Read Part 2 here

Read Part 3 here

Read Part 4 here

The Writer’s Life In A Changing World—Lower Expectations?

In his insightful blog, Seth Godin offers two separate lists (list 1, list 2) of marketing tips for writers. I want to reflect a bit on what he has in the number-one position on each list; they’re closely related:

1. Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don’t expect much. (2005)

1. Please understand that book publishing is an organized hobby, not a business. The return on equity and return on time for authors and for publishers is horrendous. If you’re doing it for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.

On the other hand, a book gives you leverage to spread an idea and a brand far and wide. There’s a worldview that’s quite common that says that people who write books know what they are talking about and that a book confers some sort of authority. (2006)

Any comparison of the number of books published versus the number of authors making useful amounts of money at it is damn sobering stuff. Seth Godin certainly has his facts straight. The odds are definitely against you achieving anything that resembles business success.

I have, however, a question about lowering our expectations. Does the unlikelihood of ever realizing material success or fame from your writing mean you should lower your expectations? Or should you, instead, adopt different sets of expectations—aligned with marketplace realities—that are high nonetheless?

I have a lot of respect for Seth Godin, especially because he makes me think hard about things. Moreover, I think he’s right, but only to a point. This man, who’s forgotten more about marketing than I’ll ever know, is somewhat off the mark here. What he said applies only to your business expectations. Here’s why that’s important:

We need to draw a clear distinction between our artistic expectations and our business expectations. We need to be sure we’re looking through the right lens. Business expectations for a clear, useful and timely non-fiction work about designing eBooks should be different from those for a volume of haiku by an unknown poet.

But artistic expectations don’t have much to do with business expectations. It is our artistic expectations that drive us to create, and we mess ourselves up badly if we conflate the two. Of course you’d like to earn your living from your art, but that doesn’t make being an artist anything close to a realistic business proposition. It’s dicey at best, and writing poetry, fiction or songs means going into a business where there’s always more supply than demand. (If you write nonfiction, your chances of business success are somewhat improved). But, more often than not, being an artist and earning a living are two different challenges.

Artists cannot survive, however—much less thrive—on lowered expectations. We have to “shoot for the moon” or not even bother showing up. Here’s my list for recalibrating artistic expectations in the light of marketplace realities.

1. Produce the very best, most authentic art you’re capable of.
2. Write a poem or story or song that touches the heart and inspires others to believe in their innate capacity to achieve.
3. Do everything within your power to put your work as far out into the stream as possible so that it may touch as many lives as possible—regardless of whether you ever see a penny of return.
4. Always strive to create works of surpassing truth and beauty—the highest that you know and then reach higher.
5. Never stop growing and, in changing yourself, change the world

We all have access to the same tools of creation, production and distribution. Our only obstacle is our own limiting thoughts and fears.

In conclusion, a new poem on this matter:

Aspiration

Fully admitting
That fame or money is unlikely

And only a near anonymous life
Perfecting that which may not

Exceed our own,
Toward what should we aspire?

For truth
And beauty

And gratitude to this
Consciousness of all

Only if this is sufficient
Count yourself an artist

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I watched this documentary last night mainly on the strength of its trailer. The reviews on iTunes were pretty mixed, but something told me this film just might be really good. It was, and now I want my wife and kids to watch it and discuss it. And I want to recommend it to anyone who thinks I’m a reasonably thoughtful person, who’d never recommend anything I did not believe was genuinely worthwhile.

The trailer does a good of telling you what I AM is about. All I can add that is that it’s an intelligent, provocative and well-crafted look at whether we are actually more competitive or collaborative by nature.  I think you’ll be left wanting to learn more, which is a good thing.

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Read Part 2 here

Read Part 3 here

What’s Changing For Writers? The Need For New Curators

From the writer’s standpoint all the changes I’ve been enumerating contain a lot of good news/bad news. The more-level playing field that the Internet has created also means almost a complete absence of standards and an enormous lack of (or opportunity for) credible curators to bring the best new work to the attention of receptive audiences.

To be sure, this is a complicated issue. Publishers (and, in particular, book editors) are still performing this task along with literary critics. But they also do not command the degree of consumer attention they once did, and so are less determiners of what gets read or discussed. Simultaneously, the culture has shifted considerably, and being a published author does not necessarily command the attention or confer the gravitas it may once have.

Change is messy. New curators are emerging, and more will undoubtedly build followings, command attention and earn permission in the coming years. Similarly, new authors are emerging, who can command the attention of considerable audiences not easily or otherwise swayed by big publishing’s imprimatur.

