Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re timely to other conversations occurring online. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 2 in 2023.

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Here Be Dragons: Vanity presses, scams, and publishing in the digital era

THE WORST JOB

Back in the early 2000s, when I was fresh out of an arts degree and struggling to pay rent, I scored a job with a newly launched small press who believed eBooks were the next big thing. 

This sounds commonplace herein 2023, but I’m older than dirt and we’re talking about an era when smartphones didn’t exist. The owners had stumbled onto this belief years before Amazon launched the Kindle and we all carried high powered mini computers in our pockets. In those heady days,  eBooks were consumed on dedicated, high-end Sony devices with a sizeable price tag and very little market penetration. In fact, the market suffered from a real chicken-and-the-egg dilemma—not enough people bought e-readers to drive the price of the devices down, while the lack of devices capable of reading eBooks meant they were expensive to produce and garnered few rewards. 

No sane person doubled down on eBooks in that era. They were, at best, an entertaining gimmick. But these folks looked at the technology and saw a cash-cow, especially if they got in on the ground floor.

Looking back, it should have been one of the most exciting and transformative gigs I’ve ever worked. Alas, the owners were also two of the worst people I’ve ever met.  Two days a week I’d show up at their offices where the radio was tuned to the local we-are-religious-and-hate-all-you-fuckers station, then work to a half-hearted brief that left me wondering what, exactly, the owners hoped to achieve. 

The publishing team—myself and one other graduate tasked building a press and starting a popular blog—were spectacularly ill-equipped to do either task, lacking the experience, contacts, and technical know-how to deliver what we were asked to do. Of course, our employers were also similarly ill-equipped and had no concept of what to do beyond paying us for our efforts.  In a sad precursor to many jobs I’ve worked since then, the attitude seemed to be “the internet is there and free to use—please do so to make us money.”

The two of us shared office space with our employer’s other business, a mortgage brokerage who seemed to broker mortgages for an invisible pool of clients, none of whom we ever saw or heard anything about. The overall vibe was creepy as hell, and ultimately not that great—we were expected to deliver weekly reviews on the blog, but also had to pay for all the books, films, and products out of pocket.

All in all, the job got old real fast and the weird, terrible energy wore down any enthusiasm I had for the exciting ebook-driven future. It’s only looking back, with the benefit of several decades experience, I can see the strong foundations of what they were trying to do and the language to describe their business strategy. 

The pitch should have been “we’re creating a content-driven marketing outlet using new technology in an effort to capture decent market-share in an about-to-boom industry. A perfectly valid tactic if you can finance the years of building up content and an audience in order to position yourself for success. Were the owners nicer people—or better at articulating their vision—it might have worked despite the perilously awful timing and incomplete approach to funding. Their site launched two years ahead of the blogging boom, and a full eight years ahead of the ebook boom, which meant resources, software, and knowledge of what we were doing were all make-it-up-as-you-go-along. 

Alas, they weren’t the kind of folks who inspired such loyalty or experimentation. As you might surmise from their radio choices, the owners were essentially right-wing fundamentalists who embraced the Field of Dreams theory of creative business development: they’d built it, and writers and readers would come. No additional effort required. I got the feeling they believed in the prosperity doctrine: initiate a project and god would provide, just as they believed he’d come down to smite the gays, the blacks, and the poor who dared to exist in his shining kingdom.

I’ve never loathed any employer quite as much as I loathed these guys, but they paid and it was a publishing job in a city were such things were non-existent, so I did our best to deliver despite my reservations. Blog posts were written—mostly reviews and odd humour pieces—and we reached out writers who might be interested in going digital with their books. Very few of them bit, but that wasn’t unexpected: the company offered a pretty shitty deal and limited distribution.

It was a bad job, but it wasn’t yet the worst I’ve ever worked. 

That came when they decided to pivot, and embrace a new business model: relaunching their publishing house as a digital-first vanity press. 

STRANGE MUTATIONS

Professional writers and publishers take a dim view of vanity presses, which are often derided as scams run by inveterate swindlers who prey upon the dreams of folks who want to become authors. I don’t disagree with this stance—the bulk of this essay offers a similar argument—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t pause to note that the vanity press model is not inherently unethical. 

The history of publishing is endlessly interesting, full of norms and industry conventions that developed in response to the state of the market. Go back far enough, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and the business model of vanity presses was actually the norm. Writers paid for the production of their book, and received a greater percentage of the profits and greater control of their work.

Even now, an author approaching a vanity press with a clear vision of what they’d like to achieve, what they can afford to spend, and how they’ll make a return on their investment is capable of having a great experience. It’s rare, because vanity presses don’t typically target folks who have their shit together on that level, but essentially the line between vanity press scam and publishing services provider is often one of promises made, fees levied, and information provided to the customer. 

The term vanity press started entering the vernacular in the 1940s, when a publisher named C. M. Flumiani was at the heart of the largest publishing-oriented fraud case in US history at the time. Eventually jailed for scamming writer out of $500,000 with his vanity set-up¹, which promised promotion, expert editing, and agenting services. In reality, promotion meant including the book as a line entry in Flumiani’s catalogue, accepting all books sent their way, and doing very little else. 

Flumiani was hardly the only vanity press to be targeted in the period—two others were quickly swept up in legal challenges of their own—but he was the highest profile and a pivot-point in the perception of such publishers. For decades after, vanity presses and those who used them were a source of scorn in the publishing landscape, and while the tools vanity presses employ have shifted, the strategies were remarkably consistent all the way through to mid-2000s.

Then, in 2007, the Ebook boom began. Jeff Bezos launched a dedicated reader as a loss leader for the world’s biggest online retail store², and in doing so opened up access to the platform to individual authors. For years after, the industry struggled with the question of whether eBook publishing constituted vanity publishing or the re-emergence of an old business mode as a feasible approach. Increasingly, the latter has won out—once again, authors  invested in and controlled every aspect of their work, and took home a larger share of the profit. The self-publishing boom has evolved rapidly in the last fifteen years, with a huge swathe of writers refining the model and developing tactics that capitalized on it. 

Many of the folks who turned to digital publishing with the rise of ebooks, putting out their own novels and marketing them to readers directly, sidestepped the issues of vanity publishing. They didn’t pay exorbitant fees to produce their books, and they knew exactly how their books would be distributed and marketed to readers. 

In many ways, the self-publishing boom was a blessing for those of us who routinely found ourselves commiserating with folks scammed by vanity presses. Rather than spending thousands of dollars to publish a print book that would never earn back the expense, aspiring writers eager to get their book out no matter what could produce an ebook on their computer with a double-digit budget and word processor file. Said books might only sell a dozen copies at best, but this is true of many vanity press releases, and digital releases were economic and could be done for a handful of pocket change rather than a bill for thousands. 

THE ETHICAL QUANDARY

I’d like to say my employer’s transition from struggling digital press to full-fledged vanity outfit was gradual, the powers that be taking small steps towards the model without my colleague and I noticing.  Alas it happened very fast, and was difficult to miss: when my co-worker and I failed to generate a stream of prospective titles from our pool of writing contacts, the owners moved onto the next phase of their plan and rolled out the vanity press playbook.

