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The 5 Biggest MISCONCEPTIONS in Writing/Publishing

Published by Scott on October 1, 2021

Have you ever stopped writing a story because you just… didn’t care about it anymore?

Let’s go over four ways to come up with a story idea you’re passionate about, then practice together!

During the last stream, the subscribers voted that we go over the biggest misconceptions that I’ve learned about writing/publishing over the past 10 years.

The Biggest Misconceptions in Writing/Publishing
(a.k.a. What I’ve Learned the Hard Way)

  • I’ve been writing/working in writing for over 11 years, and in that time I’ve learned a lot
  • Of course I’ve learned a lot about the craft of writing, but today I want to focus on other stuff, FIVE things that I’ve learned about the “world” of writing itself
  • That includes publishing, readership, and lots of things that people outside of the writing world, and many people inside of it don’t know… or don’t like to acknowledge
  • Some of these things you might already personally know, but some of them you might not, and I hope that by going over them together, you might avoid some of the mistakes that I made!

#1 Misconception: Publishing is Merit Based

  • For those who don’t know, the typical route to be traditionally published goes: get a literary agent, your agent submits your book to publishing houses/editors, then your publisher submits your book to stores
  • That sounds simple enough, just get an agent and everything falls into place. Right?
  • Well, first off, let’s look at some numbers from actual literary agents:

  • Overall, agents get somewhere between 10-50 queries per day, depending on how popular they are
  • And they only sign on to work with 1-4 new authors per year
  • That means at best (only 10 queries per day and 4 new authors in a year) you have a 0.1% chance per agent, and at worst (50 queries per day and 1 new author in a year) you have a 0.005% chance per agent

That’s not very high!!

  • Even if your story is in the top 90 PERCENT of queries, that still only brings up your chances to 1% at best or 0.05% at worst
  • If you think, like I did, that you can simply write a great story and eventually stand out, unfortunately that’s not the truth
  • There are LOTS of ramifications of this, which we’ll go over

#2 Misconception: Writing Quality Matters

  • Many of us think that if we just write a great book, then someone will want to publish it
  • But looking at the numbers, mathematically, there are TONS of great books that are not getting published all the time

  • At the end of the day, what determines a book getting published has nothing to do with quality, it’s just luck
  • I know that sounds harsh, unfair and wrong, but let’s take a look at some famous examples:

Twilight was published by mistake: the inexperienced assistant at the agency didn’t know that young adult books were supposed to be under 60,000 words, and requested the 130,000 word manuscript. It should have gotten a form rejection e-mail!

Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703414504575001271351446274

Harry Potter was only published because, when the agent was on the fence about asking for more of the book, his young daughter read the first chapter and asked for the next one

Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/revealed-eight-year-old-girl-who-saved-harry-potter-296456.html

Brandon Sanderson, one of the most prolific fantasy authors of our time, was only given a chance at being published because he happened to meet an editor he’d submitted his manuscript to at a convention… which had been rejected 18 months earlier!

Source: http://shazarose.blogspot.com/2018/09/two-men-manuscript-how-i-got-moshe-to.html

All three of these authors and their books are beloved by millions of readers all over the world, but they were a hair’s breadth away from never seeing the light of day

  • Books have to pass a certain threshold of quality, but after they’ve passed that low threshold, all that matters is the agent’s/editor’s personal taste, how busy they are, whether or not they had a bad day, whether or not they took on a book in a similar genre recently, and a million other tiny, tiny things that we have absolutely no control over 
  • When I started writing, I thought that if I just kept learning and sending out books to agents, eventually I’d find success
  • But that’s not how it works. Remember the gambler’s fallacy: even if you’re 1% to get published, that doesn’t mean if you try 100 times you’ll succeed, it means every single time you try you have a 1% chance of success

#3 Misconception: Focusing on Just Writing is Good and Cool

  • In an effort to try and be a successful writer, I focused almost entirely on writing and very little else for almost 8 years
  • But that was a mistake for two reasons:

#1. Like we mentioned before, the odds of ever even getting published are, for all intents and purposes, zero

#2. Even if you are somehow miraculously published (like I was!) there is still zero guarantee of success

In 2018 the Author’s Guild posted a survey of over 5,000 professional writers, and the median income was $6,080 with only half of that actually coming from selling books

Source: https://bookriot.com/how-much-do-authors-make-per-book/

  • And then, even if you do find success, all it takes is one or two failures to take it all away
  • George RR Martin has talked before how, even after getting three Hugo Awards and huge advances, his 1983 novel “The Armageddon Rag,” was a flop and killed his career as an author for over ten years since no one would touch him

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/failure-nearly-made-apos-game-143043933.html

