S1 Ep26: Why Don’t We Just Quit?

…with Kameron Hurley

After years of rejections, Kameron’s early book deals ran into problems when her publishers either folded or went bankrupt. Instead of quitting, she kept going. And going. In the decade since, Hurley has signed new deals, built a fanbase, and even won a Hugo.

We sit down with her today to ask hard-hitting questions: Why don’t we just quit? Why keep doing it? Why not ‘just’ self publish? And finally, was it all worth it?

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Nota bene: SPECIAL THANKS to Casmer Maliszewski for helping us clean up the audio on this episode! We experienced a lot of distortion and he kindly stepped in to help make it a more comfortable listen.

Show Notes

• Long career that begin with a slew of rejections, followed by getting picked up by publishers who either went bankrupt, folded, or refused to pay. Kameron now claws a fierce living on the midlist, with a hard-earned fanbased and a chest of publishing war stories / wisdom.
  
• Sunyi reads a bit from Kameron Hurley’s essay, ON PERSISTENCE:
• I felt like I’d failed at everything. Life was a ruin. I found myself living in a spare bedroom at a friend’s house, unemployed, deep in medical debt, staring at yet another novel three-quarters of the way finished. When I opened my laptop, the sticky note still stared back at me. Persistence, in all things, in writing, in life. I finished the book. I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t know how to do anything else but finish the fucking book.
  
• The importance of being ‘easy to work with’ in the industry
• But also the importance of knowing your worth and fighting for your career
• Choosing walk away from bad deals, unsupportive agents or editors, and bad film options (yes you can do all of this!)
• Why did Kameron choose to champion transparency on her blog? Because the skewed publishing perspective that many writers put forward made her feel like a failure.
• Examples of midlist writers who broke out to find big success
  
• The importance of pen names
• The importance of giving away arcs for selling books
  
• WHY DON’T YOU JUST SELF PUBLISH? The dreaded question that we swim through repeatedly in conversations.
  
• Why do we keep doing it? Why should we persevere?
• Defining personal success, and finding joy in the process.
  
• Sunyi’s final question: WAS IT WORTH IT?

Links

• Kameron’s blog and Kameron’s Instagram
• “On Persistence, And the Long Con of Being A Successful Writer” (truncated essay)
• We Have Always Fought (essay)

Transcripts (by Sunyi Dean)

Sunyi
Hi, I’m Sunyi Dean.

Scott
And I’m Scott Drakeford.

Sunyi
And this is the Publishing Radio Podcast. In 2022, we both launched debut novels in the same genre with the same publisher in the same year. But despite having very similar starts, our books and subsequently each of our careers went in very different directions.

Scott
That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry over and over. Why do some books succeed while others seem to be dead on arrival?

Sunyi
In this podcast, we aim to answer these questions and many more, along with how to build and maintain an author career.

Scott
Everyone signing a contract deserves to know what they’re really signing up for. In an industry that loves its secrets, we’ll be sharing real details from real people. We’ll cover the gamut of life as a big five published author from agents to publishing contracts, finances, and more.

Sunyi
Well, Welcome to Publishing Radio Podcast. This week we have with us Kameron Hurley, who I’m trying not to be too much of a fan girl about because I followed Kameron Hurley for a long time. I first heard of her through reading about God’s War book on Matt Hilliard’s website. I read God’s War and geek feminist Revolution, which we’ll talk more about later. But basically, it changed my life and also reading Kameron’s blog was one of the first sources of transparency in the industry that I really encountered. It was a big deal to me today. And I guess we brought Kameron on to basically talk about why don’t we just quit and the industry in general. So if you want to introduce yourself, Kameron, that would be absolutely amazing.

