Dance, Monkey

Since the dawn of social media, writers were reassured by their agents that a platform wasn’t required.** Was it nice to have a built-in fanbase? Yeah! But it wasn’t a requirement because the publisher would tend to the marketing on behalf of the author.

In the last few years it’s been a growing concern for most writers subscribing to those same assurances despite seeing social media personalities getting approached by agents like Patrice Caldwell and UTA before their books are even read.

Agent Jenna Satterthwaite’s most recent substack proved dismal on the subject.

So yes, Traditional Publishing is trending toward requiring a social media platform for fiction authors. Like most major corporations, big publishers are squeezing for every penny and refusing to take on the elements that once made them appealing as publishing options.

It used to be the advance except they’ve broken that into three, sometimes four parts making it somewhat difficult to budget for the average author. One part at signing, another at edits, and a final chunk once the book is published… Whenever that happens.

Nevermind the tax element. Let’s break that down, shall we?

Congrats, you are an author with a book that sold an average advance of ten thousand dollars. For my sanity, we’ll assume the advance is broken into three portions because I’ll flip the nearest table if it’s more.

That’s 10k divided by 3 which means you get 3,333 dollars. Now comes the agent’s 15% and you’re at 2,833.

Most authors prefer to overestimate on taxes to avoid paying more later, so that’s 40% taken from your first advance installment and the lump sum is now just shy of $1700.

But that’s okay, right? Our book is being published and the publisher is going to do everything in their power to make it sell a bunch. It will Earn Out** and I’ll get to publish more books! Only, now the publishers are encouraging authors to hire their own PR.

Also, there’s that nagging point that your book only sold for 10k and other books sold for ten times that amount. If you were the publisher, who would you invest more in? The book you bought at 10k or 100k? Yeah… There’s a reason they want you to hire that PR. That highly coveted big publisher marketing isn’t for you, the average author, its for the pen name writing IP** that despite its terrible quality, is simply too big to fail.

The conclusion is a natural one. You, the author, must build a social media platform. Cultivate a solid fanbase dependent on your glowing personality alone. That way, your fans on social media will buy the books you haven’t sold just yet.

So at this crux, I think we’re all asking the same question… Why not just publish ourselves?

There are several valid reasons. Firstly, there’s a chance that advance could be more. With a solid agent that 10k advance could be more like 50k. An initial payment of 8,550 does sound slightly better.

Then, there’s the distribution. Your book will be on shelves, even for a small amount of time, and there will be gates open to you that Self-Pub never sees. Your fellow authors will be less likely to snub you and willingly exchange blurbs, reviews, and promotion. You’ll be invited to attend conventions and be a guest speaker. You still might not find anyone at your book signing, that’s just a hit or miss anywhere. Overall, you will be considered more prestigious than your indie-peers.

Another reason is that not everyone can afford to be indie. I don’t care what anyone says, hiring an editor is necessary for an indie writer. I hire multiple for my books and there’s still errant typos that send me climbing up the walls. Not just a little copy edit** either. I do at least a line edit** along with a copyedit for each book and some of those books include a dev edit**.

Then you have the formatting, the cover art, and the ISBN. These things can add up into the thousands and the return on investment is slight.

It’s not ideal for a lot of people and leaves a lot of amazing writers without recourse, especially minorities who’s culture does not consider writing a viable career option.

So where does this leave us? In an industry where talent must promote themselves first and books secondly, we can expect more inexperienced writers on large platforms releasing books they wrote when they were twelve.

We can expect large bodies of fandoms raging at publishers on behalf of their author. Fans who expect and demand character relationships and their preferred endings.

Art is for interpretation and is meant to be thought provoking, but entertainment is meant to please audiences. At this rate, it’s clear which way Traditional Publishing wants to go, but no one truly wants to accept it. The average entertainer must cater to the audience until their platform is large enough that they can afford to take risks. This is how it’s always been for entertainers, but authors have long been the exception until now.

Regardless of the publishing route you, the current publishing options remain the same. You dance, monkey.

**We’re talking fiction. If you’re non-fiction without a platform, might as well be dead on arrival.**

**To Earn Out is to sell more books than you were given in advance**

**IP stands for Intellectual property. Many of the books you read were actually ideas from the publisher. That publisher then hires a writer to write the story. And publishers can range from Disney to Avon all the way to Penguin Random House.

**Dev Edit (Developmental Edit) is the big picture edit of a book. To make sure characters are consistent, story flow is good, foundational fixes.

**Line Edit is an edit on the sentence level. To ensure each sentence flows and makes sense and there’s continuity of names and descriptions throughout the book.

**Copy edit is where every coma, every word is scrutinized to make sure it belongs there. At this rate you hope there will be no typos, but even after multiple editors, there can still be a typo on the first page of a traditionally published book.

**Disclaimer: While I have tried to limit naming names, all situations I mentioned are actual incidents that have or currently are happening in publishing.