Publish or Perish (Your Writing Career, That is)

As part of my job maintaining the adult fiction collection for the local public library, I have to weed books. I know it sounds awful—getting rid of books—but we have limited space, so it has to be done. I’ve been weeding the collection for a long time, removing books that are damaged or worn out or that haven’t been checked out in a few years. (In case you’re wondering, we either sell the books to a used book wholesaler or recycle them.)

The books that don’t check out usually fall into one of three categories: literary fiction with limited appeal, books by authors who’ve published only one or two books, or books that may have been popular at one time but now seem dated, in either subject matter or style.

What’s been disheartening lately is just how many titles are on my weeding lists. I’m sure part of the reason more books aren’t checking out is that library circulation in general has declined as more and more people read e-books and listen to audiobooks. But there is something else going on. Now, due to social media, trends take hold much faster but also die out more quickly. It seems that if you don’t have books published regularly, even if you were once a bestseller, you may suddenly find your books languishing in the weeding pile.

When I first started doing this, if you had one or two books published in a relatively popular genre, those books would check out for several years. And if you wrote a series, having a book out every year was good enough to keep people reading you. If you caught on well enough to be on our standing order list (books by authors we receive automatically from our vendor without having to order individually), your books were probably safe from weeding for 10 or more years, even if you had significant gaps between new releases.

Now, if you’ve published only one or two books, unless they were a huge success, the odds are I’m going to be weeding your books as soon as we hit that four-year mark. Even if you published 10 or more books in a popular genre, if you don’t keep writing (and keep up with fiction trends), your books will probably be weeded. It used to take 15 or 20 years for a popular genre to go out of fashion (think glitz fiction from the ’80s or chick lit); now it can happen in five years or less.

Even bestselling authors end up in the weeding pile if they dare to write something other than what their readers want from them. Older books in Janet Evanovich’s Between the Numbers series still consistently check out, but none of her single titles and new series have caught on. Based on circulation numbers, most readers apparently want only legal thrillers from John Grisham, vampires from Anne Rice, and Sookie Stackhouse books from Charlene Harris.

Everything is moving faster now, and authors are under pressure to keep up. Even bestselling authors are struggling to perfect and maintain the formula that got them on those lists. I see authors who were once household names on my weeding list more and more frequently.

For some lucky writers, this constant change has been magic. There are more books by new authors on the bestseller lists than I’ve ever seen before. And many writers who can write fast and know how to promote are enjoying the kind of success that was unthinkable in the past.

But if you write slowly, change genres (or write in an unpopular one), or don’t have the time or resources to promote, the book world has never been tougher. And don’t ever think you can rest on your laurels or count on success. The slow build of a career that used to be the norm in publishing isn’t happening nearly as much. So the motto is: write, publish, promote. And do it as fast as you can.

For many of us, this can seem discouraging. But the reality is, success as a fiction author has always been something that only a tiny proportion of writers ever attained. Back in the day, the publishing options for any given book were very limited; you could count them on your fingers. Now the options seem almost limitless, yet being published no longer has much to do with having a writing career.

Even so, writers today actually have more control over their writing futures than before. And despite my whining here, one thing hasn’t changed in publishing: you must have courage and perseverance and believe in yourself and your dream. Organizations like Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers make it a lot easier to do that.