Kameron
Yeah. I’m Kameron Hureley. I’ve been publishing books for, gosh, since 2011, so for a while now, enough so that now I’ll go into a con or something and say someone will say, Kameron Hurley, I’ve been reading you since I was a teenager. And they’ll have a debut novel. It’s like all you need is 10 years. And all of a sudden, I’ve been reading you as a teenager, which is good and bad. But my eclectic mix of stuff and Geek Feminist Revolution is a series of essays. I write a ton of short stories. I have a few collections of those. Light Brigade and The Stars or Legion are probably the ones I’m known for best. Actually, an intern at my day job say to me, Oh, my God, you’re lesbians in space one day. And I was like, Yes, Stars Are Legion is also known as lesbians in space on TikTok and on BookTube apparently. A lot of people also know me from an essay called We Have Always fought, which is about the erasure of women who have been involved in warriors in throughout history. So that’s probably another big one.

Sunyi
So we like to ask guests about their publishing journey. I know yours is really long, but if you felt like going over it for some of the people who haven’t encountered you before, that would maybe be a good place to start to get some context.

Kameron
Sure. I started what I call old fashioned way. I definitely went through trenches of submitting short stories to magazines. I actually went to the Clarion West Writing Workshop in 2000, which was forever ago now, but actually came up through there as well. And then my first book was accepted, I think, in 2008 the first time, but didn’t come out until 2011, and that was God’s War. I had a three book deal. My editor was then fired during the Great Recession in 2008. Then that deal was cancelled. I was still paid for it. The deal was cancelled. We resold it to another publisher, which was great, except they never paid us and then eventually went bankrupt and sold. I had another series that came out shortly thereafter. It sold a lot better. That publisher was also sold. It’s and that was fun. I was wondering, are we going to get paid? That was another exciting meltdown. Then we moved over to, I think I did Saga Press is where I’m at still now for Stars the Legion, and the Light Brigade. Certainly had a much more stable thing there. The checks clear. That is very good. And then I’ve also done a couple of short story collections with, again, some smaller publishers.

Kameron
So I have worked with, again, big publishers, again, like Saga, and also, again, very small publishers. I mean, Apex Publications just did Future Artifacts.

Sunyi
One of the essays that you’re probably really well known for is an essay that was called, On Perseverance. And I remember reading this essay when I was in a fairly bad point in, I guess, my publishing life. And I was going to actually read a section from it, if that’s okay, which I’ve never really done on this podcast before. Part of this essay did appear on Chuck Windegg’s blog, but this bit of it, I think, was truncated for space.

I felt like I’d failed at everything. Life was a ruin. I found myself living in a spare bedroom at a friend’s house, unemployed, deep in medical debt, staring at yet another novel three-quarters of the way finished. When I opened my laptop, the sticky note still stared back at me. Persistence, in all things, in writing, in life. I finished the book. I’d reached a point in my life where I didn’t know how to do anything else but finish the fucking book.

And for those who don’t know that, the essay starts with Kameron talking about she stuck the word persistence on her laptop, and it’s just the long career path to get there. So I guess I’m curious what you knew about the publishing industry going in where you first heard terms like midlist and lead and what were people talking about it when you first got into the industry?

Sunyi
And do you think that they’re talking about it now?

Kameron
I think there’s a hesitation to talk about it publicly. It’s like any other corporate job. You want to be considered easy to work with. You don’t want to be considered a whiner. You don’t want to be considered trouble. So here are the stories going round about writers who are, Well, they’re just really hard to work with, or they’re just trouble, or their project failed because they’re difficult. So you don’t want to do that. But I have certainly gotten drunk in the bar with plenty of people even back in the day. I did go to Clarion, which was adid the boot camp for science fiction and fantasy writers, and I met a lot of professional writers that way. So I made those connections fairly early. I was 20 when I went at the time. So I was pretty immersed. And I felt even going into that first really wild experience, that I had some understanding. I knew it was going to be very difficult if it was easy, everyone would do it and they would keep doing it. Publishing is really hard. It is capitalism, right? They are there to sell books, and they should make money, and they’re there to take their tithe, their pound of flesh from you.