It started with a series of competitions for fiction and non-fiction, earning a profit off the exorbitant entry fees that didn’t match the paltry prize money or the promise to publish the winners. It was clearly a bad deal for anyone with a modicum of sense, and I was saved from my first ethical dilemma when there weren’t enough entries and the two folks who submitted were refunded. 

When those competitions failed, the owners pointed us towards a company whose business model they wanted to emulate, and it was clear they were going to offer publication-for-a-fee to anyone who submitted. By this point, I wanted to leave. Problem was, I also wanted to pay rent, and the job market was tight for someone with my particular set of skills. Which is how I spent a few weeks working under the vanity model as I plotted my escape. 

Working for a vanity press or publishing scam, even briefly, is a hell of a learning experience. I’m often surprised by the folks who have done so, and even go on to write about their experiences publicly.³ It would be right up there with reading slush as a learning experience, were it not for the ethical quagmire you navigate—I remember sitting in their office the day the presses vanity ambitions clicked into place,  plotting out how  myself fired for gross incompetence.

My co-worker had already fled, but I had to be fired from the gig. Quitting, while tempting, would mean a six week wait until I could claim unemployment. If they let me go, I could start my unemployment application the next day and not starve while looking for another gig. I started submitting copy late for blogging assignments, and screwing up mail-outs between regularly calling in sick. It took a few weeks for everyone concerned to decide I was done, and even then, they didn’t fire me so much as throw out a bunch of buzzwords about pivoting the focus of the press and cancelling my contract because we were mostly “content development” rather than editorial

At my last staff meeting—attended so I could collect my final paycheck—they were all excited about signing their first author. This guy had written, near as I could tell, a pro-Nazi thriller with autobiographical elements. The book came with a clear marketing hook, too—the author’s father was a member of the SS, and he leaned on family stories to create his narrative. 

While there are many times I’ve cursed the demands of late-stage capitalism, slowly manoeuvring us all into jobs where we put up with a damn lot in the name of not being broken against the cruel rocks of poverty, there have been few times where I’ve hated the necessity of earning money quite as much as that damn meeting. 

And while it’s hard to feel even a pang of sympathy for someone who’s pro-Nazi, especially in 2001 when they were relatively siloed rather than a highly visible presence in our online lives, I still listened to my mortgage broker ex-boss wax philosophical about how big this book would be once the author’s check cleared and almost felt a pang of empathy for the poor bastard handing over the money.

It was the most slavish, dogged commitment to capitalism over ethics I’d seen, but the level of delusion on both sides was honestly a little sad.

THE BEST JOB I’VE EVER WORKED

If there’s a bright side to working for ethically bankrupt scammers with publishing aspiration, it’s probably this: you become very attuned to the shitty ways people with bad intentions can manipulate their targets. You develop a keen eye for the opportunities that aren’t really opportunities at all, but a way of making a buck out of folks with the desire to publish their writing.

Six years after I worked for the aspiring vanity press, I found my way to a job as the manager of the Australian Writers Marketplace, one of those yearly books full of writing opportunities that soon went the way of the dodo when the internet did the job better. A big part of my job was vetting writing opportunities for possible inclusion in the book and online database, making sure they weren’t lures designed to pull writers towards vanity outfits.

Working in that space as digital publishing boomed proved interesting, because ebooks and the internet introduced endless gray areas we had to navigate. I’d often be faced with answering a key question—is this a scam, or a misguided attempt at disrupting the industry? Plenty of folks approached writers with honest intentions, but set up business models that ‘disrupted’ without understanding what they were disrupting, and how writers could benefit from using the exciting new publishing pathway they’d invented. 

Over time, I paid attention to the buzzwords in the marketing copy. Every time the words “bold” or “experiment” were deployed, it usually signalled a misguided tech provocateur attempting to replicate what Jeff Bezos had already done. Meanwhile, vanity presses leaned into the “bold new approach” and promises that ebook were just as legitimate as print (even as they pushed for print packages producing several thousand physical copies). 

Competitions were also a rich seam of scams to be cross-checked. The easiest to spot were the competitions run to make money, easily identified by their exorbitant entry fees and meagre prize money. The ones to watch for were the loss leaders: competitions sponsored by  vanity press outfits or high-end publishing service companies. 

These competitions often appeared legitimate on the surface, with decent prize money and a reasonable entry fee, because the competition wasn’t really about who won and who lost. Instead, it was about collecting the details of a couple of hundred potential customers, all of whom could now be targeted for fee-based services down the line. The hit rate on those efforts may very, very low, but with the mark-up vanity presses put on their services, they only needed a handful of people from the hundreds they contacted in order to make the effort pay off. There are few businesses who won’t spend a couple of hundred bucks now in order to make five thousand dollars down the line. 

Publishing companies and agents were trickier to police, as the line between “outright malicious” and “well intentioned, but probably not useful” was blurry. I spent my days searching for agents and small presses who violated the ethical guidelines of major industry organisations by sending rejection letters recommending authors try a particular freelance editor for their next submission, or offering of publication if writers would just cover the cost of producing the book.⁴

Even here, time made it clear there were certain phrases to look for. Just ‘bold; and ‘experiment’ typically signalled a poorly thought-through attempt at disrupting the industry, the folks trying a back-end publishing scam would appeal to the dream of getting published in their writers’ guidelines. “Everyone else has rejected you,” they’d whisper in their subtext, “but we’ll work with you to make your publishing dreams come true.” 

STRANGE NEW WORLD

Here in 2023, where digital publishing is on the rise and thousands of authors make a legitimate career publishing books on their own, the line between ‘folks who offer services to indie publishers’ and ‘a fully-fledged vanity press’ still seem blurry to the untrained eye. The main difference between the two is price, and the tenor of the marketing copy—self publishing services sell their skills, and vanity presses sell a dream. 

The notion of getting published is seductive to new writers, especially when they mistake getting published for the goal they really want to achieve with their writing.⁵ I’ve written about this siren song before, and will no doubt to it again, but the truth is publishing is a hunting ground full of easy targets if you’ve got a less-than-ethical bent. The lack of real understanding about how the industry works—even among some of the folks working within it—combines with the grand ambitions of aspiring writers with big dreams and no sense of how realistic their dreams and business model may be.

It used to be easier. For years, writers cautioned beginners to embrace some variation of Yog’s Law, which states “Money should flow towards the writer.” I cleaved to it myself for many years, in the days before digital publishing and widespread access to distribution, because it made perfect sense in the traditional publishing model. And yet, here in 2023, offering it up feels a bit like an elegant weapon of a more civilized age, one where the traditional publishing model was the only effective publishing model. 

In this world, all writers worked to much the same approach: write good work, and sell the rights to a publisher, who leveraged their monetary capital and highly-trained staff to distribute and promote the book widely and quickly sell as many copies as possible. It’s one of the reasons vanity presses were such a money pit—writers would pay for the production of the book, utterly missing that the most valuable things traditional presses invested their capital in was marketing and distribution. 

Then the Jeff Bezos ebook gamble paid off, kicking off the ebook boom, and soon we all carried mobile devices with more computing power than the designers of early e-readers could dream of. Readers now carry whole libraries in their pocket, and writers have easy access to global delivery systems that can get your book into the hands of folks on the far side of the globe with the touch of a button.

