A Hierarchy of Authors (Overview)

A Hierarchy of Authors examines the scope of writing success, viewed as a career ladder that most writers will never climb.

(It might be slightly less depressing if you read the parts in reverse order.)

Part One

• The Canon - "Their work is so subtle and complex that if you don't appreciate it, it's your fault."
• The Blockbuster - "The quality of their novels may fade over the years, but with a yard of shelf space in every bookstore in the Western world, who cares?"
• The Bestseller - "They've reached the point where it takes a streak of four utterly shit novels for readers to start losing interest."

 Part Two

• The Breakout - "They make it look all too easy, primarily because the author has no fscking idea how it happened."
• The Debut - "The possibility of an undiscovered Faulkner, Joyce, Chandler, Asimov, and the subsequent opportunity to boast about reading them."
• The Midlist - "Where most published authors remain until their careers quietly die."

Part Three

• The Indie - "There are two kinds of independently published author: those on the way up, and those on the way down."
• The Short - "The author of seven hundred short stories, eighty of which have been published in such luminous periodicals as Skokie, Illinois After Dark."
• The Vain - "The Vain decide to stick it to the man, and get their message out the old fashioned way - by getting scammed."

Part Four

• The Slushdweller - "The Slushdweller lives in a hovel made of rejection slips, glued with the salivations of their own umbrage."
• The Bottom Drawer - "They hope their failing is some deficiency of skill, because they understand that their deficiency of talent is pretty permanent."

Part Five

• The Unfinished - "The Unfinished sometimes get pretty good at beginnings, but their endings suck - mainly because the end comes when the middle runs out of steam."
• The Wannabe - "They feed the fantasies that lead others into the perpetual disappointment of a lifetime spent writing badly."

A Hierarchy of Authors, Part Five

The bowels of Hell are dark, miserable, and densely populated with the lonely souls of people who betrayed the very concept of creativity by calling themselves authors. We've passed beyond the levels where the term has any real meaning - here there be liars.

The Unfinished - The Unfinished are "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" in the morning, and "I woke up and it was all a dream" in the afternoon. They wake up with a Great Idea For A Novel, start writing after the coffee kicks in, and burn out after ten pages of meandering backstory that wouldn't survive to the second draft, if they ever got that far. They believe their talent is a wellspring that will spontaneously pour forth onto the page, unfiltered by anything as unnatural as thinking about plot, character or theme. When the spring runs dry, they find themselves having to think - about the next Great Idea For A Novel.

The Unfinished sometimes get pretty good at beginnings, but their endings suck - mainly because the end comes when the middle runs out of steam. They find no joy in the experience of writing - the idea doesn't translate perfectly into words, and inspiration rapidly becomes work. The result just doesn't live up to the rough-cut movie running in their head, so they try writing screenplays. (I'd point out that the odds of selling a screenplay make writing novels seem like an even bet - but they are the Unfinished, and so won't ever find out that the footprints of famous filmstars outside Mann's Theatre are set in cement made with the powdered bones of bad writers who tried to shop a spec script to Darryl Zanuck.)

They call the stillborn results of their failed ideas fragments, in the hope that some morning they'll wake up with a Great Idea For An Experimental Novel. The fragments accumulate, eventually creating a simulacrum of a Bottom Drawer - which to the Unfinished, feels like achievement.

The Wannabe - Also known as the Bullshit Artist, which appropriately describes their position relative to Satan. The Wannabe seems harmless enough, because the ones you notice are office workers who had "an idea for a story" years ago and waste one lunchtime a month talking to someone about how they'll "take up writing" when they retire. Or that stoner friend of a friend who thinks that they could outwrite Kafka if only they could get the mix of acid and window cleaner just right, and could figure out how to operate a ballpoint pen inside their skull.

The harmless ones are easy to spot: just listen for the phrase "I've always wanted to be a writer." They think the job of being a writer must be easy, because that famous guy does it, and they could do it so much better than that guy, if only some telepathic publishing magnate would stop them on the street and offer them a lifetime job as a bestseller. They're harmless because it never occurs to them that writing is a verb.

But the dangerous Wannabes are the ones you don't immediately recognise. They think they are writers. They're the ones who carry notepads and interrupt someone's after dinner anecdote with "That's witty/hauntingly truthful/emotionally black, can I just write that down." They emulate the speech, mannerisms, and public activities of the writer, well enough to convince Slushdwellers, Bottom Drawers and The Unfinished that they've found a kindred spirit. They can be found wherever writers gather: conventions, signings, bookstores, community colleges and unemployment offices. They wax lyrical about theme and metaphor, bemoan the state of the industry, and demonstrate an encyclopedic recall of misunderstood writer's quotations and bogus literary criticism. They consider their advice on writing so profound, they organise critique groups or teach writing classes in order to dispense it.

