The Business of Writing: Looking to the Past

Today I’m going to talk about an age where, as never before, writers were able to make a living from their art on a reasonable scale - not just a few outliers, but in significant numbers, able to earn enough from their writing to do it on a full-time basis - which naturally meant that their production was far greater than if they were working a job as well, with concomitant effects on the quality of their work. (For everything improves with practice, even storytelling.) I’m not talking about today - though I could be. I’m talking about the period from about the 1910s to the 1940s, with the Golden Age around the middle of that time, before the onset of the Great Depression. The era of the pulp authors.

Putting my business hat on for a moment - just for a moment, I swear - one of the jobs of any self-employed person is to study his industry, to look at what is happening and try to work out what will happen in the future. A lot of people have said that the current climate is unique, that it has never happened before - but that is patent nonsense. I can think of two periods immediately, both of which are well worth studying for anyone working as a writer at the moment. Today I’m choosing to focus on the one that is the most obvious parallel, but I will briefly discuss the other…

Which is the boom in self-publishing computer games in the 1980s. A time when creating a game really was one person sitting in his bedroom with a stack of textbooks and a computer, doing the programming, graphics, sounds, the works. (Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders is an excellent history of this period from a British perspective; Hackers covers the American point-of-view, as does Masters of Doom, all of which are excellent reads.) This period lasted through the decade, petering out as bigger competitors and more sophisticated computers meant that development became impossible for a single person or small team - but watch this space, as I think already this notion is making a comeback, and as the tools get better, I think this is something worth looking at.

The main focus of this post, though, goes back a lot further than that, to a more direct parallel. Strange as it may seem today, there was a time when there were hundreds, thousands of magazines devoted to the publication of fiction alone - short stories, novellas, even full novels. I’m tempted to say that this only survives - and just barely - in the science-fiction and fantasy genre, and even then it has really moved to the fringes, with subscriptions in four or five figures. Back in these days, six figures was the norm, even for a less successful magazine, and far from being a ‘broad church’, some of these seem amazingly specific. Submarine Stories, anyone? Far Eastern Adventure Stories? Stories about air-war, romance in the old west, any one of a hundred genres, and while they were notable flops, many of these lasted for years.

There was, of course, a hierarchy of writers. Some of the best-known could command five cents a word, while others would manage on a single cent, but this was the 1920s - and the ten bucks you might get for a thousand-word short was worth a hell of a lot more than it is today. (To whit - 138 dollars, give or take. Not bad for a morning’s work. We can discuss how the rates of payments in magazines haven’t changed since before the Great Depression later.) This was the age of the million words a year writers, where that was almost commonplace - and certainly fifty thousand words a month was extremely common. Which meant - in modern money - almost seven thousand dollars a month, assuming it all sold, for even the most rookie author.

Now, there were still far more failures than successes, and examples of publishers failing to pay writers on time - or at all - were legion. Nevertheless there was an enormous market for fiction, and the demand meant that there were far more ways into the trade than there have ever been. Erle Stanley Gardner worked his apprenticeship before coming up with Perry Mason, as did Raymond Chandler, Robert E. Howard, dozens of names still known and regarded today. Yes, Sturgeon’s Law applied as it always does, but still, a great age.

It came to an end. Of course it did. The Great Depression sucked the life out of the American economy, and that was the first blow - a lot of the pulp publishers were on shoe-string budgets, and toppled easily, and suddenly people needed the ten or twenty cents they’d spent on their favorite magazine for something else, even if it was still available. Publishers began to supplement with reprints that cost them nothing, especially from authors that had made it big since then. The best of the authors survived, escaping to Hollywood or to the ‘slicks’ such as the Saturday Evening Post.

While there was a brief resurgence, the ubiquity of paperback books after the Second World War meant that tastes changed, and suddenly people were able to get their fiction fix at far cheaper prices than before - and the market transformed into something closer to the form it held at the end of the last century. Short paperbacks at first - including, naturally, quite a lot of pulp reprints - then growing longer as time went on. It’s interesting to speculate what some of the great writers of today would have done had this market lasted longer; could A Song of Ice and Fire be a hundred-part serial in Weird Tales or Adventure? (I’d love to see Robert E. Howard’s version of that sort of saga, a hundred-part Hyborian epic would have been thrilling to read.)

