003: Unpacking Writing Advice–Every Strategy Requires Capital

Writing advice is never a one-size-fits-all thing. Context and philosophy is everything, yet there’s a tendency for both the givers and receivers of advice to assume a bon mot of wisdom applies without questioning the resources, genre, goals, and ideology behind it. 

I’ve built a career out of helping writers figure out their craft and their business, and I’ve seen the phenomena over and over:

• Writers who have a long history of writing their novels intuitively–or by the seat of their pants–who believe their fortunes would fare better if they learn how to plot.
• Eager small presses and indie publishers are ready to fork out for expensive advertising courses, regardless of whether they have the resources, business structure, and backlist to make the techniques offered work.
• Writers who naturally approach their work with slow consideration and rewrites, who doggedly push themselves to write at Stephen King speeds (or faster, if you’re an indie).

No sooner do you decide that you’re going to write that someone comes along to make you feel you’re doing things wrong. It doesn’t help that we’re now in the post Gold Rush era of indie publishing, where there is more money to be made selling toolkits and courses than selling books. 

Nor that the publishing industry–whether indie or traditional–is so poorly understood by many people involved that it’s easy to buy into the feeling that you’re doing things wrong. 

That frustration makes it easy for people to sell us solutions, whether it’s as well-meaning advice offered for free or expensive courses full of resources. 

So today I’m going to talk about the three questions I ask before taking onboard any advice or strategies I encounter: 

• What type of resources does this advice favour? 
• What’s the philosophy of the person offering it? 
• What’s their goal in offering this advice in this context? 

Figuring out the answer to one of these questions can be great for separating good advice from the chaff. Knowing the answer to all three can help identify the advice that will transform your writing and publishing, rather than merely become a source of ongoing guilt.

This also means these are big topics, so I’m going to tackle the first of them–understanding the resource base required–then return to tackle the next two in a future newsletter. 

UNDERSTAND THE RESOURCE BASE

Asking yourself what resources are required to implement the advice is always my first port-of-call. It is, without a doubt, the absolute best question a writer can ask. 

I hold with John B. Thompson’s belief there are five broad types of capital we use to get things done in the publishing industry:

• Economic Capital, representing financial resources from cash (and cash-flow) through to existing stock and assets through to the ability to raise cash through loans. For my own purposes, I’d also add time as an economic resource–the ability to invest a couple of hundred bucks knowing it will pay off in a decade makes it possible to make very different decisions than someone who needs to earn that money back fast.
• Human Capital, representing the skills, knowledge, and experience of the staff involved in a venture (which, for many writers, is just them). 
• Social Capital, Thompson’s catch-all for the friendships, contacts, and networks that can be brought to bear in the publishing field, and the ability to generate favours.
• Intellectual Capital, which in publishing terms is essentially the intellectual property one has the rights to publish and exploit. Your stories–and the various ways they can be produced in digital, physical, and performance formats–are intellectual capital, but so is a huge amount of stuff writers generate in workshops, presentations, social media, etc. 
• Symbolic Capital, which represents the prestige, recognition, and respect accorded to people and institutions. This form of capital is intangible, but highly valuable, and it’s something publishers court (and many writers crave almost as much as financial reward).

Everyone in the publishing industry–from writers going trad to dedicated indies to publishers to reviewers and reader groups–starts with certain strengths and weaknesses, and uses the capital they have to build up the other types.

Capital influences everything in writing. At its most basic level, it shows how the advice from one area of the publishing landscape (traditional publishing) can be detrimental to someone operating in another (indie publishing).

A TALE OF TWO WRITERS

The form of capital most writers start with is a combination of time (economic capital) and skill (Human capital) which they transform into a book (intellectual capital). What they do from there is often a series of strategic and tactical choices.

Book sales essentially convert intellectual property into cash–a seemingly straightforward trade. Thing is, few people buy books just because they exist. They need to know the book exists, and be coaxed into parting with their resources (time, money, attention) in order to acquire your work.

Indies and trad put both have strategies they use to convince readers the exchange is worthwhile, but they leverage capital very differently in order to make it happen. 

Let’s break it down. 

EXAMPLE 1: THE TRAD PUB WRITER

A writer who goes with a publisher is basically offering access to their intellectual capital for the publisher’s economic and production resources, as well as the staff’s skills and networks. 

The publisher’s human capital polishes up and improves the manuscript, trading the efforts of designers and editors for an improved piece of intellectual property. 

Traditional publishing is often driven by velocity–selling a lot of books quickly–so they want as many people to buy the book in the first three weeks as possible. So they then invest their financial resources in print runs and their social resources into building up the symbolic capital around a book. 

Advance reader copies go to reviewers and librarians and other stakeholders who can generate buzz and anticipation–both forms of symbolic capital. The publishers’ promotional arm trades economic resources and their own reach to get opportunities and visibility for the book. 

If all goes well, their book receives excellent reviews and sales (symbolic capital), and builds up a fanbase (social capital). When this capital accumulates enough, the writer can negotiate a larger chunk of the publisher’s resources (including the all-important advance) for future works.