An excellent example of one of these new curators is Seth Godin. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it’s unlikely that you haven’t encountered his ideas about marketing and particularly his ideas about permission marketing and the disruptive power of eBooks.

For the past year, he has been conducting The Domino Project with an eye toward seeing what he could accomplish publishing the works of others. He has now published, “twelve books, twelve bestsellers, published in many languages around the world.” Here’s a link to The Last Hardcover, one of his latest blog posts that talks specifically about what he’s learned from the experience. I suggest it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the changing publishing landscape. And while I’m at it—here are useful links to two of his blog posts on marketing directed at writers: Advice For Authors #1  and Advice For Authors #2. These also are not optional reading.

His last hardcover book is a short poem by Sarah Kay, which she presented at TED in 2011. Sarah’s entire TED talk below runs a little over eighteen minutes, but I’m pretty sure you’ll not only be thoroughly charmed, but feel it’s been time well-spent. If all this is starting to feel like something new, fresh, relevant and quite a departure from the familiar past, then you and I are in violent agreement.

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I’ve been working on what turned out to be a short ten-line poem for the past three days. Several times a day, I told myself to just throw it away and start something else. Yet something else, writer’s instinct—for lack of anything better to call it urged me not to. This morning around 4AM I woke with not just the two final lines, but a deeper understanding of what the poem wanted to be. I also woke to a flood of memories from my first year teaching Freshman English and Creative Writing at Memphis State University. But first the poem:

On This Corner Of Quiet Streets

On a plum tree
Outside their garden wall

Buds unfurl
In the still April air

On one branch overhanging
A small bird calls and calls

An unopened letter beside her
She sits

Waiting to confirm
What her heart already knows

Back when I taught college freshman and sophomores about poetry, I began by dividing all poetry into poems of statement or non-statement—illustrating this principle by contrasting two brilliant poems:  W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”  and William Carlos William’s  “This Is Just To Say.”

Auden’s poem expresses what he wants to say directly, while William’s poem works by implication. For the past two years, most of the poems I’ve written have fallen into the poetry of statement category. Lying awake in the early morning, solution at hand, I realized I’d shifted to a poem of non-statement.

I had no such thought (or any other I recall) when I wrote the first line of this poem, nor did that even turn out to be the poem’s first line ultimately. On the contrary, I stilled my thoughts and let words rise to consciousness. Then I started the more conscious process of working with what came.

Only instinct born of a lifetime of writing kept me at it. Even with that, I felt frustrated with myself and this lousy poem that was going nowhere more than a few times. Yet something kept drawing me back to the words and the images—until gradually they formed themselves on the page with a certain inevitability. And I knew it was done (well, more or less).

Writers depend on many things: their instinct, intuition, experience, craft, knowledge of the work of others, and, ultimately, something mysterious and wonderful and larger than our little selves that draws us ever forward to discover what else we might contain. Encountering the mystery is the biggest part of why we keep writing.

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Read Part 2 Here

Collaboration Versus Competition

Back when I was starting out, writers were in friendly (and sometimes not so friendly) competition with one another. This competitive climate was driven largely by the fact that access to publishers and publication was restrictive, and (in the academic scene at least) a lot depended upon whom you knew and whether or not they liked and recommended you. Access to the major and lesser publishing houses is, of course, still highly restricted, but their sphere of influence is not what it once was. Writers now have alternatives—with self-publishing becoming more mainstream everyday.

But, in addition to leveling the playing field considerably, the Internet has done much to alter the basic nature of the relationship between artists—from somewhat competitive to generally more collaborative. There are a lot of reasons driving this as a general shift or trend. Here are just a few:

Artists have always formed successful collaborative relationships, so I’m not talking about something entirely new. But writers and artists of every genre are recognizing that they are fundamentally not in competition with one another. Your audience is in all likelihood not my audience, and, besides, we are part of a global marketplace of 6.9 billion people. It’s a big place. We have far more to gain by collaborating and sharing information and resources than by adopting some outmoded, competitive stance. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a brand-new game. Most of us are just trying to figure stuff out as fast as we can to discover what works. There’s never been a time when holding your cards close to your vest made less sense.

I’ll take this one step further and suggest that this shift is actually part of a much larger global shift. This new wired-world of ours generally works better collaboratively than it does competitively. To be sure, it’s still a very competitive world, but this shift towards more collaborative models of working is pervasive and inevitable. I’ve been watching this trend in my corporate consulting work for years now—with the development of virtual global teams and cross-organizational cooperation.