Self-publishing boomed with ebooks because the thing that always limited authors who self-published—a lack of access to distribution and the cultural capital to get their work onto physical books shelves—evaporated overnight. News articles about self-publishing billionaires and unlikely success stories soon followed, endless stories about authors whose books had been rejected time and again by traditional publishers only to be embraced by readers once they self-published. For the first time in decades, writers were offered an alternate business model to the velocity-driven pace of traditional publishing, and success was feasible using both approaches. 

And Yogs law went out the window. 

My years with the Australian Writers Marketplace coincided with the big self-publishing boom, and I’d come into that gig with a few years of self-publishing under my belt. My biggest frustration in that period was coaxing new writers to the realisation that there were two business models at work, even though both were focused on selling books. In much the same way that that opening a fast-foot franchise, launching your own café, starting a five-star restaurant, and opening a food truck all demand a different approach to your business, choosing between self-publishing or going through a traditional publishing route represented very different ways of making money from your work. Applying the tactics of one wouldn’t necessarily serve you well when doing the other.

Yog’s law lost viability because self-published authors did spend money, especially as ebooks matured and the market became crowded. They invested their cash in editorial, formatting, and cover design. They spent money on ads to get their book in front of people, and on tools that made their lives easier. As the ebook market grew larger and more players were active within it, the cost of publishing a book has dropped while the cost of positioning your book and finding readers have grown. 

More importantly, figuring out how to successfully self-publish has grown more complex. For example, Amazon—once known for the accuracy of its book recommendation algorithm—has increasingly asked authors to pay for advertising on the Amazon store in order to get their books noticed by readers. This is coupled with a strong push for authors to embrace their dedicated subscription program (and its exclusivity clauses which means Amazon’s the only place the author can sell their ebook). 

Many writers are content to do exactly that, and their strategies adapt to what makes a book successful in that context. Emergent strategies such as the “99 cent launch” or making heavy use of Amazon’s advertising system play to the conventions of the Kindle Unlimited page reads, hoping that low-priced sales to the author’s existing readers will spike the book up Amazon’s best-seller lists and therefore get the book noticed by Kindle Unlimited readers so income can be made on the page reads.

Those same strategy, deployed by a writer outside that Kindle Unlimited program, is unlikely to have the same effect. Rather, highly successful self-publishers outside of KU work other tactics, from making connection with merchandisers at various stores, selling bundles, relying on long-tail sales at full price, and more. 

This complexity, alongside the early rhetoric of self-published authors making bank with a low investment of time and money, creates a new breeding ground for publishing scams. As business tactics bifurcate based on each author’s chosen strategy, a new wave of shady players have found their way into the industry. 

Many vanity presses—realising that folks now misunderstand what’s required to be a successful self-publisher is almost as poorly understood as the old traditional publishing model—simply rebranded themselves as self-publishing services. “We’ll help you self-publish,” they promise, then  charged far more than many experience self-publishers would ever pay for far worse editorial and design. 

Meanwhile, in another part of the field, teaching people how to promote their self-published books has become the new cash cow. Course after course promises to teach business models and techniques in which success is guaranteed. Writers can learn Amazon ads, Facebook ads, TikTok, newsletter strategies, direct sales strategies, and more, all promised as the magic bullet that will turn your book into a success.  

While there’s also plenty of well-regarded and respectable courses who do this as well, even the best of them fail to acknowledge they’re working to a specific business model and the efficacy of their methods fades the further you deviate from it. 

These days, one of the tricks to spotting publishing scams and bad actors in the training space is asking yourself what’s the business model here? If you can’t understand how everybody involved in the production and supply chain of the book makes money, the there’s probably something hinky going on and its worth digging a little deeper. The dangers of a vanity press are easy to spot within this context: a traditional publisher invests their money in an authors book, so they’re incentivised to make that money back as quickly as possible. A vanity publisher, already paid by the author, lacks that same incentive because the money’s already in their pocket.⁶ 

The flaw, of course, is that the folks who most need to ask questions about the business models in play are those least likely to do so. As Alexa T. Dodd notes in her essay about starting her career with a vanity outfit: 

“In truth, as a teenager, I didn’t want to do the research that would tell me the real reason I was published had very little to do with my own talent and very much to do with my family’s ability to agree to a price tag. And perhaps this is the source of the shame: that for so long I imagined myself to be what my high school teachers, my parents, and my friends believed me to be—a writer better than average, a prodigy, even—when, in reality, I was nothing more than a girl whose parents could pay for a publishing contract, only to discover that the paying couldn’t fulfill a dream.”

What Five Years with a Predatory Vanity Press Taught Me About Art and Success

Like Dodd, the greatest benefit of my time watching a small press evolve into a vanity outfit is the knowledge I took away: the publishing world is full of dangers, and folks willing to take advantage of your naivety. While we position books as art and a greater good, a cultural gift writers bestow upon the world, what actually gets a book published under the traditional model is the potential to turn a profit. Despite the cultural myths about creative careers as a calling or dream, what we all do—whether writer, publisher, or bookseller—is best treated like a business. 

When it works right, everybody in the publishing makes solid money from a writer’s work, but if you can’t understand how that happens then you’re out of your depth.  

THE NEW AGE OUTLAWS

The nice thing about digital publishing is the number of vanity presses that couldn’t pivot fast enough to make the transition. Several of the major players here in Australia went by the wayside, including my former employers. The other nice thing is the rise of legitimate small presses with niche audiences and speciality lists, taking advantage of the same distribution and tools self-publishers use to find a global audience.

And yet, the terrible thing about digital publishing is the astonishing number of folks with very little understanding of the industry who set up a press, then reinvent old publishing scams organically. These folks are rarely are they engaging in outright fraud and shenanigans, but nonetheless there are all manner of familiar strategies that exist in an ethical grey zone.

Setting aside the obvious scams of vanity presses rebranding themselves as “assisted self-publishing” services or “hybrid” publishers, engaging in the age-old grift of promising much and delivering little, new technologies and tools have seen a a stream of what-the-fuck-are-you-doing “opportunities” find their way into my inbox and social media feed.

For example, I recently saw a small press launch a Kickstarter to fund their 2022 publishing schedule. Readers are encouraged to kick in a few bucks, but the core backing rewards started with the right to submit to the press. The editors in question are calling it a bold experiment in finding new funding models, but the only thing that separates this from most publishing scams is the use of Kickstarter to disguise the fee-for-submission clause.

Similarly, I keep seeing the echoes of an old poetry anthology scam. You can read a more detailed account of this particular scam at the SWFA supported Writer Beware site⁷ but the short version runs like this:

1. Promote a competition or anthology to poets, who tend to produce small works where you can pack dozens of contributors into the same volume.
2. Accept pretty much everyone who submits, or name dozens upon dozens of runners-up, offering publication with no (or nominal) payment for their work. 
3. Market the resulting anthology to contributors, rather than readers, on the assumption that they’ll be so proud of their  publication the author will urge friends and family to buy multiple copies.

These used to be a problem specific to poetry because it was the form best suited to it—you can fit hundreds of poems in an anthology, while the same page count could sustain around  fifteen short stories or one novel. A sufficient quantity of published authors were required to make the scam work. 

This old poetry boondoggle has found it’s found its echo in the fiction side of the industry with the popularity of flash fiction as an internet-based form.⁸ While there are definitely legitimate ways of doing a flash fiction anthology as a commercial product, the presses who do several anthologies a year always make me nervous, particularly when the contributors are early career and debuting writers. 