If they’re really lucky, the writer attracts other stakeholders–like film makers, or publishers who want translations–who will cut a similar deal in order to access the writer’s intellectual property. 

Similarly, the accumulated audience and prestige can land them paid gigs at universities, writers’ festivals, and other places that both trade on the prestige of the writers they bring in (and bestow a little of their own symbolic value on the writer at the same time).

If things don’t go well enough to justify a second book, let alone a higher advance, the writer has a bunch of different choices.

 They might focus on a different format for a while, writing short stories and articles to build up their audience and their profile. 

They might write a different genre, or use a pen name, to “re-set” the expectations of the industry. 

They might stop writing altogether, deciding that the time, emotional labour, and frustration of trading their skill and intellectual property 

EXAMPLE 2: THE INDIE WRITER

Like the trad-pubbed writer, the typical indie starts from a similar place: they trade time and skill to produce a piece of intellectual property.

They aren’t loaning the right to exploit intellectual property to someone else, though–they want to exploit it themselves. That means they need to build up the skills required to handle most publishing tasks, hire out and trade financial resources to access tools or freelancers capable of doing the job.

What separates the indie and the trad writer is often a matter of scale and focus. Trad publishing likes to put out one book, build up as much attention and hype and prestige around the book as they can before release, then burn through sales quickly.

This often means limiting the number of books they take on for every author per year.

Indies quickly realised that while they may not sell books with the same velocity–they don’t have the same human capital and reach, and frequently have limited access to players who can bestow symbolic capital.

What indies have is a piece of financial capital that traditional publishing isn’t set up to leverage: time. They don’t need to sell books in three or four weeks, and slowly sell more and more backlist titles as the years and new releases accumulate. 

Without access to the reach and networks of traditional publishers, indies make very different choices with their intellectual property. Often, they lean into building stronger social assets rather than building symbolic capital. 

For example, a common indie tactic is offering a free book for people signing up to newsletter lists, trading a piece of intellectual capital for a form of social capital. 

While the sheer existence of people who give you permission to contact them is a potent form of social capital, the newsletter’s real value lies in its ability to build stronger social capital and trust. 

The more emails you write that connect with the reader, the more social capital they represent. Soon that social capital turns into a different, but no less valid, form of symbolic capital as they think of themselves as a fan. 

Build up a large enough list and you can trade that capital for sales with each new book (as well as promoting backlist titles the reader may have missed). Feed those readers into a series, and there is power there as well.

An indie might neve sell as many copies as even a middling traditionally published book, but they get to keep a greater chunk of the economic capital the book sales draw in, so a living can be made with a small-but-loyal audience willing to engage (and keep engaging) with the writer’s work. 

WRITING ADVICE AND CAPITAL EXCHANGES

The examples I’ve given above are a very broad attempt to lay out how indies and traditionally published writers trade their capital. There’s a strong possibility many folks have already thrown up their hands, since it’s not a comfortable way of thinking about art.

But it’s incredibly useful.

Because even though those broad strokes paint a picture, everyone starts their writing journey with differing levels of capital, even if they’re pursuing similar tactics. 

Some folks have an abundance of financial resources, either because they’ve got a lot of time or because they have jobs that allow them to throw cash at the process of acquiring skills, networking, or buying the services of staff/freelancers who can produce at a level they cannot.

Some folks are naturally gifted at certain core skills. They’re natural storytellers, or great presenters, or they have a knack for building systems.

Some writers begin their career with connections or forms of symbolic value that translates into a resource on the fiction side of things. 

For example, I spent the nineties working with poets, where mainstream publishing only produced collections if pop stars like Jewel or Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopez wrote them. They had a big fanbase and prestige from their music careers, and publishers saw a possibility of translating that into sales that a dedicated poet couldn’t mimic.

The hard truth of writing is that the playing field isn’t level. If Taylor Swift ever decides she wants to write a fantasy novel, she’s going to get a much better deal from a publisher (or from self-publishing) than most us ever could.

Even if we leave celebrities out of it, the uneven distribution of economic resources and social privilege are pretty apparent if you look around at the world. Some folks just start with an edge, and get to play the game on easy mode. 

This means that everyone who offers you writing advice is talking about what worked for them, and the accumulated capital they had or have. 

And the biggest mistake most people make when giving advice is assuming (or not caring) that everyone’s resource base is the same.

Example 1: Advertising Courses

Advertising courses that promise they’ll level up your ability to use Facebook ads to sell books, for example, often undersell the additional resources you’ll need on top of the hefty fee. 

Facebook and similar advertising platforms make a pretty clear offer: we will offer you access to the audience built by platform, giving you increased social reach for your marketing message, in exchange for financial capital in the form of cold, hard cash.

Which is where the trouble seeps in, because it’s easy to miss just how much economic resources you need to make advertising work. 

Not only is there the cost of the ads themselves–which will require a period of testing and loss–but also the time spent learning the techniques and implementing them. 

