People ask what the odds are of becoming a published writer. This is the wrong question. The answer, by necessity, has to be vague. Neither is it helpful to ask. Too much hinges on meanings that aren’t spelled out in your question.
If you go to conventions, or read author interviews, you’ll hear people ask this all the time. Usually the answers have to be brief, and after a while, they sound a little generic. This is because authors at conventions and panels have only limited time to address questions. Not to mention that they’re probably sick hearing it for the thousandth time!
Tell me if this rings a bell. “Becoming a writer is difficult. It’s extremely unusual for people to make a living as a full-time writer, and even getting published is a challenge. It’s easier to get published once you’ve honed your craft. Practise, practise some more, then keep practising. Write every day. Keep sending your stuff out. Don’t give up.”
This is all excellent advice. All of it is true. It is difficult to get published, especially if you’re writing fiction.
What is the chance of you becoming a published writer?
Here’s an answer you’re going to like…
The probability of you becoming a published writer… Is 100%*.
Now, if you’re only after a quick ego-boost, you can stop reading and go back to whatever you were doing before you clicked on the link to this article. For a potentially less pleasant truth, though, read on.
Ah, asterisk, disclaiming friend of many.
Let’s investigate.
Getting published
Getting published, these days, is easy if you’re determined enough. Save up a few thousand dollars. Google “self publishing”. Read reviews of on-demand printing presses. Design a cover. Contact a publisher. Wait an appropriate period of time, and then get a few hundreds books delivered to your door.
There! Published. Done and dusted. You may now distribute your books at will to friends, family, local bookstores, and anyone who buys one off you from the Internet. You can sit back, content that you’re a Published Author.
“But wait!” you cry, “That’s not proper publishing.”
Bollocks. If people want to buy your books, they can. You can market them all across the world, set whatever price you like. With the Internet, you can sell books to people from other countries, if you can convince them to buy what you have.
For most of us, though, that’s not enough. What we want is for someone else to go “Yes, this is the book we want”, and take it off your hands, proof and edit it, stick a nice cover on, and put it in some bookstores.
That form of publishing is a lot harder to make happen. So, before we begin looking at what your chances are – or if ‘chances’ is even the right word to use, we need to be really clear about what you want.
Being clear about your goal
Let’s clear the air some more. The clearer you are about any goal, the mroe likely you are to achieve it. Don’t be afraid to give something a value. Don’t aim to be richer. Aim to be $50,000 richer. Don’t aim to lose weight. Aim to weigh a specific amount.
Don’t say “I want to be a writer.” This is a wishy-washy goal. Say “I want to be published, by a recognised publisher. I want to see my books in book-stores. I want to have someone ask me to sign a copy of the book I’ve written.” Or, if you don’t want to work that hard for it, say “I want to write a story my friends like. I want to print some of my poetry and give it to relatives for Christmas. I want to write clear, elegant reports for work.” Figure out what you want, figure out where you are, and start taking steps to close the gaps.
Tyrannical numbers
So, what odds are we looking at?
Some people like to look at things in terms of numbers. They read blog posts by publishers and agents, and read interviews with already-published authors about how long it took them to get published. Then they try and do the maths. But where to start? How many points are there along the traditional path to getting published?
What are the odds of you finishing the story you’ve started? That you’ll go back and edit it, give it the polishing it needs? That you’ll find a market for it? That you’ll deal with a rejection in a constructive way? What are the odds you’ll try as long as it takes?
You can see that there are lots of ways of assessing your odds of success. If you take the view of a disinterested outsider, though, you can see why I don’t think this is a great idea. You have no way of knowing what everyone else is doing, and no way of directly comparing your talents and time invested to everyone else doing similar things to you.
Suppose you read something from a literary agent saying they accept one from every three hundred submissions. Kristin from Pub Rants gave some interesting stats summing up her time in 2010. She’s sold 28 new books out of 36,000 submissions. So that’s a ‘success’ rate of something like 0.07% for people trying to go through an agent to publish a book. Reading other agent’s blogs makes these figures sound pretty realistic.
But what does that statistic tell you? Nothing meaningful. You only know how good your query is going to be. Whether you do everything your agent’s submission guidelines ask. Whether you respond to feedback. Whether you workshopped, refined, edited, and polished your work until you couldn’t see any ways to improve it.
If you do all those things, your odds are likely to be much higher than 0.07% of success. And if you do those things day in, day out, for as long as it takes, I’d say to you that your odds of getting published eventually are very high indeed.
Of course, this statement doesn’t mean much either. It’s not often that you hear about people who devote hours a day to writing, constantly improve their skills, network carefully, revise their work, craft excellent query letters, deal with people in a friendly and professional way, and languish unpublished for thirty years. That’s because, I’d suggest, one of two things happen. They either get published or give up.
This binary outcome is not limited to publishing alone. In every field, there are the dabblers and those committed to mastery. If you commit yourself to the time, training and effort needed, you’ll do very well. If you’re only dabbling, or will give up after six months if you don’t see visible improvements every time you attend a class, you’re going to fail.
No barrier to entry
Many fields that people want to succeed in have low barriers to entry. Sports, arts, online endeavours can all be started by people with no experience, and very easily. There’s nothing stopping 99% of us from picking up a pen or sitting down at a keyboard and starting to write. That doesn’t mean we’re all going to end up acclaimed, published writers.