Like poetry, flash lends itself to doing books with a huge number of contributors. The sheer fact that you can fit 50 to 100 flash fictions into an anthology length book makes it rife for abuse—that’s a lot of aspiring authors, and their families/friends, who represent a very easy market to tap. Meanwhile, coaxing a new reader into picking up a flash fiction anthology is considerably harder than coaxing them into picking up a novel, or even an anthology of longer works. In many cases, the readership for flash anthologies remains the writers themselves. 

While the authors for these flash collections may get a dopamine rush from seeing their name in print, they aren’t getting paid for their work or finding new readers. It’s not pushing anyone’s career forward or building them towards bigger things. These anthologies, essentially, reinvent one of the shadiest practices of poetry publishing and give it new life.

Other presses turn into content mills, relying on constant turn-over to make a little money from a whole lot of titles. It doesn’t take much effort to produce a book these days⁹, nor do you need a lot of upfront cash if authors are willing to work for a share of ebook royalties instead of getting an advance. 

With those parameters in mind, it’s easy to treat publishing as a kind of slot machine, accepting hundreds of books and putting them into the world with very little editing or marketing support. Most will struggle to break even, although once again new authors hyping books to friends and family will likely cover costs. Content mills can amble along breaking even on most works, earning a profit on the the handful that take off.

Admittedly, publishing is always a gamble. The content mill model isn’t too far from what the publishing industry has traditionally done for centuries—what separates a low budget mill from a high-end publisher is traditionally the amount of capital invested in each new release and the expected return on that investment. A publisher who needs to recoup a couple of grand for each book they release is a very different beast from someone who breaks even at fifty bucks, as they’ll need to get a lot more books into a lot more hands.

The thing about each of these approaches is this: they’re easy to come to organically, if you don’t know the history. If you do one flash fiction and it makes a profit, why wouldn’t you do more? If putting out one book earns you $100 per month, why wouldn’t you put out ten times that number and make a living wage? Why not a hundred lesser works, which may sell a fraction of the copies, but make up for the difference in bulk?

Capitalism makes it easy to justify that choice on the publishing end, but it means writers now have to ask themselves, is this opportunity worth my time?

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE HUNGER

If there’s two things that unites every publishing scam, ill-conceived disruption in the publishing landscape, and ethically murky publishing opportunity, it’s that they all prey on the uniformed author’s desire to ‘get published’ above all else, and they’re primarily effective because the cultural myths around writing encourage folks to believe some pretty erroneous things about how writing and publishing works.

The tactics for luring people in continue to evolve. Vanity presses now promise aspiring authors credibility and reach rather than access, and highlight the ease of using their services. They often highlight the difficulty of accessing other publishers, and prey upon the feeling that your work is unnoticed and the mythology of ‘being discovered’ and launching out of nowhere to become a best seller. Promises are made about working with the author to make the manuscript everything it could be, giving it the best chance of success.

Often, they will make mention of outside industry organisations to establish credibility. “We’re members of the institute of editors,” they’ll claim. “We’re part of the small press network.”

Other presses will focus on vanity metrics to help their authors look good. Many literary awards, for example, can be entered for a nominal entry fee and filing out a form, after which the book is considered “on the long list” or “nominated”. Folks who understand the industry know the short list is the important part, but a vanity press can treat the ‘nomination’ as news and sooth the egos of authors worried they might have been scammed. 

The main job of a vanity press is to look good and whisper, like Gríma Wormtongue, sweet promises into the author’s ear about how successful they’ll be. Few legitimate presses talk about doing editorial work in their guidelines because editorial guidance is an industry standard—it happens to every book. Fewer still will make a big deal about an award nomination that involves filing out a form and handing over their credit card, because they know prestige doesn’t lie in the nomination.

ON BAD ACTORS AND BULLSHIT SPOTTING

Here’s the worst thing about most of the vanity presses and small presses engaged in dubious, grey-area tactics: very few of them set out to run scams or see themselves as moustache-twirling villains taking advantage of writers. Even my former boss at the vanity press legitimately believed he’d tapped into the future of publishing and found a way to bootstrap a publishing company into existence with long-term benefits for writers excluded from the larger publishers.¹⁰ Small presses who find themselves transformed into content mills, or publishing flash fiction anthologies, are often run by folks with good intentions, big dreams, and a need to keep the lights on.

Every new publisher and magazine launching in the modern era has to reckon with a singular cold reality: producing books is quick and easy with digital publishing, but selling them is hard. It’s easier to do harm by accident than ever before, and you’re asking writers to trust your ability to do right by their work.

In writing, you learn that every good antagonist is the hero of their own story, and so many of the bad actors I’ve come across seem to start with good intentions. Many truly believe their business is necessary and good, allowing people who don’t otherwise have access to the publishing industry to produce books.

There is some truth to that. The issue with vanity presses isn’t one of the services they offer, but the framing of their marketing, the prices they charge, and the willingness to take advantage of someone else’s lack of knowledge. 

WELCOME TO THE AGE OF VIGILANCE

So how do you avoid getting scammed as a writer? These days, it requires vigilance. Yog’s law is still a useful principle if you’re going through legacy publishers, but self publishing requires a new adage. Some writers do spend money these days—often quite a bit—but there’s a difference between those who do so from a place of research and knowledge and those who throw money at anyone who promises them success. 

Truthfully, digital publishing tools make judging scam strategies far messier. As the cost of entry for publishing drops, some folks find themselves with potentially dodgy business models through lack of industry knowledge, or just iterating out, rather than any real intent to screw the authors who publish with them. In the 21st Century, the challenge isn’t just avoiding the obvious scams, it’s learning to recognise the folks whose business models aren’t a good fit for your long-term goals.

There’s a level of vigilance that’s required for author and publisher alike these days. As someone entrusted with other authors work, I’m forever wary of the possibility that Brain Jar Press could easily fall prey to implementing author mill model: producing lots of titles, with minimal editorial and low-budget design, to turn a profit on the breadth of what’s published. Many of those things are true of the Brain Jar business model—I do want breadth, and a slow trickle of long-term sales—but I wanted to couple it with editorial, design, and a marketing plan that justifies the faith authors put in us to get their work out there.

I’m mindful of this because it’s all too easy to create opportunities that mimic the scams of yesteryear without meaning too, and even easier to actively rip people off with meaning too if you’re not conscious of taking an ethical approach. 

More and more, the impetus falls on authors to know how the industry works, but also how the industry is bifurcating into many different parts. Understanding half the industry is no longer enough: a thorough understanding of self-publishing strategies doesn’t insulate you against bad actors in the traditional publishing space, while traditional authors looking to go indie have fallen prey to the overpriced marketing scheme and occasional vanity press masquerading as a self-publishing service or hybrid publishing house.

I hate to say it, but there are no easy answers anymore. No good rule of thumbs that will protect you in all situations, or excuse you from going through the process of learning about your industry and business mode from a diverse range of sources. 

Working with reasonably priced publishing services are the heart and soul of many self-published writers careers,  but how much is too much to spend? The trouble doesn’t arise when an educated author seeks to employ such services, taking the trouble to budget the costs and work out returns, but when aspiring authors looking to abdicate all responsibility for their business and buy their way to success.

