9 Pieces of Bad Publishing Advice New Writers Should Ignore

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From Anne R. Allen’s Blog:

Social Media is both a boon and a curse to new writers. Online writing groups and forums are an excellent source of insider information on the publishing industry—stuff we once could only find at expensive classes and writers’ conferences.

But social media is also a major source of misinformation and dangerously bad advice.

. . . .

1) If You Can’t Handle Rejection, Just Self-Publish.

This is one of the most common themes I see. Somebody asks a question about querying agents, like how long you should wait before you take silence as rejection (about 6 weeks), or is it okay to phone an agency to ask about the status of your query (no.)

Inevitably, somebody pipes up with a variation of: “I could never go through all that. Agent rejections are so painful. I’m just planning to self-publish when I finish my novel.”

I usually don’t say anything to these people. Bubble-bursting makes me feel like a meanie, and I can hope they’ll learn more about the process before they finish that book.

But if the poor dears do self-publish, they’d better pray they never get any reviews.

If you think agent rejections are hurtful, your first Goodreads review will send you into screaming agony.

Rejection is part of a writer’s job description. You’ll get it from reviewers, readers, editors, bookstore owners, advertising newsletters, and your brother-in-law. Get used to it.

In fact, learning to take rejection and criticism well should be listed as one of the top 10 skills every writer needs.

. . . .

3) Follow this/that Guru and Learn to Game Amazon.

This might be the saddest delusion of all. There have been some major “bestselling  gurus” who have FB groups or other more secret forums, where they teach new writers the “ropes” of gaming Amazon with book-stuffing, trading reviews, or joining pricey boxed sets that promise to make you a “USA Today Bestseller.”

These “gurus” often end up in court, but not before their followers have lost thousands of dollars and may have been kicked off Amazon for life.

Amazon is run by algorithms and bots, and the temptation to fool robots is high. But even if somebody is making major bux running circles around Amazon’s algorithms right now, you can be sure that Amazon will catch on eventually. Then you can be booted off the site—for life. No shopping. No using that gift card, or even your Prime video subscription.

Don’t tempt them. Amazon is not a videogame. Do not mess with the Mighty Zon.

Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog

20 thoughts on “9 Pieces of Bad Publishing Advice New Writers Should Ignore”

  1. ‘If you think agent rejections are hurtful, your first Goodreads review will send you into screaming agony”.
    The difference is that an agent can decide whether or not the manuscript is published, whereas a book review is generally given after the book has been published so it doesn’t matter if you get a negative review, because there will be plenty of others to balance it.
    Also, receiving a negative review doesn’t necessarily lead to less sales, for example, a recent goodreads reviewer for a scifi book disliked it because it was too heavy on technical detail, and to light on action, which is what prompted me to buy the book in the first place since that’s the kind of thing I like.

    • I know bad reviews sell books about certain political philosophies, enough so that one writer used a death-threat review as the cover blurb for the second printing!

    • Thing is, when you write something, you don’t really know how it will be received by others. Something might be hated by one, and loved by nine hundred ninety-nine others. If that one happens to be the agency intern (do you really think the person with the name on the agency doors reads it?) – you’re being denied a rightful success story.

      It can be the reverse, too. Although there you usually need two to love your writing that the public at large won’t even buy as a doorstop.

      Best advice I can give is, if you can’t handle public rejection, don’t ever publish. Someone is going to hate it, guaranteed. If you can’t even handle private rejection, don’t write. Or at least think twice before you show it to anyone beyond Mommy…

  2. advice to wait six weeks to hear from an agent–bad adv

    call agents, dont write

    say your three sentences about your plot

    chances are they may say send it along, THEN they take six weeks

    otherwise youre shooting blindfolded

    gaming amazon, etc. It is done every day. I rec’d an email yesterday about how so and so’s book is number one — in the cat of pens that dont work but are beautiful

    amz has kajillion categories for #1s. not only six, nyt, usatoday, lat, chi trib,pw, wapo etc; seems a strange thing to be number one in one of a zillion cats very few will search for

    This particular article, has at least 6 pieces of bad publishing advice that new writers should ignore, plus a couple of dubious claims; never heard the one about being indie means no rejection. You kidding, sometimes our dogs walk away from food provided for them first thing i the morning. Rejection, thy name is life.