And nowadays that’s even more true, since all it takes is a quick search on Google or the Nielsen Book Scan for agents to check an author and how many copies of their books have sold

  • It’s best to think of publishing as a coin-flipping tournament
  • Imagine you have a room of 1,000 people, and every round each person who flips tails is out
  • After 9 or 10 rounds only one person will be left, the winner!
  • Yes, they won, but did they do anything significantly different than everyone else? Not really.
  • And that’s how it goes in publishing. For those who “win,” it has little to do with their actual book, and a lot to do with them happening to write something that got noticed at the right time

In a room of 1,000 people flipping coins, there will always be a winner, just like there will always be bestsellers. But there is no guarantee that it will ever be you

  • Basically what I’ve learned is that you have to do other things besides writing or else you’ll end up both poor and crazy
  • That means finding some other fulfilling hobbies, as well as other fulfilling work
  • That doesn’t mean we have to give up on writing, it just means that we have to acknowledge writing for what it is: a fun thing to do on the side in our free time
  • Because the alternative, focusing hard on writing and working hard honing your skills for it, will make you as happy as focusing on and honing your skills for a coin flipping tournament

#4 Misconception: People Like Stories for the Plot

  • Let’s change gears a little bit away from publishing
  • When I first started out writing, I mostly came from reading books like 1984, The Time Machine, Lord of the Flies, and other books where the focus was the plot/themes, not characters
  • So I always thought that the reason people read books was because they enjoyed the plot/themes

But that’s not the case at all! People like stories for a HUGE variety of reasons, many of which I’d never even thought of before, like:

  • They feel like they can relate to a character in it
  • It gives them a feeling of escapism from their lives
  • They enjoy the representation in the story
  • They like the worldbuilding/magic system
  • It’s funny

Take a look at these books that advertise things like “trans heroine with ADHD” or “vamp-slayer with OCD” or “giant mechas inspired by Chinese myths.”

These are story points that get readers excited!

  • For some people these may be obvious, but for me it was enlightening
  • Basically you should write whatever you love/is important to you, because (1) the odds of it ever being published are low anyway, and (2) because it might be the story someone else is waiting for

#5 Misconception: You Didn’t Even Read Up To The Amazing Twist in Chapter 17 So You Don’t Know if My Story is Good!!1 

  • This is something I see all the time online in writing groups, with beginner writers complaining that people “only read a few pages” of their story so they couldn’t possibly judge it accurately
  • But unfortunately, the truth of the matter is at the end of the day, basically only the first page of your book matters

Let’s take a look at the math:

  • If an agent receives the smallest amount of queries (10 per day), that means they have seventy to look at every week
  • Keep in mind they’re already working full time with the clients they already have, so queries are always overtime
  • Even if they spent only 5 minutes per query, that’s nearly six hours of overtime per week… and it’s usually WAY more!
  • Instead, they are looking to get through queries as quickly as possible so they can go home and relax, like the rest of us

Noah Lukeman, the president of a literary agency, wrote a book called The First Five Pages, and if you’ve never read it I’d highly recommend checking it out:

Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XMWSSY

At the beginning he writes: “By its end, you’ll come to understand why this book should not have been titled The First Five Pages but The First Five sentences.” Because those five sentences are, essentially, all that matter.

  • This lesson is one that I’ve learned a lot, in book writing and article writing as well
  • For book writing, I’ve poured my heart and soul into a ton of books, but their beginnings were all weak, so they were essentially a waste of time if my goal was to get them published
  • For article writing, I’ve learned that if you don’t have a catchy title/image, it doesn’t matter how great your article is, no one is going to click on it 
  • If you’re writing a book, then you need an attention-grabbing opening if you ever want anyone else to read it
  • And if you’re writing an article, or posting anything on the internet, then you need an attention-grabbing title, even if you have to spice things up a bit
  • Otherwise it’s essentially as if you wrote nothing at all

IN SUMMARY!

  • All in all, these five misconceptions aren’t here to make us all depressed and miserable
  • They’re to help us see the reality of the situation, so that was can live healthier lives as writers with realistic expectations 
  • I wandered through writing for nearly a decade not knowing any of this, and it hit me hard when I finally found out
  • If I’d known all of these things from the beginning, I could’ve saved myself a lot of anger, frustration, and depression 
  • If you want to write, then write! By all means. But just be sure to pursue other fulfilling things too.
  • And if you don’t want to write/can’t write, then don’t feel bad at all! You’re not missing out on anything 🙂

If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you join us on Twitch.

And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.

Hope to see you next time, friend!

Top image: Pixabay

Published inExercises/WritingGeneral Advice