Testing time costs money. Some courses I’ve seen–which already cost thousands of dollars–then suggest setting aside $300 a month for ad testing as a baseline. 

It’s similarly easy to miss that the techniques work better with deep blacklists, where selling or giving away one book can lead to the sales of dozens. This means advertising is a tactic that favours writers with published books in the double digits (aka a deep reserve of intellectual capital).

It similarly misses that any social media advertising is at its best when the platform is new and gathering speed, before enshittification sets in.  

The advice around advertising can be great if you’re coming into publishing with a surfeit of time and discretionary cash you can afford to lose, or if you’re an early adopter, but not-so-great for someone who is cash poor and coming to the platform late.

The same holds true for advice about putting out books at a particular professional standard, going to events to build up your network as a writer, or engaging in pitching programs and professional development courses if you’re focused on traditional publication.

Example 2: Making Time To Write

To take another tack, Stephen King’s simple extortion for writers to produce 2500 words a day seems like great low-level writing advice that’s easy to apply. Yet it’s easy to overlook that King’s mother was hugely supportive of his writing, rather than trying to curtail his efforts, and his wife Tabitha is a writer herself who understood making writing a priority. 

The time to write 2500 words isn’t always a given, and many writers produce far less than that. The constant extortion to “make time to write” or “write every day” often fails to account for different resource bases.

Sometimes, no amount of well-meaning advice can change the resources a new writer can bring to bear. Choosing to write over watching Netflix may be easy, but choosing to write over time with your young kids? A sick relative? Time with your spouse who, reasonably, expects you to pull your weight as a partner? 

Issues of class and culturally ingrained privilege come into play here, and sometimes things are not as easy as the advice makes it seem. If you’re a busy mum of three, for example, getting productivity and writing advice from a straight white man who has never doubted his privilege is probably not the best fit. 

Example 3: Brain Jar Press

I often joke that I started Brain Jar Press with a laptop and three hundred dollars, because I’m the very definition of someone who started publishing with very little economic capital (well, very little cash-based capital; I had a lot of time).

What that overlooks is the capital I’d built up over twenty years of working in writing and publishing spaces.

I had a lot of skills that I’d built up in those two decades, including a very strong understanding of digital publishing and indie tactics. I first worked for an ebook publisher in 2002, and first self-published my own ebook in 2004, years before the kindle existed.

I also spent seven years working for the local writers centre here in Queensland, helping people understand the transition to digital publishing. I had a lot of skills already, and invested what cash I had in learning more. 

I also started with a huge amount of social capital, courtesy of my fiction writing and the years I spent running conventions and the GenreCon writing conference. 

My network included several authors with a significant amount of Symbolic capital, from New York Times Bestsellers to Hugo and World Fantasy Award winners, all of whom knew me well enough to trust me when I said, “let me publish your book and pay you royalties instead of an advance. I promise it’ll be worth it.”

This meant that when Brain Jar started publishing other people, we rolled out a series of books by people with a considerable amount of prestige, attracting more attention than we would have if we published first-time novelists. This led to reviews and award nominations, which led to more attention. 

Replicating what I did with Brain Jar isn’t impossible, but I had a lot of advantages that helped mitigate the lack of up-front cash, even before I factor in running the press as a backlist-focused entity.

I strategically traded the capital I had to build up in other areas into the symbolic capital and economic capital that carries us to this day. 

MATCH THE ADVICE AND STRATEGY YOU TAKE ON BOARD TO THE CAPITAL YOU’VE GOT

To reiterate the start of this newsletter: Writing advice is never a one-size-fits-all thing. Context and philosophy is everything,

Your starting resources and capital heavily inform what you can bring to bear on the problem of writing and selling books, whether that’s via indie or traditional publishing. 

The trouble is, we’re not used to thinking about resources as writers. It’s too much like treating your writing a business, and we are to treat what we do as art and leave the icky realities of business to other people. 

Some folks cleave to that, because it makes their art worthwhile even without economic success.

Me? I think it’s bullshit.

Which is where the second question I ask about any writing advice comes up: what’s the philosophy of the person offering advice? 

I’ll come back to that next week to explore that question in more depth, but if you’re interested in finding out what your strengths and weaknesses are around writing and publishing capital, download my Understanding Your Capital PDF. 

It translates the ideas I’ve discussed here into a series of questions and exercises for pinpointing where you’re at, and mimics a process I frequently use when running workshops or mentoring folks through the publishing process. 

Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:

1. Books I’ve Written: I’ve got a few books on writing and the writing business, including the collection of some of my best writing advice: You Don’t Want To Be Published and Other Things Nobody Tells You When You First Start Writing.
2. Books I Publish: When I’m not working on my GenrePunk Ninja Projects I’m the editor and publisher behind Brain Jar Press. We’ve published several books and chapbooks about writing, drawing on advice and presentations given by some of the best speculative fiction writers in Australia and beyond.
3. One On One Mentoring: I offer a limited amount of one-on-one mentoring and coaching for writers and publishers, built off two decades of teaching writing and publishing for universities, writers festivals, and non-profit organisations.