Peter M. Ball

Hanging out on Threads means the algorithm sends me a steam of frustrated indie publishers asking worried questions about the cost and chances of success in indie publishing. I try to respond with the best advice I can – spend less, expect income to take years rather than months – but there’s a longer version of that advice I wish I could implant in their head.

This is a version of that advice.

There are five broad levers you can pull to make things happen in publishing (whether indie or otherwise):

• Economic, whether it’s cash to throw at problems, or the space to give things a long lead before they become profitable, or the ability to risk money without negative consequence if things fail. 
• Intellectual, or the books/content you generate/acquire.
• Human, AKA skills you have or can get someone else to leverage on your behalf.
• Social, or the connections/network you have.
• Symbolic, or the prestige, recognition, and “buzz” you have within your genre (and outside it).

I’ve been thinking about this because Threads feeds me a steady supply of posts from new writers who are lamenting the costs of indie publishing, while the mentoring half of my life has revolved around more than one meeting which starts with “stop spending money” as my first bit of advice.

Understanding these five levers is important. Half the challenge of Indie Publishing is recognising that folks come in bigger levers in one area than another. If you’re not operating with a huge bundle of economic capital at the start, following the business model of someone who had scads of it isn’t going to work. You’ll need to use the other forms of capital to generate your cash flow, or you’ll get frustratingly substandard results.

And the core rule of publishing is simple: if you don’t have economic capital (or any other type), you’ll need to pull one of the other levers to get what you need.

To put this in really simple terms, lets look at the typical new-writer-signing-with-established-publisher exchange (or what we now call “traditional” publishing).

A writer uses their Human capital (writing skill) to generate a viable piece of intellectual property. They then lease that property to the publisher in order to access the publishers’ economic assets (to cover production), human capital (editorial, design, and distribution), and social capital (publisher employees will have relationships with tastemakers and bookstores). If done right, the publisher pulls all those levers to create buzz and recognition through reviews, events, and awards, and sells enough books to generate more economic resources for all involved. 

If you’re an writer or aspiring publisher without access to economic capital, you’ll need to pull other levers in order to make up for the shortfall.

That might mean generating a lot of intellectual capital and releasing it cheaply to get you solvent asap, even if it means producing a less high-prestige product (this is, after all, the foundation of both the pulp era and early paperbacks).

It might mean investing your limited seed money in leveling up your skill, knowing those skills will defray costs down the line. Sweat equity is a real thing, with its own advantages, if you’ve got the time to let things build slowly and learn what you need to know.

It might mean becoming well known in a genre group so you can leverage the social connections you find there, trading on friendships to get access to skills you may need or to carry the early promotional load. Or it may mean building a huge following on social media, which is basically using sweat equity and skills to replace the kind of marketing that’s usually accessible via a combination of cash, industry connections, and prestige.

The thing is, you need to wrap your head around the five levers. Almost everything in publishing gets easier to understand once you can keep them in mind, and spotting the flaws with following a particular strategy is easy when you can read the default assumptions of the person advocating it. 

I started Brain Jar Press with very little economic capital, but I had connections thanks to running writer events and working in writers centres for a decade. I had access to award-winning writers in my genre who leant me their prestige and, on occasion, their networks. When we started publishing other people, I had people who trust me to publish their books despite the fact we weren’t offering advances. That probably wouldn’t have been easy to do as a stranger, but they knew me, and the knew my background, and the trusted both the skill set and the symbolic prestige that built up around my various jobs.

Trying to follow my path without that background would have been difficult.

On the flip side, I’ve tried to follow approaches suggested by high-profile indie book marketing courses. They don’t work for me because they assumed an investment of economic capital I didn’t have (not least because I’d spent a huge chunk of change purchasing the course). 

The course wasn’t a poor investment, just not right for me at the time. Five years on, I find myself better placed to revisit it and throw money at the strategy they recommend, with time to invest in getting good at the skills required. But trying to follow it meant I spent many years indie publishing badly because I focused on levers I couldn’t access. It wasn’t until I sat down and leveraged the things I had an abundance of that I started making a steady profit that allowed me to level things up, and maybe even build up the economic reserves to try some approaches the course advocated.

I spend a lot of time talking to new indie writers in my mentoring, and the first piece of advice I give them is almost universally stop spending money. I’ve worked for small businesses so desperate to succeed they threw money at anyone who said they could turn the tide, and the results were messy as hell. Like, ruin your life messy.

Your strategy should build on the levers you can pull with ease, not gambling with money you can’t afford to lose. Taking the time to sit down and understand where you’re at, and which levers are easest to pull, is the most beneficial thing you can do as an indie. It may also be depressing – sometimes, you’re starting with nothing but a steep learning curve and the ability to write books – but it’s not nothing, and it’ll give you some insights on what levers you need to build up.

I’ve been re-reading Frank Gruber’s The Pulp Jungle recently, and it’s an interesting source of context for the “Hungry Market” conditions I wrote about back when interrogating Heinlein’s Rules a while back. In chapter Three of his book, Gruber conducts a ‘state of the market’ survey of the pulp industry at the start of his career, noting there were approximately 150 pulp magazines active. He breaks down the editors and market focus, and the average pay rate of 1 cent per word many writers started on. 

