Nerdology 101: Patience
Hey loves, welcome back to Nerdology 101. This week I wanted to chat a little about how patience comes into play for authors of all kinds.
Misconceptions
I frequently see people talk about self-publishing like a short cut, but that is far from the case. Self-publishing is a career decision, but the truth is, it requires just as much patience as trad. It’s not a way to circumvent the query queue or avoid the pain of rejections. It’s just taking a different road. Self-publishers, like myself, have to wait on editing, wait on social media to discover us to make any money, send out applications and wait on answers from bookstores and conventions in order to get spaces that default to trad authors. All of these things take an insane amount of time—and I say that as an author who does hope to go trad one day soon. My reason for switching up doesn’t have to do with thinking either option requires more or less patience, or is anymore valid than the other. It has to do with the fact that I think trying to produce the new series I’m starting without more support would negatively impact my mental health and right now, I can’t afford to hire the level of support I would need without running the risk of hurting the quality of production. Whereas with the series I’ve already established, self-publishing didn’t have any negative impacts because it was just different. Different series come with different needs and visions. Deciding to self-publish something should mean you’ve decided it’s something you’re capable of producing to the quality standards and vision you have for it—not that you’re just too patient to wait on the trad industry to go through it’s process.
Secondly, I’d like to say that contrary to popular belief, self or trad published, agents WANT you to succeed as an author. Of course, there are exception, but I’ve had interaction with enough agents to know that most of them care deeply about authors and that there are even times where they reject a manuscript because they love it and think it deserves someone who can better represent it (more time, more clear vision, etc.). Yup, turns out most of them are just people doing something they love while trying to make sure they do right by all parties involved—including the author and themselves. The process is slow, but that’s because it’s human. For as much as the bookish community loathes AI, one would think we’d appreciate seeing signs of life a little more. I, for one, am glad when a reply takes a bit of time because no matter what the answer is, I feel substantially more confident that a human looked at my work and gave it thorough consideration than if a reply came in a few seconds.
Patience in Trad
Many people seem to forget that publishing is a waiting game. Waiting for a market to swing your way, waiting for an agent to reply to a query, then waiting for them to reply for a full, waiting for editiorial notes, waiting for publishers to answer once you’re on sub, waiting for cover design and blah, blah, blah. You’ll always be waiting for something. It’s highly unlikely that you sign a trad deal and instantly become that publishers first priority. If you do, that’s probably a huge red flag because I have no doubt every other author signed to them had things going on before you got there. If they drop all those people for you, won’t they eventually drop you for the next shiny, new author who comes along? Now, naturally, publishers will always put more into the people they think will bring in the most money, but the simple fact of the matter is that if they think you’ll rake in that much, that’s even more reason for them to slow down. Slow down so you don’t conflict with other big releases, slow down so they can put more time and money into design and marketing, slow down because mishandling the next bestseller could very well stop it from becoming the next bestseller.
Patience in Indie
Here’s the kicker, you can absolutely rush to print as an indie author. No one can tell you no. In fact, the first time around most authors make this mistake. I know I did. In all likelihood, though, the book will flop if you do that. The editing will be poor, the design will be poor, the marketing will be totally skipped over because you wouldn’t have had time to do it. You will almost certainly be doing yourself a disservice.
A self-published book should be going through every single step a trad published one does. You need developmental editing, line editing, copyediting, proofreading, typography, cover design, art design for any character art or map you want inside, file prep, marketing, and so on. If you skip any step, it’s likely to cost you. So, yeah, be patient and do the work. Then, keep being patient because most of the time, you’ll do that 3-5 times with 3-5 books as an indie author before you start gaining traction. The truth is, though, most indie authors will give up long before that happens. They’ll give up in the first year most likely. They’ll realize they’re hermeraging money, cut their losses, and move on. I hate to say it, but self-publishers do kind of have to suffer for their art. I’m sure trad authors do too in ways I’ve yet to discover because I’m not trad yet. There is no easy road in this industry. No fast road either. No matter what you do, you should expect it to take an excrutiating amount of time and energy, quite possibly money too because not every trad deal comes with a marketing budget the size of Saturn. Most people don’t even get Pluto and if you want to make it, you might have to take the difference out of your own pocket.
Post Publishing
Nikki St. Crowe was publishing for 20 years before Never King caught on. She didn’t stop. She kept going. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have written the book/series that made her a USA Today Bestselling Author. Tolkien was dead before LOTR caught on. A ton of authors have experienced this. I’ve seen people say that BookTok put an end to stuff like that and it won’t happen anymore, but I assure you it will. There are so many authors on BookTok. Readers are seeing so many book recs all the time and I’m sure it becomes easy for them to tune out the vast majority of them. So, it’s not even just possible, it’s probable that BookTok has scrolled past something that someone some day will stumble upon and next thing you know it’ll be huge. The accessibility of the internet is a double edge sword. Because so many people can reach readers, readers are seeing more things. They’re people and only have so many hours in a day. The more they see, the more selective they have to be about where they spend time and money. So, yes, you do probably have to wait post-publishing. You have to be willing to wait for your success even as you pursue it relentlessly because usually, it takes time.
That’s about it for this weeks segment of Nerdology 101. Hopefully you learned something. See you back next Friday for whatever I’ll be posting then (I’ll make sure I write it Saturday and get the topic reveals back on schedule.). Until then, have yourself a nerdy week!