So that is just something that that is how the industry is set up. That said, do we enjoy what we do? And a lot of us do it for the craft. And is it better than digging a ditch somewhere? Possibly, some days. Some days it may not be. But I made those connections very early. And so I was able to have those conversations. And I did definitely hear Midlands very quickly. It was, bitter midister. You never want to become a bitter old Midlander. And that is someone who again has a lot of says, who always has bad, very negative that it’s all publishing’s fault and it’s nothing to do with them and their writing. And I’m like, oh, God, I never want to become a bitter midlister. So that was always like the thing you never want to be. And so I heard that very, very quickly on. And I learned very early on that again, the more they pay you, the more they’re going to support the book. So you’re always fighting for that big advance. That idea being that they are going to invest more because they’ve already invested.

Kameron
Instead of what a lot of publishers will do, and Tor was notorious for this and still is I think, they’ll still throw out, Oh, here’s your $5,000 advance, those sorts of deals the first time, and they want to see what sticks. That was a publisher that I was with for a long time who did my debut. They published gazillion debuts, paid them all five to seven thousand dollars and said, go, see what happens. What’s spaghetti? You’ll hit the wall. And sometimes they did Palo Bacce the Loops, came out from them, swept every award. It’s now considered a classic of the genre. They thought they could hit that lightning twice and they did not to end up going bankrupt. But it is a tactic, right? It is a tactic. And I think they’d like to spend. You spend more, you get more.

Scott
Yeah. And publishers make money on their aggregate portfolio. They don’t necessarily care about each individual point in their portfolio and they don’t care that it’s a person. I have a question on something you mentioned and I’m glad you brought it up. So you talked about how people in this industry like to talk about how important it is to be easy to work with. That’s one of the three things is you got to be good, you got to be on time, and you got to be easy to work with. Can you think of one example of anybody who made it big by being easy to work with in this industry?

Kameron
John Scalzi.

Scott
Oh, that’s a good one.
But do you think that’s the primary variable in his success?

Kameron
Absolutely not. He’s a great marketer. And he had a wife with a day job in health insurance, which he acknowledges. That was why he was able to do it all full-time. And he made a lot of very smart, strategic business decisions. Tor tried to give him, I’m sure he’s talked about it, but I don’t know now. Tor has tried to give him some shitty deals too early on his career, let me tell you, and he said no. So I think you need to… There’s also that is fighting for yourself. In fact, my publisher came to me and tried to… And I said, no. I didn’t need the money at the time. And I’m like, no, I’m worth X. You will give me X or I’m going to walk away because I don’t need it. I have a day job, which was a great feeling at the time and got the money. They’re like, well, I can do two books for this or one book. I’m like, I can do one book with you. And that was the correct decision. I think that it has to do with a lot of luck. It has to do with a lot of business savvy as well, because let me tell you, a lot of people will be like, Well, I could take your leave, this deal.

Kameron
I’ve had agents who have… One agent who I fired eventually was just like, Well, what did they say to me? So my first publisher, again, they weren’t paying us. They were going bankrupt. These ones eventually were sold. One of them is still living is a tax exile in Finland, I think. But she actually said to me, she said, Well, I don’t want to alienate them in case for your next book, they’re the only one to make an offer. And I was like, That’s how much you believe in me in my career. Fuck you. And here’s some things. I was getting some sloppy stuff back with other people’s names and contracts. And I’m like, This person is not on their game. They’re clearly not investing me. I’m a little fish, and this is a big agent. And I moved on. But I did have to have that gut check, right? You’re always terrified because you feel like… Here’s the thing. You feel like the person as an author where you have the least amount of here because everyone else has all the more experience in you. They literally work for you. All of these people are taking a piece of you and are taking a piece of your creativity and of your work and all that, they would love for you to continue to think that your work is not valuable and they are not making money off you.

Kameron
But in fact, they are. They’re not necessarily doing you a favor yet. This is a business you are going to be asked to make some really tough decisions. But I also know that to accept less for something that I know is going to be a bad strategic decision. Have I always made the best decisions? Absolutely not. I’ve had two publishers sold underneath me. I’ve signed the… To this day, I’ve signed things. And I went, Why did I do that? And you just have to go forward, right? There’s nothing else that you can do. It’s just to understand what you’re worth. And that that is just part of the business. It’s a business just like anything else.