Since we writers (and artists generally) are usually resource-constrained, collaborative efforts are even more advantageous to all concerned—especially when it comes to leveraging technology to build platforms for our work.

Finally, the Internet is providing us with so many more points of contact and ways to work collaboratively. It has never been easier to work with other artists, regardless of their geographical location. The single, biggest limitation on all of us is time, but then there’s nothing new about that.

Finally, a new poem to start out the week:

Compassion

With some, compassion takes root
In their suffering and gives birth
To a fiery impulse to serve,
Yet others
Merely turn bitter

Why?

Perhaps, because
While some assume
They are alone in their pain,
Others see
That they are not

© 2011 Press Forward Publications, Richard Geller, Madison CT

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What are the odds of earning your living as a creative writer? 

This is one of those questions—the kind that perhaps you don’t want the answer to. Oh, we all readily acknowledge the odds are long, but perhaps we’d rather not know just how long. Besides, we love writing too much to let lousy odds discourage us.

Personally, I wish I had examined this question a bit more critically when I was in graduate school, not because it would have made any difference to my decision to pursue a writer’s life. It might have, however, dramatically altered early on my expectations around what success would look like and thereby saved me some anguish.

Okay,  you might want to stop reading right now….

Statistics about writers are not easy to come by. Apparently, we’re not a group economists are particularly interested in when they study the health of the economy. Here are a few facts I found in a recent Google search:

“Authors, writers and editors held about 281,300 jobs in 2008. Writers and authors held about 151,700 jobs and editors held about 129,600 jobs. About 70 percent of writers and authors were self-employed, while 12 percent of editors were self-employed.”  Bureau of Labor Statistics – US Dept. of Labor

Full disclosure: I’m among this numerically select group of 151,700 working writers. I’ve been a working freelance writer (corporate communications/training) for the last 25+ years, which is just another way of saying I’m a wannabe full-time creative writer with a day job. How many people actually make their living being poets, novelists or songwriters?

This guesstimate comes by way of Ray Chesna, a musician friend of mine, who has a rather dramatic and helpful way of demonstrating that at any moment the supply of really good musicians (and music) far exceeds anyone’s capacity to listen to it all by a huge factor.

Let’s assume there are 300 million people in the US—perhaps 1% of whom are actively writing novels, plays, short stories, poems, memoirs, songs etc. in the hopes of making a living. That would be three million of us. Of those three million hopeful or benighted souls (depending upon your point of view), what percentage of us do you think actually make a living without a day job?

My most optimistic guess would be a lot less than .01%, or less than three-thousand out of three million. Do you believe there are even 3000 poets, playwrights, novelists, story and songwriters in the US making a living without another gig? Is that odds of a-thousand-to-one against? Personally, I doubt they’re even that good.

My point is that the writer’s life probably means having a day job, and having a day job is not a good indicator of your success or lack of it.  So, what does success look like as a creative writer? I’d suggest, that’s a question worthy of some reflection—even more so in fast, changing times.

Success And Failure 

The world offers all sorts
Of stories and images
Of the successes
And failures of others

Or we can choose to craft
Our own
Definitions

Only these
Are ever real

Or satisfying

Read this and other poems in True Worldly Things by Richard Geller

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What’s changed? Basically everything other than writing. Here are my top seven things that are changing:

What’s changing for writers? No gates

Even if the gatekeepers  haven’t quite gotten the word, anyone who wants to can cost-effectively publish a professional-looking volume, provided they’re willing to learn the basics of self-publishing and hire competent freelance talent as needed.

What’s changing for writers? A more level playing field

Marketing is the name of the game, and most big publishers are just not that good at it anymore. The reasons include:

What’s changing for writers? The loss of critical influence

Literary critics in particular do not enjoy the influence over book marketing they once did. Reviews and ads in prestigious newspapers or journals are no guarantee of sales. Literary critics have eroded much of their credibility, and, even with book clubs, their influence is now trumped by word-0f-mouth. Rightly or wrongly, literary critics are less likely to be viewed as offering independent, informed critical opinion and, more likely, as the shills of big publishers. Similarly, the university, the literary canon and academic scholarship holds far less sway over what gets read and discussed.

