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."

Reason #8: What's Your Exit Strategy?

Are you "Stay the course", or "Cut and run"? How many novels and stories do you have in the field? How many more are you prepared to deploy?

Recent discussion on various blogs has centred around the idea of quitting writing. The broad consensus seems to be that a writer will inevitably return to writing, in the same way that a chronic masturbator cannot look at their open palm without fleetingly wondering where the nearest bathroom is.

But you can call yourself a 'writer' without any requirement to actually produce anything, which is why it's so difficult to define 'quitting'. Quitting implies failure, or at least non-success, and you can't fail if you never set any standard for yourself.

You can call yourself a 'carpenter' too, but unless you eventually produce a table, you're just whittling.

If you have a goal for your writing, some measure of success, then by definition you have a threshold for failure. The only variable is time - how much you're prepared to waste. If you have no measure of success, then your writing will only ever be good by accident.

If you're only writing to 'please yourself', well, the bathroom is second on the left.

Reason #7: Publishing is Dying

These statistics have done the blog-cha-cha in the last few weeks:

In 2004, Nielsen Bookscan tracked the sales of 1.2 million books in the United States and here's what they came up with:

• Of those 1.2 million, 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies.
• Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies.
• Only 25,000 books sold more than 5,000 copies.
• Fewer than 500 sold more than 100,000 copies.
• Only 10 books sold more than a million copies each.
• The average book in the United States sells about 500 copies.

(From Bookends, where it seems to have started, though they claim otherwise. A print-on-demand shill calls it evidence of a "dying industry". Miss Snark weighs in with caveats.)

If you read these points (particularly the last three) and think "Hey, only 500 copies, what's the point of even trying?", then I say:

Bravo! Stop writing, and you'll have more time to read books written by people better than you.

Now, there are many reasons why these statistics are not representative of the industry as a whole. (They track ISBNs, not titles; they only count 70% of the retail market; the 1.2M figure includes backlist, small press, print-on-demand and even calendars; they don't include Amazon or WalMart; this only covers the US market, etc.)

But based on these numbers, the reports of the death of the industry are greatly exaggerated. Even on the most conservative interpretation of these figures, the top 25,000 books sold at least 180 million copies, an average of 7,200. (Make up a number for the unaccounted sales.)

Do you think there are 25,000 books in the world that are worth a damn? If you haven't cracked the top 25,000 yet, should we feel sorry for you?