Now, of course, things have changed again. The dynamic publishers of the 1950s are clogged up with their overheads, tied to an old system of distribution that - like the pulp magazines of old - no longer works so well, and has been bested by a more efficient rival. We’re entering - have well and truly entered, I feel - the age of the independent or small-press, and given that the set-ups permit the writer to publish himself, with no need for most of the traditional publishing infrastructure, the temptation is there to consider that maybe, at last, things are approaching their ultimate form.

Don’t you believe it for a second. We’re in a time of transformation, and it’s probably safe to assume that things will stay as they are for the present, but something will change it. The Harold Lambs, Norvell Pages and Hoffman Prices of the 1920s would never have thought that their world would change so dramatically or so quickly - nor, I assume, did the Big 5 publishing houses foresee what effect self-publishing would have on their market, and will continue to have in times to come.

(Yes, I do think there is a role for larger publishing houses, certainly in the non-fiction market - but I have a very strong suspicion that the ‘Big 5’ of 2030 will be totally different names and groups than the ‘Big 5’ of 2015 - and that at least half of them will be companies that currently don’t exist. Discussing what I would do if I was running a company like Hachette is far too long-winded for this post, but cutting out as many of their overheads as possible would be a good start, and acknowledging that the most important part of the process is the author would be another.)

Why study the history of your field? Well, you can play with thoughts about where it might go, what might happen next, and thoughts for the future all you want - and I will be talking about that in more detail soon, maybe even tomorrow - but the most important lesson to learn is the inevitability of change. What exists today will not exist tomorrow. If it’s advice you want, it is simply this: Write! Build your backlist, start new series, write new stories, and most important, keep control of the rights to them. Don’t yield them, at least not for any length of time. One thing that is constant is that having completed works is valuable. Say everything changes tomorrow - I still have the novels I have written. I still own the rights. I can still use them. That...that is important.

And for the record, as of yesterday, that includes ‘Traitor’s Duty’, which I finally finished in draft form. Now the editing can begin.

So, Where Is Alamo Going?

As I write this, I'm about half-way through Alamo #12, 'Traitor's Duty', and anticipate having the draft completed comfortably before the end of the month, though I will admit that writing this one has proven a little more of a trial than I had anticipated when I started out with this. I should have learned my lesson with two-part books from way back in the beginning, when I wrote 'Victory or Death' and 'Tip of the Spear' as a loose two-parter; the latter, while I'm happy with it, was one of the more tortuous ones to write at the time.

And yet, 'Take and Hold' and 'Traitor's Duty' have proven harder still, to the point that I'm looking forward to Alamo #13, which promises to be a nice change of pace for me, for reasons I will get to later on. I believe, whole-heartedly, that the best way to improve as a writer is quite simply to write. I am proud of 'Price of Admiralty', but I hope that I have gained experience over time since then, something like fourteen novels later. Sometimes, that means being ambitious, and with these two books I wanted to cap off a lot of the ongoing plot threads that began all the way back in that first book, and that I have added to since then.

That's meant characters coming back in, ones from earlier books – Frank Rogers from that first two-parter, the return of Commodore Tramiel, Logan Winter coming back into the main storyline (where he is to stay – on which, more later). It also meant expanding the setting once again; a lot of these two books is set on Mars, which, despite being the capital of the Confederacy, I had visited a grand total of once in the previous books – and Callisto, with Carter Station orbiting in (and while I think about it, anyone want to guess who that is named after?) not at all. This I have corrected.

All of this required a plot that would explore the Triplanetary Confederation itself. Hitherto, Alamo has been exploring strange new worlds – and it's going back, don't worry about that – but I wanted to delve a little deeper into the home of these characters, see what that looked like, what drove them. Show a few more 'civilian' types than we had seen before, that sort of thing. And, of course, with space battles, ground assaults, back-street intrigue and all the other elements that make up the typical Alamo. There's space for a post on crafting action/adventure novels, and I think that's something I probably should tackle...

No spoilers, of course, but I think I came up with a plot for this, and I started laying the seeds as far back as Not One Step Back and Triple-Cross, though it only kicked into higher gear with Ghost Ship – a book which was quite a lesson to me in itself, actually. It evolved so far from the original concept in the plotting of the book that I intend to write the original book I set out to write as Alamo #14, to be titled 'Cage of Gold'. (Alamo #15, 'Not In My Name', is another holdover from a while ago, though this one was originally planned as Spitfire #3. Hell, Ghost Ship was supposed to be Spitfire #2, in fact, the original cover was branded that way.)