The one thing they don't do, ever, is actually write something.

And therein lies the secret to spotting them: ask to read something they've written. Even the Unfinished will offer to dedicate their novel to you if you would just read the ten pages they've written so far. Like that hot chick with the adam's apple who keeps making excuses why she'll give you a hummer but won't let you handle the junk, the Wannabe will find some eloquently bullshit excuse, about maintaining the purity of the work in progress, or not wanting to spoil you for other writers. Keep pressing. Ask for details of their latest opus, where they've submitted in the past. Track their progress as the lies expand. It is the only way to get them to stop (pretending to be) writing.

Why? Because they make writing look easy. They feed the fantasies that lead others into the perpetual disappointment of a lifetime spent writing badly. They perpetuate the myth that anyone can do it, that the only difference between Shakespeare and an accidental rhyme scrawled on a blank Christmas card is a few "lucky breaks". The would like nothing better than to see writing reduced to a pastime, where only the activity matters, and no-one judges the result. Only then will they feel secure enough to start writing. God help us all if that happens.

We've reached the very bottom, the Thirteenth circle of Writer's Hell, directly below Satan's anus, encrusted with rejected manuscripts and ever-ready to deliver a steaming pile of slush and false inspiration. There is no path to Publishing Purgatory from here, no Untold Secret of Writing that will lead us back.

The only way out is to stop writing.

A Hierarchy of Authors, Part Four

The previous installments of A Hierarchy of Authors (see parts One, Two and Three) covered every measurable strata of success in the laudable occupation of telling really long lies for money. (That is, of course, if you think that the noble art of storytelling can be measured at all, let alone on the basis of something as crass or as irrelevant to the true writer as monetary reimbursement, or readers.)

This is the penultimate stage of our journey. We've now reached the lower levels of Hell, where murderers and traitors compete with bad writers to soothe the pain of eternal damnation by drinking deeply of the Devil's seminal emissions. If you find your likeness amongst these lower levels, eyeball to, um, ball with The Fallen One - he who created the slushpile submissions process and whose urine is mixed with the ink on every first novel contract - verily, I say, you must stop writing, ere you fall prey to His sweet seductions as He bids ye to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Vanity Publishing.

The Slushdweller - The mound of unsolicited manuscripts in the corner of every agent and publisher's office is named after its most common inhabitant, and the strange material they exude. Most writers have to go through the slushpile, but the Slushdwellers live there, pitching tents and getting their mail redirected to 700,000 Word Vampire Novel, Thirteen From The Bottom.

The Slushdweller lives in a hovel made of rejection slips, glued with the salivations of their own umbrage. They are proud of their hovel of rejection, having deluded themselves that walls shellacked with publisher's letterhead and handwritten comments saying We only publish medical textbooks or Please do not send anything else ever will insulate them from the distractions of critical self-examination, creating an inspirational silence within that is in some way different from the disinterested silence outside.

The Slushdweller believes wholeheartedly that "good writing trumps all", including any external concept of "good writing". Yet they also simultaneously believe that publishing is a vast and insular conspiracy entirely staffed by ex-girlfriends and the teachers that hated them at school. They are convinced they are only stuck in the slushpile because they don't know The Secret, and think "Not right for us" is code for "I love this so much that I must prevent anyone else from ever reading it."

The Slushdweller outwardly manifests the trappings of misunderstood genius (greasy hair, coffee breath, and most of the clinical criteria for schizophrenia), but deep down, at a level of unconscious clarity they cannot tap into when writing, they do understand what keeps them in the slushpile: their writing is crap, and they have not learned a thing since they shovelled the first load into an envelope and licked it closed. But living in the slush becomes self-sustaining: disappointment becomes the expectation, so their ego is never challenged. They learn to crave the validation of the rejection slip, as the only external evidence that their thoughts even exist.

The Bottom Drawer - The Slushdweller with a sense of shame. (And by "Bottom Drawer" I mean a metaphor for a back catalogue of failed sure-fire-bestseller experiments, not your habit of doodling peachy arses on every flat surface.)

Unlike the Slushdweller, the Bottom Drawer is at least dimly aware that their writing sucks, so they prop up an entire industry of bogus writing advice, most of it written by marketing graduates who figure out it's easier to sell 50,000 words of "You Can Do It" to Bottom Drawers with delusions of Slushdwellerdom than to sell a three word slogan to Coca-Cola. They hope their failing is some deficiency of skill, because they understand that their deficiency of talent is pretty permanent.