Scott
Yeah. Go ahead Sunyi.

Sunyi
I was just going to say that I love hearing that in a way, because I think Scott recently said in a live chat that we did with Jerico that you should consider walking away from deals if it’s not a good amount of money. And I think people were genuinely gobsmacked to the idea that you could just walk away. You could say no, that you can advocate.

Kameron
Yeah, I’ve said no before. I said no to Tor at one point, too. I just didn’t like the contract. So you can absolutely say no. And whether that was a good or not, I still don’t know, right? But yeah, I have said no. I was uncomfortable doing it. And there was someone that tell me if they can’t move this, this, and this, I’m just not comfortable doing this.

Sunyi
Just off the record, I will say that I think if you can’t sign a lead contract, it’s probably not a good idea, just from our experience.

Kameron
I will say that, yeah, on the record, yeah, Tor is notorious for signing a lot of debuts and seeing what sticks, right? And I’ll pay you very little and just see what sticks. Everyone knows that, so.

Scott
Yeah, that’s the basis of our entire podcast.

Kameron
The publishing is not a meritocracy, right?

Scott
Yeah. It is and it is and it isn’t. The piece that is meritocratic is simply that I do think still that there is some bar, some bar of quality and it’s a subjective bar, editor by editor and subpopulation of readers, et cetera. But there is some bar of quality you have to cross to be able to convince enough people that you belong in the industry. But beyond that, yeah, absolutely not a meritocratic, good Lord, industry.

Sunyi
Your new nickname is Spaghetti Scott.

Scott
Sleep has been sparse lately and I deal with a baby screaming in my ears, so my verbal abilities are going downhill quickly. But yeah, I made the mistake of assuming that once you sign a contract of any size, you’re in and they’ll operate like any sane business would and trying to make the most money possible. It’s going to be this awesome partnership of making the best of the assets that you’ve just agreed to work on together, and it’s not always that. I’ll just point out that your example of Scalzi was a very good one of somebody who’s fantastic to work with by all reports. Other than him taking a blog post and putting it on his blog, which I appreciate, I haven’t spoken to him ever, but he’s reputed to be very good to work with and a very kind human. Even him, the first thing you said about him was, Well, he said no to deals. That’s not the idea of easy to work with that publishers want to put out there. They want you to feel grateful for getting a deal. They want you to feel grateful for getting any money for something that somebody would undoubtedly do for free, and then they want to tell you that it’s your platform that makes or breaks your success when it is clearly not the case.

Scott
My point is, fuck being easy to work with. Maybe don’t be a huge dick right out the gate, especially if you don’t sell for a ton of money. I’m not advocating for being a total asshole at any point in time. Be a good human to these people. But yeah, I just do not see value in being easy to work with. In this industry and other industries, it works for a very small subset of people, but it is not everything that people make it out to be.

Sunyi
I’ll just say as well, a lot of writers have… I’ve encountered this sometimes where writers will say when the subject advances come up, Oh, I would be so grateful to get any advance, even if it was $500. I always think you shouldn’t be grateful to get a tiny advance. If you want to sign that and that’s the right thing if you did sign that contract. That’s the right decision to make, no judgment. But the idea that we should be grateful to receive a really small amount of money for what is like months or years of labor is ludicrous to me. Be angry and sign the deal if you have to

Kameron
I think there’s being a doormat and there’s being easy to work with, right? I think there’s standing up for yourself and knowing what you’re worth and then being a doormat. So I think that there’s nuances in there. I still at my day job. I’m a lovely person to work with day to day. But we go into review time. I’m like, here’s why you need to pay me all this money. And I think they respect you more for that because you understand your worth. Now day to day, am I delightful? Absolutely. But I also know when we go in and we negotiate that I need to work. I’ve told a very well-known Hollywood producer came to me and said, Well, we’ve been we’ve been optioning best sellers for five thousand dollars. I don’t know why you seem to think that you need more money. And I said my age. I said, Well, you go tell them to go option best seller. Fine. If they’re interested, that’s great. They can come back to me. And if they’re not interested, that’s not someone who’s going to fight to make that name. And they’re going to squat on your IP and you’re going to sit there going, oh, this Hollywood producer is sitting on my thing.

