The Great Ass-Moving Experiment
As a writer, like most writers, I have one giant terror point. For some people it’s the writing. For some people it’s showing your work to friends, or to strangers. For some people it’s marketing in general. For me, it’s marketing fiction to editors. I don’t have a problem with nonfiction (as my bibliography demonstrates), but when it comes to the giant black box world of terror there’s very little that can beat marketing fiction to New York.
It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.
Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.
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