What’s changing for writers? The loss of publishers’ marketing power

Books now compete for attention with a diversity of media unimaginable a decade ago. And the biggest of the publishers are not, for the most part, known for being anything but big. Their imprints no longer carry the same prestige and authority with consumers they once did. Only the exceptional, smaller imprint is actually known for something. For example, Lonely Planet is well-respected among travelers for providing reliable, useful information for those with more adventurous inclinations. What is Random House known for?

What’s changing for writers? The internet

Everyone with a computer has universal  access to a global marketplace. For example, my work at aSiteAboutSomething receives on average four thousand visits a month from up to 68 countries. POD and eBooks are rapidly making global distribution a reality for anyone who can learn to brand and market him or her self by building a viable platform. The opportunity is there for almost anyone who really wants access.

What’s changing for writers? The artist as marketer

At one time, you might have imagined some wise, kind-hearted publisher or promoter who would recognize your talent and shepherd your career for you. In all likelihood—not happening. If you want in to this game, you’re the brand, and you’re going to have to learn how to market yourself and what you do—the one exception  being if you create art with a mass-market appeal. Again, that’s not most of us.

What’s changing for writers?  No clear path(s)

For most artists, this is the time of DIY (do it yourself) marketing. Writers and artists have always had to promote themselves, but not to extent necessary today. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to follow. Websites, blogs, YouTube, social media, readings, performances, newspapers, journals, contests, radio, TV, etc.—absolutely everything is potentially part of the mix. It’s pretty much up to you to figure it out—with the usual your results may vary caveat. Beyond developing your craft, there’s a lot of other stuff to learn and to try out. It has simply never been less clear how to go about building an audience for your work.

Which brings me back to the question of why we write—especially when it’s all such a “blooming confusion?” Fame and fortune are, at best, improbable outcomes of the artist’s life, and that’s always been true. This pursuit of something true, useful and beautiful is, however, seductive and oddly satisfying. And, despite all the changes welcome or not, because I have to. How about you?

Read Part 2 here

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Deep inside, I think
Most writers understand
This world is crazy

That everyone is simply pursuing
Whatever it is
They think will make them happy

And all that desire
Inevitably
Consumes our world in wars

Ponzi schemes, pollution and falsehoods,
Even as its beauty and its pain
Enchants and puzzles us

And we write in search
Of a surer path to happiness
For ourselves and each other.

I think sometimes
How naïve we are.
And then I write the lines

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Some thoughts after reading Fast Company’s “The Inside Story Of Occupy Wall Street:”

Those old enough to remember the civil rights movement and the anti-Viet Nam war protests of the 60′s, know that fundamental change does not really come from Washington. “When the people lead, the leaders will follow” is unfortunately closer to the truth—unfortunate only because things have to get pretty bad before large numbers of people take to the streets in protest. But this cycle has been repeated often enough that there should be no surprise when it does happen.

We are at another such point in our history when government has become so thoroughly dysfunctional, so firmly committed to maintaining the status quo, that fundamental reforms are required to assure the most basic expectations of any stable modern society: universal, affordable access to quality education and healthcare, an economic Bill of Rights for all citizens, renewal of infrastructure, the rule of law, and a restoration of government’s system of checks and balances.

When we have hundreds of thousands marching on Washington and in all the cities of this country, some of our elected representatives will awaken to the urgent need for reform. For now, they are in denial that they are (both Democrats and Republicans) wholly out of step with reality.

Properly framed, there are only seven or so basic issues that most Americans expect their elected officials to work, and no political rhetoric of finger-pointing and fear mongering, whether from the right or the left, will hide their failure to do the actual job for which they’re elected.

For most, I suspect their time has passed. We need younger representatives, who understand the world as it is now, who are ready to work the real problems and seek viable, sustainable solutions and not those who stubbornly cling to a world that no longer exists.

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When I was a poor graduate student at the Poetry Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, my first big purchase was an IBM Selectric. It was an amazing machine, because it gave me the ability to switch type fonts and correct without Wite-Out.  Next, I heard about the first Wang word processors that only large corporations could afford. (I wanted one of those so badly!) But in the early 80′s the first personal computers appeared, and I bought an IBM PC and ran WordPerfect. My first Apple was a IIci, and it (and subsequent Macs) changed my life again and again with: desktop publishing, video editing,  the internet, online marketing, self-publishing, and audio recording.

The bottom line for me is that, for over a quarter of a century, Macs have been at the center of my creative life—a key enabler of my dream of getting my work further out into the stream.

If you do one thing, watch Steve Job’s 15-minute graduation address to the Stamford Class of 2005. I promise you it’s worth your time. Thanks, Steve, RIP.

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