#1 Have fun, because you aren’t going to make any money!

Look, some guys spend $20,000 on a boat, fishing gear, licenses and then fill up with about a hundred dollars worth of gas and maybe, if they have a good day … catch a fish.  So if you spend your time writing, and then pay an editor, a book cover designer, and someone to format your book so that it looks nice, and end up with a book, what’s the difference?  The thing about the guy and his boat is that he is having fun.  Fishing is fun.  It involves some challenge and requires skill.  There are good days and bad.  If you feel the same way about writing, then it can be fun as well.

What if the fisherman decided he needed to make a profit for the investment of time and money he put into his boat, gear, and studying the wily ways of animals with brains the size of a pea?  Crunching the numbers, he would probably need to catch tens of thousands of fish every year.  He would need to fish all day, every day.  He would need to stick to the sure thing, and fish the same few spots day after day after day.  It would be grueling, he would be miserable, and in the end he would fail anyway.

 Keeping with this analogy, if you want to make a living off of writing creative fiction, you need to “catch” tens of thousands of readers every year, just to squeak by.  If you grimly go about writing with all of your might day and night, only cranking out vampire romance novels, and sticking with the tried and true formulas that draw in the same rather dopey readers, you will be miserable, and you will also almost certainly fail in the end anyway.

Have I hammered this point home yet?  Have fun.

#2 Let it all hang out, because nobody cares!

Write the book you would want to read.  Forget the rules, the formulas.  If the book you really want to write is Harry Potter, then by all means enjoy yourself.  Heck, just write fan fiction and steal the characters outright.  Sure, the copyright police might insist that you stop, but by then you could have already ordered thousands of copies of your book for the same price as a nice fishing boat.  You can give them away and slip them into public libraries, if that is your idea of fun.  Of course if what you really want is to BE that famous author, sorry, I can’t help you there.

I have fun writing original stories.  I know that nobody really cares what I write or whether I follow the rules for writing a short story, novella, or a sonnet.  I amuse myself, and if I amuse others, that is a win-win.  If I amuse myself, and others are not amused, that is still a win for me.  If others point out that I did not follow the rules for such and such, that is still a win for me, because I really don’t care and I had fun writing it.

#3 Don’t both with agents or publishers, because they are idiots!

This is a little known secret: almost every great author was resoundingly rejected by an endless stream of agents and publishers.  Why?  Because they are idiots.  OK, that isn’t fair, they aren’t idiots.  It is simply that they want the sure thing, and the sure thing is what is already selling, so all they really want is another J.K. Rowling, and even then, they only really want another Harry Potter installment, not something new and different. 

Simply don’t waste your time chasing agents and publishers.  Publish whatever you want directly on Amazon.  The other little known secret is that most authors that do actually land that agent and book deal with a “real” publisher don’t end up making any money.  The books are printed up, the publishing house does a tiny amount of marketing, and the books languish on the shelves until they are returned.  With the tiny royalty paid per book, you would need to sell a hundred thousand copies just to make a living for one year.

So relax and have fun.  Don’t follow the rules and publish you own books.  You’ll thank me some day for this great advice.