth about that decision before, but the bottom line is that I made the “safe” choice of graduating with a master’s degree. More fool me, I think in retrospect, but to be charitable to myself, it was also the advice everyone gave me.

I had hoped to get back to my author career after a year or two, but the momentum for my author brand collapsed and I knew I’d have to start from the ground up. “One or two years later” became a decade.

Three

However, this time I kept writing and kept publishing. I just did not feel any incentive to incentivize it.

My writing had once again become merely a hobby. I wrote a lot of fanfiction. I self-published Wolves of Harmony Heights in 2017, and started working on the Dragon’s Grail series.

I figured if it could not be a job, it could at least be fun.

But then my publisher decided to steal from its authors, and I was one of them. I demanded my rights back to all my books in lieu of being paid what I was owed, and republished them myself in 2018.

Doing that reminded me of how successful I had been back in 2011. Suddenly I was gripped by the desire to try making a go at an “author career” for a third time. I had nearly succeeded once! Surely I could do it again?

But things had changed. The gold rush era of self-publishing was arguably already over, or at the very least tapering out. ‘Zon’s algorithms kept changing and Kindle Unlimited kept getting more difficult to make money on, and other platforms like Barnes & Noble and Kobo had entered the chat. Advertising on Facebook and ‘Zon had matured and become big business and big for business.

The self-publishing advice everyone gave, from romance author forums to 20 Books to 50k, was simple but deadly: write as much as possible for as small a niche as possible and advertise everywhere possible.

It was called the “rapid release” method and while there were (and are) many variations of it, it always boiled down to “write inhuman amounts of words every day and spend a lot of money on advertising.”

Key, of course, was to first “find a niche.” That was critical: find as small a niche that you could mine that would make you money, and marry it.

This method resulted in a lot of people making a lot of money, it’s true, but it more often it resulted in people making some money before burning out in a limp-noodle heap of over exertion and niche exhaustion. (What is niche exhaustion? It’s when you write so much in a genre niche that you become sick of it, like drinking too many martinis and then never being able to stand the smell of gin ever again.)

To be fair to myself, I tried.

By the turn of the new year 2020, though, I admitted to myself that I could not do it. “Rapid release/Write to market” branding was a cage for me, and I resented it.

The natural outcome of that resentment? I was bad at it.

But I kept trying to do it, because I had been indoctrinated by decades of experts who told me I had to do it. Throughout every iteration of my attempts to become a successful, full-time author, the focus had always been the same: change myself to fit the market expectations. Being myself was only allowed in measured doses, and only in ways that fit the brand.

Some friends managed to create author personas and live in them, while other authors glommed onto some aspect of their personality that appealed to their readership (politics, or being a geek, or cosplay, or gardening, or art, etc.). They wanted to write for a living, and to make a living they had to either rise above the market—a talent few possess—or bend to the will of the market (authentically or not).

I was not good at that.

Well, it might be more accurate to say, I hated doing that. I absolutely can write marketing copy that fits a brand, but for my brand? My personality? Everything I tried felt flat and lifeless, fake and shallow. My niche was an oubliette. My newsletter was static and vapid. My intense writing regimen was exhausting.

I ran screaming from the niches. I shuffled away from rapid releases. I put aside money I could have used for advertising.

I failed, and just in time for the pandemic lockdown of 2020.

Four (back in the saddle!)

The world keeps turning, though.

In late 2022, I finally emerged from the long-running trauma that was March, 2020 and really looked around at the publishing scene. I had already quit the day job that was driving me to psychological breakdown, but I was still keeping my fiction writing on the back burner. A hobby. Something to look forward to doing when I had time and money.

Then I looked up and around, and realized: something has changed.

In 2023, the world of publishing (of books, of stories, of literature) is different…a continuation of the changes of the past 20 years, yes, but it feels like a particularly unique shift.

I could pin that change on a lot of things individually, but I think it was cumulative. Altogether it was due to tech advancements, including A.I.; social acclimation to micropayments and direct sales; the rise and fall of social media empires; and, critically, the changing nature of the relationship between people and technology.