Intriguingly, he also breaks down the format:

The average pulp magazine of one hundred twenty-eight pages contained sixty-five thousand words. Since many of the magazines, such as Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Love Story, Western Story, Wild West Weekly, were weeklies, the total market for stories was considerably greater than one hundred fifty times sixty-five thousand words.

There were also a number of semimonthly publications, such as Ranch Romances and Short Stories. Roughly, these weeklies and semimonthlies brought the total pulp market to about two hundred fifty copies of sixty-five thousand words per month. On a yearly basis, some one hundred ninety-five million words were needed to fill the hungry maws of the pulps. At the base rate of one cent a word, this meant a total outlay of almost two million dollars per year for stories.

One hundred ninety-five million words is a hell of a hungry market, even when split among the various genres. Every magazine had its own structure — if you’re curious, you can check many pulps out via the Internet Archive — but Gruber breaks down a rough guideline as:

• One “lead novel” of twenty-five thousand words
• 1-2 novelettes
• 4-8 short stories and features

Some magazines, particularly those which ran weekly, might the story or novelette entries with serial installments built out of 50,000 to 60,000 word novels. 

The typical issue of Eclectic Projects, which is my own little pulp-fiction-esque experiment, only runs to 25,000 words. Somewhat idly, I’ve been pondering how to manage a “full pulp” on a monthly basis. On raw word-count — 2,100 words a day — its not an immediately impossible idea, especially when tools like the Nickel Novel Format make it easier to envision a novella structure which can be revisited month after month. For a full-time writer — even a relatively slow one such as myself — 2,100 words is potentially in the reach of a sustainable “cruising speed”. 

Even the 3,500 words a day you’d need to write in order to take weekends off and four weeks vacation a year isn’t entirely impossible.

The trick here in the modern era — given the concerns I wrote about in Heinlein’s Habits  — is being conscious of the aftermarket for work. Pretty much everything in a magazine can be repackage and released into the wild as a stand-alone, or as part of a larger reprint collection. Not every reader is going to dive into a monthly magazine, so you want to meet folks where they’re willing to read in much the same way that a comic books lifespan now moves from stand-alone issue to six-issue trade paperback to prestige format collection.

Were I to do it, I’d be eying off the following magazine breakdown:

• One 25,000 word novella
• One 15,000 word serial instalment of a four-part serial (or two 7,500 word installments, of two serials, one designed to wrap up at 30,000 words/4 issues, and one designed to wrap up at 60,000 words/8 issues)
• 20,000 words of short fiction. This can be two novelettes, four to eight shorter stories, or any combination thereof ( a huge part of putting the current Eclectic Projects issues together is finding the combination that will allows us to hit the allocated page count)
• 5,000 words of non-fiction

A single year would eventually result in twelve 25,000 word novellas, three 60k novels, one non-fiction collection of 12 articles, and about 48 stories (or 3 to 4 collections, at the length I typically work at).

Run the magazine for five years and you’re talking 60 novellas, 15 novels, 5 non-fiction collections, 20 short story collections, then various omnibus and special collections that emerge as you build up a stable of series characters or themed releases. That’s on top of 60 magazine issues and whatever subscription/patron base you’ve built up. Sell 50 or 80 copies of each book in your back list and it adds up to a pretty decent chunk of change.

Alas, I’m not in a place to do that. Certainly not until the PhD is done, and perhaps not even then. But I’m certainly looking at the structure and pondering ways to Ooch my way towards it, much as the weekly short story drops were a way of ooching my way towards the magazine in its current format.

The first place I’m experimenting is with the next few installments of the long-neglected Shackleton Job serial. I just finished writing first draft of the next instalment, which rounds off the segment on The Chronomancer’s Isle and clocks in at tweice the length of the sections I’ve been posting so far. I’ve also made the firm decision there will be another twelve instalments after that, wrapping the whole thing up as a 50k adventure serial that can become its own project after I’m done.

And it turns out I really needed that structure, especially after such a long break. 

I wrote this as a guest post for M. Todd Gallowglass’ blog back when the first collection edition of Flotsam (now the Gold Coast Ragnarok trilogy) came out from the original publisher. It’s a little deep dive into all the ways these books were curse, right from the very first release.

THE CURSE

Here’s a thing I haven’t talked about publicly, with the Flotsam series: I’m nearly, almost one hundred percent, convinced that it’s cursed. Even as I type this post, ostensibly to promote the book, I’m giving the world around me the ol’ shifty-eye, waiting for something bad to happen.

The good news: it hasn’t happened yet. I may even get to the end of this, before the inevitable tragedy occurs, but it’s definitely coming. It always does, every time I work on the project. Flotsam and bad news are intrinsically intertwined.

For example, way back in latter half of 2010, I pitched the original idea for Flotsam to Jennifer Brozek for the Edge of Propinquity zine. One year of serialised stories, all set in the same world, about a supernatural hitman who specialised in monsters and what happened when he completely messed up a job.