Some of them still find their way to the major vanity presses, reasonably assuming that it costs thousands of dollars to put a book to print.

There’s no way to skip doing the work in publishing anymore, and nobody will care about your book or your business more than you.

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REFERENCES

• Block, Lawrence. A Writer Prepares. A Lawrence Block Production, 2021.
• Dodd, Alex T. “What Five Years with a Predatory Vanity Press Taught Me About Art and Success.” Literary Hub, August 2022. https://lithub.com/what-five-years-with-a-predatory-vanity-press-taught-me-about-art-and-success/
• Mamatas, Nick. “The Term Paper Artist: The lucrative industry behind higher ed’s failings.” The Smart Set, October 2010. https://www.thesmartset.com/article10100801/
• Laquintano, Timothy. “The Legacy of the Vanity Press and Digital Transitions.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Volume 16, Issue 1, Summer 2013. https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0016.104
• Tice, Carol. “Content Mills–Why Aspiring Writers Should Avoid Them.” Writer Beware, Science Fiction Writers of America blog, March 2010. https://www.sfwa.org/2010/03/12/guest-blog-post-content-mills-why-aspiring-writers-should-avoid-them/
• “Vanity Anthologies” Writer Beware, Science Fiction Writers of America. https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware/anthologies/

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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.

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FOOTNOTES

1. There’s a fascinating paper on the history of vanity publishing here: https://doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0016.104 ↩︎
2. Astute readers may note I’m carefully avoiding certain brand names in this essay (here’s a hint—it’s a site named after the world’s largest river and their branded e-reader). This is a legacy of the current marketplace, where many distributors are wary of books that mention their competitors, even when discussing their shortfalls.  ↩︎
3. I can recommend Lawrence Block’s autobiography, A Writer Prepares, detailing his time working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency in New York during the pulp era. Also recommended is The Term Paper Artist essay by writer and editor Nick Mamatas, exploring the ethics and practicalities of writing term papers via a content mill during the early stages of his writing hustle.  ↩︎
4. At the time, industry organisations held strict ethical guidelines suggesting agents should not provide paid services or recommend folks on. Agents, by the nature of their job, were paid by selling the writers work to publishers.
   Interestingly, in recent years, many industry organizations have relaxed those guidelines—agents campaigned for the ability to offer these services because changes in the publishing industry made agenting alone untenable for many smaller players.
   I’m still not convinced this was the right call, and research the hell out of any agent offering paid services before signing with them.  ↩︎
5. See my essay You Don’t Want To Get Published. ↩︎
6. Many vanity presses go one step further here. Having extracted money from the author for the production of the book, they will point to the lack of sales and suggest it’s time to pay for advertising to get the book selling.  ↩︎
7. Look for the details about vanity anthologies here: https://www.sfwa.org/other-resources/for-authors/writer-beware/anthologies/#Contests ↩︎
8. This is not a slight against the form—I love flash fiction. I’ve published several chapbooks worth of vignettes and flash fiction through Brain Jar Press at time of writing, and we’ve contracted many more. But these are single-author collections, marketed towards a reader base instead of the other contributors, and I purposely avoid anthology projects until I can pay all the writers involved an equitable rate for their work. ↩︎
9. My record is taking a book from finished draft to publication in the space of 24 hours, using a budget of $30. ↩︎
10. Admittedly, he’s not alone in this. A few years after I left the vanity press, I worked a short contract for a promotional printing company who firmly believed “the internet is the future.” They spent my entire tenure refusing to do anything that would improve their SEO, set up e-commerce facilities, or make other improvements requiring money or time to implement. But they firmly believed that if we could just make the mysterious internet work for us their business would be transformed, and they would like me to get on with this please… ↩︎

Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter. This essay originally appeared in Eclectic Projects issue 1.

Estimated Reading Time: 22 Minutes | Don’t like reading online? Get an ebook copy here.

On Heinlein’s Habits & The Rise of the New Pulp Era

SECRET ORIGINS

I first learned Heinlein’s Rules for Writing while at Clarion South in the Australian summer of 2007, holed up in the Griffith University campus with seventeen other speculative fiction hopefuls for six weeks spent critiquing and learning our craft under the watchful eye of established SF professionals.

At the time I’d written semi-professionally for over a decade, publishing poetry and RPG materials while making slow to negligent progress on my creative writing PhD. Years spent immersed in university creative writing programs taught me to string words together in a pretty row, but time spent in a post-graduate writing degree focuses on building a career as a researcher rather than a writer. Ergo, I went into Clarion confident I knew how to produce a story, but eager to learn how to be a writer, with the goal of soaking up all the business advice I could get.

Our crash-course in Heinlein’s rules came via the Western Australia writer Lee Battersby in the second week, and they remain the single most important lesson I learned in my Clarion tenure. Applying them—along with a market list with editors open to submissions—changed my career trajectory and netted overseas publications in an era when such things felt new and strange for an Australian author.

The application of Heinlein’s rules earned me more money and kudos in the next eighteen months than a decade of writing had earned me prior.

To make my subtext plain: the adoption of Heinlein’s rules proved significant for me and transformed my relationship with writing. I doubt I’d still do what I do without them.

And yet I come to bury Heinlein Rules, not to praise them.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Like many contemporary writers, I learned Heinlein’s rules from a mentor or friend rather than the primary source. Even though Heinlein’s himself declined to call them ‘rules’—he preferred the ‘business habits’—countless adherents use rules to describe them in workshops, blog posts, and books. Indeed, high-profile authors (including Dean Wesley Smith and Robert J. Sawyer) and excitable new writers alike advocate for ‘the rules’ with vociferous enthusiasm, and you’re almost certainly familiar with some variation.

For those who’ve never encountered Heinlein’s advice before, I lay all five out in brief below. In short, Heinlein believed a writer must do these five things in order to forge a career as a fiction writer:

1. You must write.
2. You must finish what you start.
3. You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.
4. You must put it on the market.
5. You must keep it on the market until sold.

Modern adherent will often add a sixth rule to the end—you must start the next thing—but the gist remains intact. It’s easy to see why these habits are so popular—they’re simple and logical, custom-built for repetition and easy recitation from memory. Over time, they’ve taken on a mythic quality, wisdom handed down from the venerable master of speculative fiction’s pulp era. A Rosetta stone to change a writer’s fortunes.

In truth, when we go back to primary sources, they’re a throwaway at the tail of Heinlein’s essay ‘On The Writing Of Speculative Fiction’ in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s 1947 essay anthology Of Worlds Beyond. A practical suggestion appended to a longer essay about Heinlein’s theory of science fiction, offered as a sop to Heinlein’s conscience after headier thoughts about the genre.

To understand the mythology around Heinlein’s habits, consider the iterative ways Heinlein’s rules expand in repetition: Heinlein lays out his practices and provides contextual detail in 261 words. Robert J. Sawyer’s essay on the rules, written in 1996, weighs in at approximately 1,200 words. Dean Wesley Smith’s 2016 book, Heinlein’s Rules: 5 Simple Business Rules For Writing, delivers the same information across 12,000 words. Both Sawyer and Smith cleave to the same five rules, with “start the next thing”appended as a sixth rule, but neither offer significant additional context or explanation. One could—and I did—get by with the five steps outlined above.