Readers still buy books, but they also buy direct, spend money on subscriptions, and expect more from authors they love than just words on a page. This kind of parasocial relationship represents both the best and worst of what technology offers us these days, but crucially provides authors a way to rise above the drek.

And there is a lot of drek. While there has always been a “tsunami of crap” in publishing, online sales and self-publishing has made the plate of mediocrity for readers to choose from huge, and that plate is holding more and more every day. People are blaming A.I. but this has been gaining momentum since about the time dime novels first appeared in the 1800s. However, A.I. is definitely on track to turn that momentum into a hockey stick graph.

Which means the question becomes not “what niche can I mine?” but rather, “what is the point of churning out repetitive stories written ‘to market’ if (more like, when) an A.I. program can do it faster, better, cheaper?”

What does it mean to be a human creator of anything?

The result of all the pressures on the industry means that our humanity must come to the fore in ways previously unnecessary. It used to be that being an author personality (celebrity) was an exception. While few authors went the Harper Lee route of complete reclusiveness, it wasn’t exactly odd for an author to simply be known for their work and not as a person. Truman Capote, Mark Twain, Danielle Steele, and the like were the outliers. Most fiction authors did not do celebrity tours. The majority of authors considered book tours as painful excursions of being ignored while sitting at a table in a bookstore, maybe getting a mention in the local newspaper.

What’s changed is that to be successful now, it is less about conforming to publishing standards or market expectations, but about standing out as unique.

(Has this always been true? To a point, yes, but being a “unique voice in the wilderness” was an anomaly; and, once that author’s work was accepted by publishers/readers, became their own norm for others to match. It was all about the gatekeeping, in other words. A topic for another time…)

But these days, even without A.I. in the mix (and it IS in mix, like it or not), the field has become exponentially crowded, and growing. Estimates for the number of books for sale on Amazon range from three to ten million (‘zon, of course, never releases numbers). We’re all shoving elbows at each other in here.

At the very least, this means that in 2023, it is not about how fast you can create a lot of widgets (novels). Authors, even genre authors, have to stop trying to be a “written to market” brand and learn to share our writing and ourselves authentically. That might still be in a genre niche market! I don’t think die-hard fans of mafia billionaire het romance are going anywhere. They just have a lot of other options too, and if you want readers for your tropetasitc mafia billionaire het romance, ya’ gotta stand out somehow.

That is harder than it sounds. There are eight billion people on earth, but not all of them are literate, or enjoy reading, and of those only a portion read stories in the language you write in.

It’s a crowded market and nothing you create will be unique because being one in a million means there are 8,000 people out there just like you. Authors, journalists, and writers of all kinds are fishing for ways to stand out, get noticed, make sales.

What might sound depressing to other authors sounds like ideal terrain to me.

I have finally accepted that I can’t make something unique, but I can be unique. This time, I’m not limiting myself out of fear of being off-brand. This time, I know that my super power is within me: the stories I want to tell and how I want to tell them.

Yes, it is and will be a more challenging path to forge through the publishing wilderness with stories across multiple genres, but this time I really believe that the way too long-term success for me is in embracing my wide range of interests and stories and looking for readers who want to embrace me for that.

Honestly, doing it every other way was more of an obstacle course, and one I’ve already failed at completing a couple of times.

What I see nowadays is that the publishing wilderness is becoming even wilder. The self-publishing upheaval will look like chump change compared to the A.I. upheaval, and we’re all going to have to find the trails, roads, or highways that work best for us individually.

That’s the new and interesting part, in my humble opinion.

I’m ready for the journey.

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1. To be fair, I’m kinda glad in retrospect. A lot of the romance and fantasy stories I ideated on back then were overflowing with cultural appropriation and the worst of “white savior” stereotypes. If I had gotten any published, I’d be pretty embarrassed about them now and trying to get them smothered or heavily edited. Small mercies, I guess.

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