The Bottom Drawer is capable of waffling through entire first draft manuscripts with alarming frequency, but is thankfully incapable of writing the kind of focused prose that might come in handy to summarise and describe their manuscripts. They're afraid of rejection, obviously, but they're reasonably confident that they can write a novel - they're more afraid of finding out they can't write a query letter. Their ego is so fragile that a single form rejection may be enough to make them stop writing completely. Let's hope so.

(Our journey concludes in Part Five.)

A Hierarchy of Authors, Part Three

When we left our examination of the Hierarchy of Authors (see Part One and Part Two), you might have been forgiven for thinking that the only step down from the Midlist was Unpublished. But noooooo. There are almost as many definitions of mere or non-success as there are pudgy-fingered writers, madly mashing keyboards in the hope that some random change to their manuscript will make it saleable. I've distilled these down to a few averages.

The Indie - When the publisher doesn't have a main office in New York. There are two kinds of independently published author: those on the way up, and those on the way down. There are also two kinds of independent publisher: those that started as a one-man operation out of a spare room, and those that still are.

Independents are a great venue for frustrated poets with an inheritance to play Big City Editor-in-Chief, gambling with the delicate aspirations of good-but-not-good-enough writers while he slowly realises that publishing involves many more decisions than "Wow this guy's the next Ginsberg". Independents are also a great venue for fallen Midlisters to wring out the last few dollars from their dwindling fanbase, re-releasing their early books as they fall out of contract in special "Limited Super Ultra Bound In Human Skin With All New Introduction" editions. When these two forces combine, the upper shelf behind the counter at your local comics shop will become the gathering point for pasty, salivating telemarketers trying to decide whether to forgo Batman or Legends of the Dark Knight for the next two years.

Independently published writers routinely break two of the Cardinal Rules of Publishing:

• Don't sell your book to a publisher if you don't own anything they've printed; and
• If your book has been rejected by every mainstream publisher, it's because it's shit.

The Short - The author of seven hundred short stories, eighty of which have been published in such luminous periodicals as Skokie, Illinois After Dark and Hard SF For People Who Love Diesel-Engined Locomotives. Also the author of seven novels, all of which are essentially four or five short stories glued together with a "framing device", more commonly known as padding. Has a filing cabinet full of contributor's copies, as much to prove to other Shorts that the magazines once existed, as to enshrine their bibliography for their children to giggle over in the decades to come.

You can tell a Short from their blog entries about how they "prefer the short story form" (Translation: "I've never had an idea worth more than twenty pages, or twenty bucks"). They desperately hope to become an Indie, as a temporary facsimile of success while they wait for Stephen King to publish On Writing II: Here's How To Write a Novel, You Dumbass.

And here we leave any pretense of real success behind, and continue down into:

The Vain - You probably think this one is about you. The Vain think that all agents and editors are fsckheads who couldn't recognise talent if it clobbered them over the head with the imagined object that will surely be the 2047 Nobel Prize for Literature. But the Vain will not lie down and take it up the slushpile.

No, the Vain decide to stick it to the man, and get their message out the old fashioned way - by getting scammed. They either pay through the nose to have copies printed by a vanity press that then sit in boxes in their basement until the next flood, or sign up to some print-on-demand mill who keep a digital copy of the book in case anyone ever orders it, which will not happen unless the Vain pays through the nose for "marketing". In any case, they demonstrate that their understanding of basic economics, and contracts, is as good as their assessment of the mainstream publishing industry. For every self-publishing success, there are thousands whose work, and cash, simply disappear.

Eventually the Vain will refer to their choice as self-publishing, to rationalise their colossal blunder and to pretend that they knew what they were doing in the first place. The Vain will forever describe themselves as a novelist, even though they sold exactly two copies to people they didn't already know. A few will learn the lesson, many will be doomed to repeat it, but most will eventually stop writing when they run out of discretionary income or basement space.

(Think we've hit the bottom of the barrel? Hardly. We still have to scrape it. See you in Part Four.)

A Hierarchy of Authors, Part Two

Continuing our Dantean descent through the levels of writing success (see Part One if you missed it). Take a look around, admire the view, then get your ass back on the elevator, buddy. We ain't reached your floor yet.

The Breakout - The answer to next year's "whatever happened to?" question. Every few years some perennial Midlister (see below) or took-ten-years-to-write freshman strikes it lucky with a novel that gets way more attention than it deserves. They make it look all too easy, primarily because the author has no fscking idea how it happened.