But this isn’t my primary concern. To my knowledge, neither quotes Heinlein’s final statement on the business habits:

“… if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at him.” (Heinlein LOC 178)

This, for me, is a crucial insight that’s deserving of more consideration than the constant repetition of Heinlein’s rules suggest in writing discourse.

KNOW YOUR PRODUCT

Many people believe the independent publishing movement has sparked a new pulp era, with authors free to replicate their pulp forebears’ successes with constant production and the adoption of a rapid release schedule many traditional publishers abandoned decades ago.

Before I quibble with this assertion, let’s take a trip back in time. The first American pulp magazine—the revamped Argosy, launched in 1896–set the format we think of as ‘pulp’. Your typical pulp was a thick magazine with 135,000 words of content: 7 inches by 10 inches, approximately 128 pages, filled with lurid and disposable genre tales grouped together by type. Printed on wood-pulp paper with ragged edges, their production values distinguish them from the ‘slick’ magazines with better printers and paper quality. While the slicks sold ads to make a buck, a pulp magazine’s production quality didn’t lend itself to reproducing art or graphics. Their profits lived and died in their ability to lure back readers who loved their genre niche.

In the late nineteen thirties, the pulps dominated the entertainment market, with some estimates suggest there were over 1,000 titles in production at once (some short-lived, others not). Not all pulps published science fiction—pulp aficionados will be familiar with the myriad genres covered by pulp magazines—but even so, the landscape provided markets hungry for stories to fill their page count.

This market Robert Heinlein published in shaped his business principles, but it was already in a state of decline as he laid out his business habits in 1947. The pulps battled paper shortages caused by World War II and the steady increase in competition from new mediums such as radio and television heading into the 1950s, and they would lose that fight. Within ten years, the primary pulp distributor, American News Company, liquidated and marked the death knell of the format.

Some pulp those writers carried on, writing for the advertising-supported slicks, which demanded a different type (and, frequently, higher “quality”) story than their pulp siblings. Other pulp writers ceased production of short stories and wrote longer paperbacks¹

(1), while others moved on to television

And some faded into obscurity, unable to transition to a new model when the familiar, hungry pool of editors desperate for copy ceased to exist.

CH-CH-CH-CHANGES

The market for speculative fiction didn’t go away with the demise of the pulp magazines, but it changed and left some writers less than pleased with the transition. Authors who once supported themselves and their families with short fiction now found themselves focused on longer works for much the same money.

Writers who wax poetic about Heinlein’s rules often leave out contextual details. When arguing ebook publishing represents a new, neo-pulp era, where self-published authors with a love of genre fiction and the capacity to write fast can forge a living, there’s often a failure to reconcile Heinlein’s rules with the logic governing the contemporary marketplace.

It also overlooks the other useful insight to be drawn from visiting Heinlein’s advice in the original format: Eshbach included Heinlein, and nominated his essay as the first in the collection, because:

“… he is the first of the popular science fiction writers to sell science fiction consistently to the “slicks”. Others will follow his lead; and it may well be that this brief article will be the spark that will fire the creative urge in other writers, who will aim for—and hit—the big pay, general fiction magazines.” (Eshbach LOC 75)

Ergo, when repeating Heinlein’s rules in a contemporary audience, we present two points worthy of acknowledgement. 

First, they are business habits tied to a particular era with different market logic.

Second, it’s a strategy employed by a writer with a surfeit of talent, luck, or good timing, which allowed him to achieve notably exceptional success rather than a success typical writer of his era, and this too may influence a contemporary writer’s ability to replicate his results.

THE CULTURAL LOGIC OF THE CONTEMPORARY MARKET

My adoption of Heinlein’s rules as a short fiction writer in 2007 led to a level of success, but it didn’t allow me to forge a full-time career as a writer. The short story market wasn’t large enough, and editors were now spoiled for choice rather than hurting for copy. Any attempt to sustain Heinlein’s business model through short stories alone would be impractical, if not outright impossible. The market I wrote for demanded longer works, with stiff competition for available spots. Editors still needed content to fill their publishing lines, but books were a second-tier entertainment source, their demand reduced thanks to the rise of television, film, and the internet. 

Indeed, the bulk of my career has been an era where the editors ‘desperate for content’ were no longer editors at all, but television executives tasked with filling hundreds of channels with content twenty-four seven. Fiction writers would never again have the same marketplace for their work Heinlein wrote into back in 1947, and commercially-minded pulp writers adapted their approach to the times.

It seems like books would never have their heyday as a hungry pulp market again, but then Amazon launched the first Kindle to the public on November 19, 2017, and the game changed in an instant.

Ebooks existed prior to the Kindle’s launch, but a major player unleashing an e-reader as a loss leader changed the game. The Kindle created a new audience for fiction—an audience hungry for books to read on their new devices, ready to embrace content in formats and genres traditional publishing either underserved or ignored altogether. For the next four years, independent publishing boomed with all the fervour of a Wild West gold rush. Those who could feed the market at speed earned themselves a full-time career, if not a fortune.

I don’t blame anyone who saw a new pulp era here. For a few brief, shining years Heinlein’s rules made perfect sense again: write fast, put the work to market, and readers desperate for content would pay you for your writing. The first wave of kindle millionaires emerged from writers who fit one of two archetypes:

• Authors with a deep backlist they could publish, composed of either out-of-print work from their traditional career or simply work the traditional market wasn’t interested in; or,
• Authors who could write and publish fast, establishing a deep backlist at speed.

It’s easy to see how Heinlein’s rules enjoyed new relevancy around this time, and why the general tenor of writing conversations online turned to questions of speed and quantity. Rachel Aaron’s seminal 2k to 10k post became a lighting post in 2011, with a book of the same name released soon after. Scores of self-published authors followed suit, cycling through all manner of advice for rapid production of words, from pomodoro cycles to writing sprints to dogged persistence and long hours to using tools such as dictation that sped up draft production.

What new pulp era advocates and writers who focus on speed often overlook is the difference between the hungry market Heinlein sold into and the contemporary ebook market, including the biggest and most significant: pulp magazines proved a temporary format, published on degradable, low-quality paper with a comparatively short shelf-life. 

Even the pulp paperback market, which picked up after the magazines folded, built their business assumptions around the notion books would not be available forever. The physical quality of their books were better, certainly, but limited shelf space in stores and the cost of warehousing backlists meant the life-span of a book could be measured in weeks rather than years if you wanted to maximise profits. 

The modern fiction marketplace no longer operates under those limitations. Ebooks exist on an infinite store shelf without physical limitations. Every work you produce—in theory, and often practice—is available for as long as there are folks willing to host the files and profit from it. Rather than competing with the other works released that month, you’re competing with all the back list works published and kept in digital ‘print’ by stakeholders across the publishing landscape.

As the costs of publishing books wanes, the wealth of available works expands, and the poetics of fiction adjust. Ebooks are cheap to produce. Factor in print on demand, which removes the burden of warehousing from print books, and the same is increasingly true on the physical side of the industry as well.²

The market hungry for ebooks after the Kindle launched quickly became spoiled for choice. Backlist sales—once the domain of best-sellers and cult hits—are now a part of every sane author’s business strategy.

This, too, changes the game in ways that intrigue me. You can still write and publish at the speed of a pulp author—and even earn a few bucks along the way—but the cultural logic of the contemporary marketplace doesn’t favour the tactic.