The same day I got the email letting me know Jennifer would be interested, I got the news that my father was in hospital after having a heart attack. I ended up skyping with Jennifer, agreeing to the project, then jumped in a car and rushed to the Gold Coast where my dad was getting the news that heart surgery was in his future.

He came through it okay and made it home by Christmas, so I figured, well, that’s done, then. Time to go write these stories.

I didn’t know about the curse yet. I didn’t actually believe in curses back then.

Then 2011 happened and…well, it wasn’t good. There were deaths in the family and jobs that went crazy and a day spent trapped in an airport by a cyclone. My dad’s health took a turn for the worse again, which meant more trips down to the Gold Coast from Brisbane. I had some weird health stuff going on. I kept sending the team of Edge of Propinquity apologetic emails: Sorry the story is late this month, but you know how I swore things couldn’t get any worse…

I spent December 31st hiding under the covers, giving the world the ol’ shifty-eye. Well, I thought, at least that’s over.

Then, in 2013, Jennifer Brozek emailed me again. She’d started a publishing company, Apocalypse Ink, and she was interested in doing trilogies of novellas. Would I be interested in revisiting Flotsam and transforming it into a series?

Sure, I said. I’m sure things will be better this time. No such thing as curses, after all, and I can make up for all those times I was late.

Little did I know, it had nothing to do with the year.

I dropped my laptop the same day I was due to submit the first book, Exile. Realised I hadn’t backed up my computer in a little over two weeks. Twenty-thousand words lost and another apologetic email, along with the sinking realisation that there is no professional way of explaining to an editor that they won’t be getting their manuscript ‘cause you broke your computer without sounding like a moron.

The second novella, Frost, had many problems, from lost USB drives to work projects that ate my life, in addition to the bad habit I’d developed where I fell asleep, at the keyboard, halfway through typing a word. I had friends who started making jokes about narcolepsy. Rewriting and editing were a bastard on that one, ‘cause I kept finding these sections where I’d obviously dozed off and started transcribing any random thing that was going on around me.

There was some good news: my laptop didn’t die this time. But I killed the work computer I wrote on during lunch-breaks, which got me thinking real hard about cracking wise on matters of Flotsam and curses for a while.

I got really nervous about writing the third book in the series. Crusade was always going to be tough. After two books of build-up, it was time to deliver on the promise I’d made way back in Exile. It was time to bring Ragnarok to the city of the Gold Coast (an Australian city with aspirations to be Vegas or Miami, although the Gold Coast secretly thinks those cities are far too classy).

It’s hard to destroy the world in the space of a novella. It’s harder when it finally sinks in that you’re no longer joking around about curses.

So I hunkered down in my apartment and typed like a madman, backing up every six or seven minutes, ‘cause I was determined that nothing go wrong this time. Just this once, I’d get the story over with and nothing at all would go wrong.

I fell asleep a lot, while I was doing that. At the keyboard. At work. Once, pretty close to the deadline, I dozed off in my car while stopped at a traffic light. I went to a sleep clinic and had a bunch of tests. Turns out, I was suffering from Chronic Sleep Apnea.

Oh, I said. I’ve heard of that. It’s not that big a deal, right?

You stop breathing in your sleep; the clinic told me. About seventy times an hour. You fell asleep while driving a car.

Well, sure, I said, doing the math. If you put it like that…

I went home and wrote. And wrote. And wrote.

This time my laptop – the one bought to replace the one I’d dropped – died two weeks ahead of the deadline. My desktop went down a few days later.

Hard drive failure, the tech-guy said. Thank god I’d learned my lesson about back-ups.

The rational part of me looks back at all the bad things that happened and says it’s just coincidence, but let’s be honest: writers are rarely the most rational of people. If we were, there’s a pretty good chance we’d find saner uses for our time than writing.

Besides, I’d do it again.

If you had a time machine and you went back in time and you warned bad things were coming. If you told me, straight up, you’re going to write this thing, and disaster will plague you it every step, well, there’s every chance my first response would be: bring it on.

‘Cause even with all the stuff that went wrong, I got to tell the story I really wanted to tell. I got to work with the crew at Apocalypse Ink, which has been all kinds of awesome. I got to see Mark Ferarri’s cover art for the three novellas, which was awesome, his cover art for the print compilation, which is mind-bendingly brilliant and has been my desktop image ever since I first saw it.

And for all that there’s definitely something wrong when you fall asleep while driving a car, it’s actually the impact on deadlines and writing that actually got me to go see a doctor and figure out what was going wrong when the apnea was at its worst.

Writers are mad, that way. We get obsessed with the stories and the words and the people, and we forget about the bad stuff by the time we hit the end.

And maybe it all turns out good, in the end, and maybe it all goes wrong for them. But it’s always worth it. Always. That’s the promise you make, right

We can’t help it. It’s wired into the way we do our jobs. You take some perfectly nice people and you rain all kinds of hell down on them. You shoot them and curse them and put them through the end of the world.there in the beginning, and it’s your job to do every damn thing you can to make sure you deliver by the time you hit The End.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to head off, ‘cause this computer is making unhealthy noises and I’d rather not push my luck…