Fantasy novelist Jim C. Hines was thinking about how writers break into the business, and in February of 2010, he decided to go out and create a survey of how authors made their first novel sale. After about a month of data collecting, Hines had almost 250 responses and decided to draw some charts and generate some generalities from them.
The basics of the survey are authors who published at least one novel that sold for at least $2,000 to a publisher. Hines admits that this excludes people who started with smaller publishers or self-published their own work (Hines is himself someone who self-published his first novel and then re-sold it to a New York publisher). The results are skewed towards genre (and specifically fantasy) authors, but as Hines says, those are the people he knows, as he’s part of that group, too.
Part of why he was thinking about these things was that when he was trying to break into the field in the 1990s he got a lot of different advice, often advice that was in contention. I found Hines’ survey completely fascinating. I liked how it picked apart some of the commonly held mindsets about how to break into the business. Like what? Like:
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Of 246 authors, 116 sold their first novel with zero short fiction sales
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[O]nly 1 author out of 246 self-published their book and went on to sell that book to a professional publisher
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58 authors sold the first novel they wrote
And of course, there’s a lot more at the link above. I point out the three examples above because the first one refutes the advice I always give (i.e., write short fiction first), the second refutes the idea that you can self-publish yourself and then resell to a publisher for wild success, and the third, well the third is really interesting. Many authors write several novels before they have one that’s of saleable quality. However, almost a quarter of the authors in the survey sold the first book they wrote. Whether they wrote several more novels and came back and cleaned up their first novel or if they only wrote one novel and that was what they sold was not compiled in Hines survey.
This survey also made me think of Tobias Buckell’s survey of advances for first-time novelists. Buckell’s survey wasn’t created with the mindset of proving or disproving myths about selling your first novel, but was rather a gathering of data points. Again, geared towards genre writers, aspiring novelists could use Buckell’s survey results to help decide whether an offer they’ve received is fair. And since agented authors earned more than un-agented, it proves that getting an agent is worth your time. Buckell also includes some data on what happened to authors’ advances for subsequent books.
In both cases, I found the results fascinating. Much of it I knew from my time inside the business, but all the same, getting hard data to back things up is never bad.
John Klima is the editor of Electric Velocipede, winner of the 2009 Hugo for Best Fanzine.
This is a really fascinating survey. I find the first point, about short fiction sales, particularly interesting.
It may be that many of those folks had spent a lot of time working on short fiction, but for whatever reason ended up selling a novel before breaking in to the short fiction markets. Even though I (mostly) fell into that camp, I still believe short fiction is a useful way to improve one’s craft. But this is just a guess on my part; I didn’t participate in the survey.
Interesting indeed! I find the longer I write (and remain unpublished) the more these holy cows of publishing need to be seriously milked.
W
Zephyr — a superhero webcomic in prose
http://wereviking.wordpress.com
Really really enjoyed this post – there’s nothing like hard data. Jennifer Jackson’s Query Wars posts on her blog provide hard numbers for the query process, which I also find faschinating. It’s good to know that not being able to fork over thousands to go chasing around the country for workshops or conferences isn’t ending my writing career before its even begun. Because I was definately starting to worry.
The idea that one has to write short fiction before writing a novel is one of the worst things ever to happen to short fiction slushpiles, especially in these days when novels are widely read and short stories hardly read at all.
A significant fraction of stories I’ve seen in slush are little more than novel synopses or are written by people who clearly haven’t read very many short stories and don’t enjoy them.
Huh. I was at a panel at a sci fi convention last weekend when the very subject addressed by example 1 came up. The panelists (Robert Sawyer, Naomi Novik, Jody Lynn Nye, Samuel Delany, Jack McDevitt) largely agreed that you should just write in whatever format calls to you. McDevitt changed his mind at the end and went with the “short stories first” suggestion, but he was the only one (as I recall).
I don’t have any particular point to make, I just found the comparison between the responses of these lauded writers and the results of this mini-survey interesting.
Once again, I find myself agreeing completely with Nick. The two–short stories vs. novels–are such different storytelling media that to expect someone to practice one by doing the other is ludicrous. And I’ve been telling people to do it for years.
People need to write what feels comfortable to them. Of course, many people can’t tell how long a particular idea should be, but that’s a whole different animal.
I, for one, will no longer advise people to start out writing short stories. I’ll tell them to write what they want to write, but to thoroughly investigate that area first. So, if you want to write short fiction, READ short fiction.
You should probably also know that I did a bit more analysis of Jim’s data (with his permission) on my own blog.
Jim analysis is good; I simply had access to a stats program and the training to use it.
I broke things down by decade and genre (and more). There’s a LOT of data there, but at the top of each section is an “executive summary” where I tried to be pretty non-stats person friendly.