Contemporary pulp writers don’t seek editors desperate for copy, but niche audiences who feel under-served by the existing markets (or dedicated fans who crave more from a specific writer rather than a specific genre, but they take time to build).

In the here and now, the challenge is not selling your work to an editor, but finding and keeping an audience.

CUTTING YOUR FUTURE INCOME

Back in 2009, venerable SF writer Robert Silverberg wrote an entry in SF Signal’s Mind Meld blog about the best writing advice he’d ever received. The advice came in the early part of his career, around 1957—just ten years removed from Heinlein’s essay—when Silverberg forged a career via the rapid production of the solid-but-conventional 5,000 word stories needed to fill magazine pages in his era. To the young Silverberg, it seemed a safer bet to produce the “competent potboilers” editors found it easy to say yes too, but neither stretched him as a writer or showed any real ambition. In effect, he wrote in accordance with Heinlein’s advice, producing work fast and lean, then finding an editor hungry for copy.

This approach lasted until the magazine editor Lester Del Ray gave Silverberg some advice:

(Lester) pointed out to me that I was working from a false premise. “Even if all you’re concerned with is making money,” he said, “you’re going about it the wrong way. You’re knocking out penny-a-word stories as fast as you can, and, sure, you’re pulling in the quick bucks very nicely. But you’re shortchanging yourself, because all that you’ll ever make from what you’re writing now is the check you get for it today. Those stories will die the day they’re published. They won’t get into anthologies and won’t be bought for translation and nobody will want you to put together a collection of them. Whereas if you were writing at the level that I know you’re capable of, you’d be creating a body of work that will go on bringing in money for the rest of your life. So by going for the easy money you’re actually cutting your future income. (Silverberg 2007)

Silverberg hesitated to push himself, as his experience showed his ambitious projects never sold as easily as the potboilers, but Del Ray argued this would be a temporary phenomenon. Eventually Silverberg did as advised, and the approach transformed his career. He won awards, had work reprinted, and collections followed suit. Rather than produce disposable stories, Silverberg shifted to stories that rewarded re-engagement, which became the cornerstone of his income.

Our era resembles the pulp paperback age Silverberg wrote into than the pulp magazine era in which Heinlein formulated his rules. Shifts in the market—especially how and where we read new work—made it necessary. As editor and author Nick Mamatas argues in his essay, How To End A Story, the pulp magazines (and many slicks) favoured stories with neatly tied denouements over those which provoked further thought. Magazines needed disposable content, so a reader would pass the magazine around (a tactic used to boost the circulation numbers pitched to advertisers) and make way for the next issue (61). That was the logic of the market at the time.

The creative economy of the internet age is different. Magazines need unique rather than disposable, something to pull readers towards their websites. They want stories destined to be shared, discussed, unpicked, and broadcast via online channels. An ending with a ragged edge, which leaves the reader thinking, is a stronger choice than something easily forgotten. As Mamatas notes, the genre’s elder statesmen still offer editorial advice informed by the pulp era, but the economy around short fiction has changed under their feet (62). We are writing into a new publishing economy (and, in fact, a very different market landscape to the one Mamamtas was writing about in his essay).

HUNGRY MARKETS

So where are the copy-hungry markets Heinlein wrote for to be found in the current marketplace? Where should an aspiring pulp author, eager to cleave to Heinlein’s rules, seek to find an editor so desperate for content they’ll buy the complete dogs of our back catalogue? It doesn’t lie in short fiction anymore, and may not lie in long-form fiction either.

On the surface, a contemporary neo-pulp writer might search for what indie phenomenon Chris Fox has dubbed a Hungry Market, or “a genre that loves to read, but isn’t being supplied with enough books.” (8). This often translates to a highly specific sub-genre or trope, rather than a broad market, and indie publishing has forged whole subgenre movements by deploying this approach. In the last decade we’ve witnessed the rise of niche sugenres such as dinosaur erotica, academy romance, litRPG, technomagic sci-fi, reverse harem romance and erotica. By now, sub-genres trends that rise, crashed to shore, and recede in popularity are an ongoing part of the indie conversation as writers share what works and what doesn’t in online spaces. 

The curse, of course, is any hungry market will soon be overfed by other neo-pulp writers swarming the profitable niche. After a rapid rise in available content, the subgenre ceases to be hungry, satiated by the rapid emergence of backlist titles and a pseudo-cannon of “must read” titles that form a common language among fans.

I would argue the most compatible hunger for content to Heinlein’s day isn’t books at all, but social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, et al have the voracious need for content, constantly putting new material before users to promote engagement, then niche and categorize their audience data based on those interactions.

Alas, these platforms are notoriously difficult for creators to monetise. Social media sites trained creators to engage with them for free, trading access to an audience for much needed content. For most platforms, paying a creator for their work is not a feature, but a tool to be deployed when attempting to capture market share or threatened by competitors. Their philosophy is to get as much content for free, then pay for the most popular when it becomes clear the creators may leave.

Platforms often deploy a communal creator fund—an arbitrary amount bequeathed by the organization running the platform—in lieu of straightforward exchanges of financial capital for artistic content. They spread this monthly fund among content creators on a proportion-of-content-consumed basis, with X minutes of content consumed equating to Y cents.

These funds are frequently disconnected from revenue generated, which means they can be inflated in the early stages (to draw creators in when a revenue share wouldn’t pay out as much) and then allowed to stagnate as profits rise. The funds disconnect the value creators provide from their compensation, which leaves the system ripe for abuse.³

The Kindle Unlimited program—aimed at voracious readers willing to subscribe for ten dollars a month—is similarly hungry, and there’s a subset of neo-pulp writers who forged strong careers there, working at speed and tickling Amazon’s algorithms with constant new releases. Like the social media platforms above, authors are paid from a creator fund, and while their work is not generating ad revenue, it is providing considerable value to Amazon above and beyond the creative product, allowing them to run the Unlimited program and lock in exclusive content, which then pulls reader into an exclusive relationship with the Amazon shopping ecosystem.⁴

In all these examples, the revenue a creator can earn is supported by speed and the willingness to unleash a deep backlist. Alas, said revenue is not proportionate to the value they provide to the platform in question.

While one could argue this is true of the pulp magazine model, said magazines at least paid on delivery rather than waiting to see how ‘successful’ a story proved to be with their readership. The potential value of a story was easy to predict.

THE NEW PULP ERA

There are still authors who earn good money cleaving to Heinlein’s principles. Some even make significant money, for the moment, but it’s worth considering the publishing landscape here in 2022. Heinlein’s business practice assumes there’s always a market for a competent-but-unspectacular story, an assumption reliant on a surfeit of hungry markets cycling through disposable content at speed.

I argue the contemporary writer, producing work in systems with deep access to back list and a greater need to build their own audience, face the opposite problem. Our markets are not hungry for long—increasingly, they’re picky eaters, with broader genres giving way to specific tropes and subgenre preferences. In this terrain, a writer is arguably better off crafting more ambitious, better-quality work than the churn implied by Heinlein and his more vocal contemporary advocates.

It doesn’t mean we should eschew Heinlein entirely—in a world where back list titles hold almost as much value as new work, the ability to work fast still holds value—but I think reasserting Heinlein’s rules as habits rather than commandments is a good first step. Like much advice from the previous century, the assumptions that underpin Heinlein’s Habits are ripe for re-examination.