Sometimes it's because an advance reading copy was thrown over the walls around Fortress Oprah. Or because some random world event gave journalists short of detail on the breaking story the opportunity to waste airtime and column inches analysing the "parallels" in the book. Or because ... (shakes magic 8-ball) ... Rarely, it's because the novel is genuinely, accidentally brilliant.

It sounds like a good deal, and if you like your royalty payments on Big Cheques, it is. But the problems come when the sudden fanbase expects more of the same, and the publisher insists that the money train keep rolling on schedule. Which is a problem, because the author has no fscking idea how it happened.

The smart ones know how to handle breakout success. They stop writing.

The Debut - The debut novel holds a magical allure: the possibility of an undiscovered Faulkner, Joyce, Chandler, Asimov, and the subsequent opportunity to boast about reading them before they "get noticed", "sell out" and "go mainstream". People buy debut authors almost entirely because of this hopeless optimism.

Subconsciously, readers (and reviewers) go a little easy on debuts because "it's only their first novel". Unless it's utterly shit, people will say it "shows promise". Publishers take advantage of this because for most debuts, this is the only marketing angle.

Debut authors can go from "Am I really good enough yet? What if no-one buys it?" to "Hey, I'm kickass, where's my publicist?" in record time. Then the second-novel blues set in, when they realise that they got raped by their two-book deal and they won't see another dime until the publisher signs off on the next book, which is due next Tuesday.

The Midlist - where most published authors remain until their careers quietly die. Most biblio-historians agree that "Midlist" derives from a Latin phrase which means "everything that isn't a Bestseller", though there is some argument that comes from the Greek for "no marketing hook whatsoever".

Ninety percent of published authors are "midlist" because if their editors told them they were "bottom of the list" they'd never get the corrected proofs back. A few at the top of the midlist make enough to cover their mortgage, but every midlister finds that the second-novel blues is a permanent affliction. Most of them are effectively working a second job for $2 an hour, scribbling down the first draft at lunch while their colleagues at the Department of Transportation wear out every variation of "Mister Big Time Author is too important now to attend the health and safety seminar."

For most published authors, this is where the dream ends. You, however, are still dreaming of getting this far.

(On to Part Three.)

A Hierarchy of Authors, Part One

Writer and reviewer Bella Stander recently compiled A Taxonomy of Authors from the collective experiences of industry publicists. However, the list only relates to authors successful enough to be given a publicist to abuse and degrade. Most of you won't have that chance.

I present here an infinitely more useful Hierarchy of Authors, in order for you, Dear Reader, to find your place in this scheme, and to more clearly define your fantasies.

We'll begin by covering the authors at the top of the heap, the big cheeses, the lottery winners.

You're all entitled to one brief delusion that you might ever reach this level of success.

There you go.

The Canon - Authors who have changed lives, literature, the world. Authors who will be widely read, discussed and quoted a hundred years after the university you bequeath your notes to burns to the ground. Their work is so subtle and complex that if you don't appreciate it, it's your fault.

Those who are shortlisted for the Canon get laid by hot grad students for the rest of their lives. However, their sales never befit their status, and quality Chinese opium is more expensive than it was in the 1860's.

If I say You will never be this good, there's only a 1 in 100 million chance I'm wrong.

The Blockbuster - Authors who routinely sell in the millions because they routinely sell in the millions. Some of them make more money than Australia (especially now that our biggest export took one in the chest from a fish you can't even eat). The only thing they cannot buy is entry into the Canon - though it appears that some of them can't afford an editor. The quality of their novels may fade over the years, but with a yard of shelf space in every bookstore in the Western world, who cares?

A surprising number of them have easy-to-pronounce names, but if anyone knew the secret to becoming a Blockbuster, they wouldn't tell you. You have more chance of being hit by a car, then the driver dying mysteriously on your next birthday.

The Bestseller - They may not have their own picture printed on their money yet, but their publicists know not to leave any brown M&M's on the signing table. Newspaper reviewers compete to write the most fawning, quotable review because the Features Editor plays golf with them. They've reached the point where it takes a streak of four utterly shit novels for readers to start losing interest.

If you do everything right in your career, and come up with an endearing series character you can spin out forever, you may have one chance to become a Bestseller. (And I mean 'you' as in the collective readership of this blog, not actually you.)

What are your chances of ever being this successful?

Roll a dice. Count the number of times that it takes to roll five sixes in a row.

Now, tell everyone you know. That's as famous as you're ever going to get.

(On to Part Two.)