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.
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Looking to level up your writing and publishing? When you’re ready, here are some ways I can help:
I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume
Like many of you, I have good weeks and bad weeks on the writing front. This week has been rocky, and if
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re
