When it comes to publishing in the modern age, I don’t think people care much about anything other than sales. As an author you can write something great, but if it doesn’t sell like hotcakes the miserable soulless scorekeepers in the publishing industry will say what the miserable soulless scorekeepers in every industry say: that you failed.
Because primacy of sales is not implicit in the word author, however, qualifiers become necessary. You can only be a successful author if you sell lots of books, or otherwise generate serious revenue in the form of t-shirt sales, film rights, speech-circuit fees, etc. It doesn’t matter if you generate all these sales by lying about yourself or duping your readers. The only thing that matters is the money.
If you write a book that is only read by world leaders, who take your words and change the planet with them, you will not be called successful. You might be described as influential, and the fact of your influence might drive future sales or offers to speak in front of go-go executives, but until the money rolls in you will never be described as a success. Not even if you save a million lives.
If you do not sell a lot of books but you receive critical acclaim then you can call yourself a critically-acclaimed author, or an award-winning author, but you cannot call yourself a successful author. Unless of course you were aiming for critical success all along, in which case you can pull a fast one and present yourself as a successful, critically-acclaimed author, thereby implying that you sold more books than you actually did.
If you are neither critically-acclaimed nor generating sales, then you can call yourself an author as long as you A) have written at least one book, and B) are working on another book, even if it’s only in your head. If you stop at any point, however, you become a failed author because you failed to achieve critical acclaim or financial success. In the writing business there is nothing worse than being a failed author. Except being a miserable soulless scorekeeper.
The antidote to all this, of course, is defining success for yourself. And I don’t mean that as a trite observation. Rather, I mean you should have an actual conversation with yourself about this issue and define why you’re writing and what it is you hope to give and gain by linking words together.
You don’t have to tell anyone what your definition is, and you can change it any time you want. What’s critical is simply that you know the answer yourself. Because if you don’t, the miserable soulless scorekeepers will gladly define success for you.
— Mark Barrett
Wow–I wrote a post on the same topic on my own blog on the same day (without seeing yours). I’m grappling a bit myself with the question of “What defines a professional author?” Is it sales? Dollar amount of royalty payments? Being signed by a big publisher? Actually writing well? Interesting you were thinking about the same things at the same time.
http://www.davidderrico.com/what-makes-a-professional/
– David
It’s maddening, isn’t it? Not only is it hard to define these things on any absolute or quantitative level, but there are always people looking to knock you for qualitative reasons as well.
I think a professional writer is defined by intent rather than outcome. Writing professionally means you’re trying to do that as your profession — as the way you make the money that keeps food on your table. It’s a very tough nut to crack if you’re a novelist, but not so tough if you’re a writer of many other stripes: tech writer, copywriter, etc.
So…because the term ‘author’ really seems to have to do with writing books, I would say a professional author is someone who means to (or manages to) make their living writing books. Certainly some years might be good, while others are bad, so the year-to-year payoff/ROI isn’t a fair barometer. In fact, struggling financially the entire time you’re a professional author may be the norm, as your post suggests.
Beyond coming up with the right words, I have a related concern that too many new authors are giving up their amateur status too quickly. Part of that rush is the desire to show success as an author by traditional means — meaning making a buck. But part of it is also an attempt to legitimize one’s efforts by financial metrics as against qualitative metrics.
We put money first in America, to the extent that It’s hard to tell someone their book stinks if it sells 10,000 copies. Creating sales thus becomes a vaccine against critical appraisal, and I think many would-be authors recognize that almost implicitly. But that recognition may also stunt the creative growth of writers who are still learning their craft.
More on this here:
https://ditchwalk.com/2010/02/22/were-all-amateurs-now/
I had read that post you linked — it was probably my favorite post of yours and one of the main reasons I started following your blog. It is depressing that people seem more willing to look at local artists as “talented amateurs” yet look at local authors as “vanity-published wannabes.” But I do think that perception is changing, just as it did for art and music and movies. In fact, I think it’s already changed for the vast majority of the general public — it’s just publishers, agents, and sometimes authors themselves who hold on to that old idea.
Don’t get me wrong: there is some utter CRAP that gets self-published. But I think readers are smart enough to figure that out fairly quickly. There are some utter crap traditionally-published books, TV shows, restaurants, financial instruments or investments, and everything else too. And yet those industries survive.
Sadly, I think you’re right: at the end of the day, all that seems to matter is if you make enough money. I keep asking myself, “What would make me a ‘real’ or ‘professional’ author?”, and the only definitive answer I can come up with is if I earn enough money at it to make a living. Sadly, that’s a very high bar, even for traditionally-published authors; it’s just a very rare thing. I’m hoping that e-books and self-publishing will open the doors and expand the number of authors who can make a living. If the current system only allows 200 people (or thereabouts) to earn enough to pay rent, then the current system needs to be eradicated. The publishing industry earns a living for a lot of people — printers, shippers, warehouses, bookstore workers, editors, agents, CEOs, etc. — but only a tiny number are actually authors.
I’m an author, so that system doesn’t work for me. Let’s try something new.
I don’t know if e-books will expand the number of authors who can make a living, but their availability should make the process a bit more fair. There will always be politics and favorites, but the quality of the work has a bit more of a chance of shining through. At least in terms of that segment of the audience that actually cares about literary merit or quality or whatever you want to call it. (There was never a great demand for literary fiction, even in the golden age of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Most people were reading serials in the Saturday Evening Post.)
The point of the original post was really that most writers do not write for money per se. Yes, we’d all like to strike it rich or find out that there are millions of people who love what we do, but the impetus to write is almost never an economic calculation (for good and obvious reasons). I think it’s critical that writers get in touch with that original impetus, and stay in touch with it, because that’s what will sustain you no matter what else happens.
People can say you’re no good, they can say you never made a living, but they can’t tell you that you don’t like butter-pecan ice cream if that’s your favorite flavor. That’s why there are a lot of small ice cream shops that are started by people who love ice cream. Some of them make it, some of them make it big — yes, I’m talking to you, Ben & Jerry — and others fall by the wayside, but they were all clear about why they got in the game.
I’m just suggesting that it’s important to be clear why you want to be in the game — even apart from your aspirations. If you know that, nobody can take it away from you. And they can’t hurt you by beating you up with labels like ’successful’ and ‘professional’.
Here I think you hit on the real reason for much of the freaking in the publishing industry. There’s a lot of lip service given to books as culture and books as history, but for most of the people in publishing books are, first and foremost, a meal ticket. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but all the talk about what’s wrong with publishing somehow omits the rather obvious fact that people are scared to death that they’re going to lose their jobs (or their quarterly profits, or both).
Authors are the raw ingredient of publishing. They are the source material that is mined — even if a project is put together in-house. The idea that authors can now work entirely (brace yourself) out-house (!) in order to reach readers is a serious, serious threat to a business model predicated on total control of the marketing pipeline. If I was in publishing I would be freaking out, because the level of uncertainty in the industry has to be near 100%.
I think that it’s instructive for authors to look at webcomics. Some creators are making money off of webcomics, but the way they do it is to make money off advertising and merchandise–T-shirts, books, Google Ads, Cafe Press stuff, and other marketing tie-ins. The webcomic itself is free, usually free in its entirety; it’s updated regularly and often (at least three days a week, usually five, and sometimes every day.); and the creators provide blog-style content along with the comic itself.