Embracing speed at all costs starts from a false premise. Sheer weight of production can still generate an income, just as thousands of tiny tributary dribbles may eventually form a river, but it strikes me as an approach requiring more effort for less reward. In a marketplace where the primary challenge is discovery, repeat customers and word-of-mouth are a writer’s most valuable resource.

It’s tempting to see this as a callback to hackneyed concepts around ‘quality’ art versus the commerce-driven genre, but I think the key word to focus on is ambition rather than quality. As a fan of B-grade movies and cult literature, in addition to years of teaching writing to undergraduate students, I know ambition is an endearing quality in an artist. It’s far more pleasurable to watch a creator strive—stretching beyond the limits of their time, budget, or skill—than watching an artist play it safe. A brilliant failure is far more interesting than a stultifying success.

To echo Del Ray, ambition is a strength in the 21st century writing landscape. You’re competing for a reader’s attention against your contemporaries, but also the greats, the very goods, and the merely competent authors from many generations who came before you.

After all, Robert Heinlein’s novels are still right there, ready to be purchased in multiple ebooks, print books, and audio. And I promise you the works keeping him prominent aren’t the worst old dogs he fired off to editors desperate for copy to fill their pages. Those works only have longevity and value as a backlist because the best of Heinlein’s works elevated his profile and expanded his readership.

CONTEMPORARY PRINCIPLES

For all I see flaws in Heinlein’s rules, especially when read against his original essay, the adoption of all five in moderation can still help writers push their career forward. You must still write, after all, and finish what you start. While I believe in redrafting and editing, I believe there’s a point where you must declare the work done, and not tinker with it any further.

Where I diverge from Heinlein most is the final two steps, for putting the work to market is no longer enough. The desperate editors are not there and the hungry markets are too short-lived, and there are now enough books to feed even the most gluttonous of readers. There is more space for ambition and reworking your craft in this landscape. Your back list matters considerably more and you want to build it fast, but always question whether three okay stories are more valuable than a single great work.

The contemporary pulp writer doesn’t simply put work to market because they understand each new work builds up value around their other creations. They produce works aimed at engaging a reader long-term, across multiple works, rather than focusing their relationship on a single tale. They ask for investment across their entire career, not a single storyline. They engage their audiences directly, rather than editors, and extend beyond the parasocial relationship of author and reader.

And they keep building up their back list, one ambitious story at a time, searching for new readers because those books are still available.No mouldering wood-pulp magazines will steal away our work , wiping away our worst and our best stories alike as the paper decomposes. Everything we do is still available and may well be for decades to come.

To eschew the immediate appeal of hungry markets might sting in the short term, when the first books are harder to sell, but we build careers off the stories folks still read years after release.

NEW PULP

“I always wanted to be a pulp writer,” Kameron Hurley writes in her introduction to Future Artifacts (6), citing an affection for fantasy tales such as the Conan stories and Elric of Melnibone. Future Artifacts collects Hurley’s short stories produced for her Patreon over the last six years. Like the pulp writers, she knocked out stories in a couple of days in order to make regular cash, rather than stretching royalty cheques for longer works, which arrived twice a year.

And yet, Hurley works at a slower pace than the pulp writers of old, producing a single short story per month (albeit at a higher fee than she’d earn from most magazines; At time of writing, Hurley’s Patreon will pay her over $3,000 Australian for each new story, and she averages one a month). Those who cleave to Heinlein’s rules and the pulp ideology around fast production may hesitate to embrace Hurley as a New Pulp writer, but I often fear those folks miss the forest for the trees.

Hurly makes her Patreon income off the stories she produces, but they’re a fraction of the total content generated for her patrons. She supplements story production with broader outreach, much of it story-adjacent without becoming new fictional works. This outreach includes a monthly podcast, behind-the-scenes videos, craft advice, and one-on-one skypes with fans. Hurley repurposes these secondary works after an exclusive period: posting videos on her website; making the Get To Work Hurley podcast available through multiple podcast streams. Even the stories have a second life—Future Artifacts is published by Apex Publishing, rather than Hurley’s Patreon funds, and exists as a separate product to the works sold to her most ardent fans. While Hurley writes for her most ardent fans on Patreon, those same works spread and extend her reach into other content-hungry parts of the internet.

In this respect, at least, the pulp era hasn’t left us—the philosophy has simply mutated to adapt to a new era. Stories and novels, increasingly, are the high-end prestige products in an author’s arsenal, while the hungry markets desperate for content have become social media streams where the payday is less, but the reach is considerable.

The spirit of Heinlein’s rules remains valuable, but the blind application of the practice or exhortation of its virtues without consideration for the market in which we operate does a disservice to creators. The wood pulps are gone, and the hungry social streams won’t pay for stories, but smart writers can still leverage that hunger if they hustle. They create fewer works, but the increased reach and long life-span elevates the value of what they produce through repeated, deepening engagement.

The goal is no longer feeding a hungry periodical market with easily forgotten stories, but to write stories which reward those who come searching for more.

We may well be in a new golden age of pulp fiction, but the logic of our market demands more from us than the simple repetition of habits from decades ago.

REFERENCES

• Aaron, Rachel. “How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.” Pretentious Title: Official Writing Blog of SFF Author Rachel Aaron/Bach, June 2011. http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html
• Eshbach, Lloyed Arthur. “Editors Preface.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.
• Fox, Chris. Write to Market: Deliver a Book that Sells, Self-Published, 2016.
• Heinlein, Robert A. “On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.” Of Worlds Beyond, edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach. Advent Publishing, 1947. Kindle edition.
• Hurley, Cameron. Future Artefacts. Apex Book Company, 2022.
• Mahatmas, Nick. “How to End a Story.” Starve Better, Apex Book Company, 2013.
• Sawyer, Robert J. “On Writing: Heinlein’s Rules.” SF Writer, 1996. https://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm#:
• Smith, Dean Wesley.Heinlein’s Rules: Five Simple Business Rules for Writing. WMG Publishing, 2016
• Silverberg, Robert. “MIND MELD: Shrewd Writing Advice From Some of Science Fiction’s & Fantasy’s Best Writers.” SF Signal, January 2009. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2009/01/mind_meld_shrewd_writing_advice_from_some_of_science_fiction_and_fantasys_best_writers/

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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.
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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.

FOOTNOTES

1. Interestingly, many pulp paperbacks were distributed through the same magazine networks who once distributed the pulp magazines. ↩︎
2. At this stage, fewer indies publish their work in print than ebooks, leaving print-on-demand the platform of choice for small presses more often than indie authors. The long-term implications of this technology are less obvious as a result. ↩︎
3. The sole platform offering creators a profit percentage based on the ad revenue their content generates is YouTube, who made the choice while fending off new challengers in the video space. Sadly, this only applies to some content—at the time of writing, they’re monetization for the short-video offshoot they’re hoping to use as a challenge to emerging competitor has fallen back on the creator fund model. ↩︎
4. 4. In recent years, changes on Amazon have limited organic search for books, leaving many Kindle Unlimited authors reliant on the Amazon advertising systems in order to find their readership. It’s a deft way of recouping royalties paid out to artists via the creator fund by asking authors to reinvest their profits. ↩︎