    • Calling agents or editors to pitch your book is horrible advice because:

      1. Agents and editors or anyone engaged doing business don’t want their time consumed fielding unwelcome pitches from you.

      2. Most books, especially non-fiction, are hard to summarize effectively in three sentences.

      3. The moment someone picks up the phone, you’ll become tongue tied and blow your smooth pitch, and you only have one shot at this.

      • Peter Winkler,

        3. The moment someone picks up the phone, you’ll become tongue tied and blow your smooth pitch, and you only have one shot at this.

        That’s why you write that stuff down and read it from the card.

      • Peter Winkler, that’s the way I and others in my cohort did it. We are all non-fiction writers. And not every book but many are bestsellers from trad with agents.

        And yes, three sentences. Or less. “Ive a completed book about x, my expertize/creds are y.

        Worked for us .

        Your mileage may vary

      • Back when I was still trying to get an agent, one of the most consistent things I saw that agents absolutely hate is being called by a writer trying to pitch rather than sending a query letter as is standard. They made it sound like it would utterly blacklist you, like it made them so uncomfortable it was practically stalking. Are there exceptions where it’s worked for writers? I don’t doubt it. But these days, given that it seems to put you on the s***list of pretty much any and all agents–and the fact that most likely you wouldn’t even get through to an agent, only their secretary/intern, who is almost certainly instructed not to put such calls through–I would never suggest an author looking for an agent call the agency to pitch their book.

        (I write fiction, so my agent research was limited to fiction. Maybe non-fic is different, though I can’t recall ever seeing an agent say, “Oh, but it’s fine if you’re a non-fiction writer. It’s only super creepy stalkery annoying for fiction writers.”)

        • I”d just venture pretty much, having social lunches with agents in ny and chi that the ms is going to be the deciding factor no matter one’s approach

          Agents –unless they are adjudicatedly insane– wont pass up an interesting sounding ms. No matter how they hear about it. Their control is saying yes or no.

          I’ve not found agents to be ‘bad mood people What they dont want to ee, like readers dont want to see, a crp ms that the author’s mother thinks is great –confederacy of dunces notwithstanding, though i found it unreadable

          the fabled mss writ on TP and rumpled yellow pages all crossed out, still find their way, IF the story/ content shines.

          If I were going to advise today were a new writer want an agent. Id say go to conferences were the young and hungry ones hang.

  3. “If you think agent rejections are hurtful, your first Goodreads review will send you into screaming agony.”

    The most common myth I see amongst tradpub authors is that only an agent and developmental editors can turn your pile of cap into a read worthy manuscript…

    LIES.

    My first book has over 300 reviews on Goodreads and it’s rocking a 4.34 avg. I am by no means a perfect writer. I do one pass, send it to the copy editor (no one gets a say on my stories but me) then I do another quick pass and publish. 7 books total and none of them are less than a 4 avg. Most are 4.2 to 4.7.

    In other words, I’m sorry your a crap author op. I always suggest people who need their hand held and someone to tell them how to tell a story, trytradpup.

  4. I have 10 books and on average for 350 reviews, I’m rocking a 4.14. I rewrote 2 earlier books and the average is coming up on them.

    I’ll hear about a new author and then I’ll look at their Goodreads reviews and wonder why a major publishing house (Minotaur) bother with books two and three when #1 book has a 3.2 rating. The next two books are averaging 3.3. When you see books with reviews like that, you have to thing the agent and editor don’t know what they’re doing.

    • Reviews don’t always track sales.

      Especially on the print side where a lot of sales go to people who don’t read the book right away or at all. The old habits of hoarding interesting-seeming books haven’t fully gone away. More, not everybody checks online reviews or trusts them. Or bothers to post online reviews for every book they mildly like.