When people look at the most successful people in a field, they often think “that doesn’t look so hard. I could probably do that!”. They’re partially right. They probably could. They probably won’t, though, because their commitment level is not high enough.
Let me give you an example. I am married to a extremely talented, professional musician. My wife can play more instruments than I can list, sings, and gets paid to do both. She has been heavily involved in music since she was very young. For her, picking up new instruments is easier than for most people, because she has a lot of relevant experience and musicality she can draw upon. Without any formal tuition in guitar, she can play songs reasonably fluently, and could easily learn to play something specific if she wanted to.
I am an unmusical guy. I can’t sing in tune, and my other musical abilities are limited to some awkward self-taught piano. But I want to learn to play the guitar. How easy is it for me to start? Very. I can get a second-hand guitar for next to nothing. I can buy a ‘teach yourself guitar’ CD or ask a friend to show me some basic chords. Realistically, half an hour’s practise a day will get me to a point of basic competence after a few months.
I’m extremely unlikely to ever become as good as my wife. I am not committed to mastering the guitar. If I were, I’d probably have to put in far more practise than I am going to. I’d have to want to be a great guitarist enough to give up other things that are important in my life, and I already know I’m not going to do that.
The same applies with writing. Many of us write at least a little every day, in other fields. We send emails. We update Twitter and Facebook. We might even sketch down ideas for stories. But, deep down, we know that there’s a difference between that and someone who commits themselves totally to mastering writing as an art form.
There is no difference between me, a guy who sings Disney tunes in the shower, wanting to become a professional singer, and my wife, a professional singer, wanting to become a writer. Both of those wants could be achieved, but at the cost of devotion that we’re unlikely to make.
Being outstanding
Being better than everyone else in your field is a matter of application. If you choose to apply yourself to something until you master it, then you are likely to succeed. It’s not common, because people don’t want to commit to the hard workPeople do this rarely, but when it does, it can have spectacular results.
A guy I used to live with joined a coffee chain part-time five years ago and started working as a barista. He fell in love with the position, and swiftly moved through the world of coffee making. He recently competed in the World Latte Art Championships and came second
Now, he’s living ‘the dream’. He’s being paid to teach other people about coffee, something he literally eats, sleeps, drinks and breathes. I’m serious about that last bit – his exhalations are a powerful caffeinated stimulant. He’s ‘got there’. You can, too, but only if you’re prepared to put in the effort.
There is nothing wrong with dabbling
Let’s get this perfectly clear. There is nothing wrong with being a dabbler in any field. I am only ever going to be a very bad musician. I can kick a soccer ball around, but I’ll never play on a field more competitive than my backyard. I can’t draw my way out of a fast-food playmat maze. I acknowledge this and am fine with it.
You ned to think, seriously, about what you want to become a master at, and make sure your expectations are realistic. This goes doubly so for fields with no barriers to entry. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you’re going to need to put in double or triple the effort, at least, of those around you.
Obviously, you can’t do this with every hobby and job you have. It is perfectly OK to remain an ameteur in some areas of your life. Don’t fall into a trap of thinking you need to be superlative at everything you do. Being a dabbler is a fantastic way to enjoy a variety of different things. Especially if you haven’t found something that makes your heart sing – keep trying new things! Don’t worry about being bad at them when you begin.
Dabblers and masters
What can seem unfair about fields where the competition is largely invisible, like writing, is that dabblers and masters are thrown in together. When an agent looks at a book submission, they aren’t grading you on how long you’ve been writing. They’re grading you on the quality of your craft.
I’ve never met a writer who says they’re at the peak of their game. The best writers I’ve had the honour to meet and talk to are humble folk. They know they can always improve. They work at it, harder than anyone else. And they keep perfecting their craft.
So what commitments are you willing to make? Do you want to commit the time, energy, effort and pull away from the pack? Or are you happy to stay where you are? When you begin working in an open-entry field, you’re going to come up against stiff resistance. You’re not just competing against yourself, but every other aspiring writer out there. This is what makes writing so fun! When you do get published, there’s no doubt in your mind that you deserve it. You’ve proven yourself against the other 99.93% of the field, that your time and effort has been justified.
For me, I’ve made the commitment. I write every day. I’ve changed my lifestyle significantly so I can do this. I’ve cut back on my job and now work part-time, enough to support myself, but taking excellent advice from Patrick Rothfuss in cutting my lifestyle expenses. I’m nowhere near the level of skill where I expect to get published any time soon. But, as I write every day, I know I’m getting better. It won’t happen instantly, but it will happen.
If you want mastery, stretch out your time horizon. Successful mastery of anything worth the effort won’t happen overnight. It will happen in leaps and bounds. In invisible steps that you might not feel yourself taking. I’m not an A-list blogger, but I read those who are, and take their advice on board. Surround yourself with people who you want to emulate. See what they’re doing differently to you. Experiment. Diversify. Narrow your focus. Grow. Write. Write. And write some more.
You determine the odds of your success. Define what you want. Know why you want it. Decide how to get it, and commit to taking actions.
Go write.
– Pip