So, 'Traitor's Duty' is designed to tie up all the loose ends from 'Take and Hold', as well as quite a few others as well. The Cabal is a big player in all of this, for a start, and that's been the focus of the series since 'Victory or Death'. For four novels, from 'Battle of Hercules' to 'The First Duty', Alamo cruised through Cabal space, and it really seems fair to count the two bookending novels into that as well; 'Not One Step Back' saw them setting off, and 'Ghost Ship' concluded the journey. I want a good payoff to all of that, though one which still leaves things open enough that the adventure will continue.

Something else that I think is important, is that characters must evolve. From a character that was originally meant to be a one-appearance shuttle pilot, Lieutenant Margaret Orlova has turned out to be – for me, anyway, I don't know what others think – the breakthrough character. Her scenes tend to be the easiest to write, and her journey has had, by far, the most turns in the road over the course of the books. She's gone from military-brat smuggler to a dog watch commanding a battlecruiser, and it's been a hell of a road; that's something else that needs to continue. Captain Marshall, likewise, and Ensign Cooper...and here's an interesting tale for you.

(Spoiler for 'Battle of Hercules' - highlight to read...) At the end of the book, Ensign Zabek, the Espatier platoon commander, is killed during the escape from Hades Station. That event is really what sets Cooper off on his journey, which has taken him up to filling her role...but it almost never happened. You see, Cooper was meant to die in that chapter. I even wrote the words, but I changed it to Zabek – and almost changed it again, because I had plans for that character. Hell, I spent the next few hours after writing that scene in a bit of a state of shock, and thought about changing it right up until the launch...but I resisted the temptation, and I'm glad of that, because from a story point of view, it was the right thing to do. (End Spoiler)

Now, I don't think it is much of a spoiler to tell you that the Battlecruiser Alamo series is to continue. Hell, I've commissioned the cover for Alamo #13, and it's pencilled in for a July 25th release, somewhere around there. Where am I going with the series? Well, after tidying up the loose ends back home and resolving the twelve-book arc – which seemed unimaginable when I first started writing it – it's time to start a new twelve-book arc.

Incidentally, I'm not going to pretend the what I ended up with in this book was what I originally conceived at the start; that would be a lie. I came up with a plot arc that I liked, but with the knowledge that I would change and improve it based on the evolution of the characters and, frankly, coming up with better ideas over the course of the two years this has taken to write. (And yes, it was almost two years ago – Alamo #1 was released on June 26, 2013, which seems more like a century ago to me.)

That arc is going to send the series out into space again, back onto the frontier. At least the first four are going to be stand-alone stories, though naturally, the characters will continue to evolve and develop, and the setting will continue to evolve over time. I'm not going to give anything away, but Alamo #13 will be very much like Alamo #5, in that it will introduce the basics of the changes. I'll be switching back to three-POV books, because that's where I'm most comfortable, but there will be more flexibility as to what the POV characters are – they won't necessarily stay the same from book to book, but will change depending on the story being told, and what viewpoints I need to best tell it. That's something I've been working towards for a while, and I'm very much looking forward to having that freedom.

There's plenty of precedent for this; Alamo #1 and #2 where two-POV, Marshall and Orlova; and #1 was originally plotted out as a single-POV, just Marshall, before Orlova leapt onto the keyboard and started to type. Alamo #3 and #4 were three-POV, Marshall, Orlova and Caine, and Alamo #5 was Marshall, Orlova, and Winter – a character with whom I have considerable history. Alamo #6 through #9 where Marshall, Orlova and Cooper, with occasional uses of Bradley, and Alamo #10 through #12 are Marshall, Orlova, Cooper and Winter, with another Bradley chapter turning up. Hell, I should probably try and get a Caine POV in there.

What I'm building up is a pool of POV I can choose from, and I think that will help me, a good tool for my kit. I've got, at the moment, six POV characters in mind – not all of which have yet been introduced, I'm saving something for Alamo #13 – each of which attacks a problem from a specific viewpoint. I'll go into this in a lot more detail around the start of June, once Alamo #12 is out.

Wow, this turned into quite a monologue, didn't it. I suppose the answer to the question 'Where is Alamo going?' is onwards and outwards, to seek out strange new worlds and new civilizations. After all, that was what I originally wanted to do with the series, and what I hope I have over the course of the books to date. (And yes, at some point in the near future, there are at last going to be aliens. They're in the setting, but the reason why they aren't turning up as much...will become clear in later books. Hell, there has to be some mystery left in the setting, doesn't there....)