      Another possibility is that some books are simply polarizing; some love it, some hate it. Even when not, some might see is as a 4, some a 3.9, some a 2. Tastes vary and aggregate ratings are not reflective of every single person in the review pool.

      Don’t know if publishing has any received wisdom about sales for sequels and series but Hollywood rule of thumb is that a sequel of a successful movie will open to at least 75% of the first. The exception in modern times are superhero movies where the sequel for a new, successful character will do better than the original because people who wouldn’t risk money on the first but caught it on TV will go to see the now familiar character.

      So a book with mediocre reviews might, for a variety of reasons, still project to sell enough to justify releasing the sequels still under contract…

      …or maybe the author has compromising video of the editor stashed somewhere.

      • L ron hubbard comes to mind, Felix, years ago his crews mob-reviewing lol. But… Lots of minus reviews. Still sells many

        • I still remember the review of BATTLEFIELD EARTH at Asimov’s.

          It went along the lines of: “Hubbard stopped writing Science Fiction in the 30’s. Apparently, he thinks everyone else did too.” 🙂

  5. One of the most curious aspects of the tsunami of author-advice bloggers out there is the fact that in almost every case — based on a quick perusal of their online review counts — the self-designated publishing experts who write these blogs:

    1) Do not appear to have achieved notable numbers of online sales with any of their own books…

    2) But do appear to be deriving significantly more revenue from their Kindle author-advice books, which are presumably being purchased by other authors, than from sales of their own fiction books.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that also Author Solutions’ business model?

    plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

    • -grin- Isn’t that what happened during the Goldrush as well? Most miners stayed poor but the butcher, baker, candlestick maker made a fortune on the goldfields. 🙂

    • Meh, there’s a long and storied history behind the phrase “Those who can’t, teach.” It doesn’t change the value of the teaching (for good or ill). But the simple fact is that people with less talent inevitably spend significantly more time learning how to improve their abilities, and then still can’t do the job well enough to make a living doing it. But boy, do they know the job like the back of their hand.

      Hence, those who can’t, teach.

      Its not all scammers and people looking to make a quick buck. Some people (a lot, actually) poured significant time into learning the process, and still can’t do it well enough to earn a living. Doesn’t mean their knowledge is useless. Its just useless to them. It can be quite valuable to the right student.

  6. The biggest lie:

    That there is any one-size-fits-all advice regarding publishing, because one or more of the following applies to every author (in no particular order):

    * The advice that sounds meaningful is from a different one of the thirteen distinct publishing industries

    * The advice that sounds meaningful is based upon the personal experiences of someone at a different time or from a noncomparable background

    * The author’s objectives are different from those of the individual offering advice, such as the notorious “create art/get rich” purported “divide” that is not so much a division as emphasis

    * The advice itself hasn’t been run through counsel (e.g., the OP’s comment about “in perpetuity” clauses, cf. Lampack v. Grimes)

    * The advice assumes certain completeness and quality parameters to the author’s work that are… umm, ok, I’ll be polite… not founded upon anything the author has done to date (note: sometimes this cuts both ways!)

    * The advice is founded upon a business model with unstated productivity parameters (“more than three but fewer than a dozen book-length releases over the next thirty-six months” is an incredibly common one… and to understand why you’d have to know how “seasonality” fits with publishing, with book retailing both brick-and-mortar and otherwise, with…)

    I’ve been working with the publishing industries for over three decades, and almost exclusively for the last two decades. I’ve come across two pieces of advice that actually work:

    (1) The correct answer to any question about darned near any aspect of publishing, at any length in any forum, is “it depends.” And I would have said that before I went to law school, too.

    (2) Attempting to apply principles stated by outliers (either persons or events) as if they are universal is dumb, self-defeating, and usually reminiscent of Professor Harold Hill and Hoop Dreams. Just think for a moment about the attempts to “replicate” the success of Jonathan Livingston G/u/a/n/o/Seagull

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