Kameron
And they will squat on your IP for five hundred dollars a year and not do and do a damn thing with it is what’s going to happen. And you can go and tell everybody. Oh, Michael Bay is going to direct my feature. And I’ll tell you right now, it’s not going to happen. Whereas if they are investing in you and they’re like, Well, shit, we need to decide if we’re going to be paying to someone ten, $10, $20,000 every time, which is they fall out of bed and make $10,000, right? Then they have to decide, oh, this is worth investing $10, $20, $50,000. Or it’s not and I’m going to drop it. Now the ideal is to do what Gibson and Neuron Mancer were what he’s making. I don’t even know what he’s doing. Let’s just say $20,000 a year at least in option money for that every single year. That’s what you’re going to do for 20 years, but not $500 a year when it could be made and make you half a million dollars. So I think it’s understanding the reason they are giving you a hard time, the reason they’re, especially Hollywood, and I’ll get on Hollywood, but is wasting your time is because they do know that it is valuable and it is Worth something.

Sunyi
So I was just going to quickly ask. I remember on your blog, you were one of the first authors I found who would actually do yearly breakdowns of income and stuff. And given how secretive people can be about publishing and particularly about money, I wondered if there’s anything that particularly motivated you to be transparent, to go out of your way, to share details like that, just to dive into it.

Kameron
So I felt like a failure. I felt like a failure because I had published, what have I published? Twelve, 13 books. I do a short story every month for patron. And I could not make the numbers work. I could not get my stuff. I mean, I could make enough writing right now where I could probably get an entry… Let’s see, like an entry level job or something somewhere. But God knows if you need health insurance in America, you cannot survive on that. And I kept wondering what’s wrong with me. And what I suddenly realized is that most authors are lying to you. I would be on panels with people and they’d be like, Well, I’ve been full-time for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They have a spouse with a lot of money and health insurance who is helping them go full-time for either X amount of time, five years or something, or forever because they’re taking care of the kids or doing something else, whatever. But they were not honest and transparent about that. And for me, I think for the first 10 or so years that we were married, I was the one who had the health insurance.

Kameron
I couldn’t quit my job. There was no way that that was going to happen. We actually got married because his health insurance is this is before Obamacare. His health insurance was going to went out. We were going to be screwed. He was like, I’m going to die. For me, I needed to realize, I wanted to be transparent that just because someone seems to be successful, quote-unquote, there are some years I’ll make $5,000 writing that year, right? With patron now, I make much more, but that’s because of patron. I make way more than I do in book advances every year, let me tell you, especially because I’m way behind this current book. Because let me tell you, you get behind because of a pandemic or something like that. You don’t get paid until you send them the rest of the book. So you’re just sitting there going, Crap, I need to finish a book or I’m not going to get paid. So it’s understanding the way that those economics actually work. And just because someone has written a seminal novel or has written 25 novels does not mean that they’re not waking up at 06:00 a. M. And going to be a marketing strategist and getting yelled at by clients all day

Kameron
That’s what I did today. So it’s understanding that there’s a lot more going on the background than a lot of people will present. And I think that it gives, especially newer writers, this really warped view of what success means, of what that trajectory is. Martha Wells was putting out book after book after book since I was a teenager. And not really like it was… She was just this reliable, wonderful storyteller and nothing broke out until Murderbot. And she even said at one point, she’s just like, I didn’t realize it until I looked up one day that my career was almost over. And she ended up signing with one of the publishers that I did that went bankrupt, just how I met her. But I think that people forget that sometimes you can go, Victoria Schwab talks about this. She refers to what? Eleven books were midlist books that was out of print within two years, her first book. And I like those stories because they are much more typical of the actual experience that the vast majority of writers have.

Kameron
So, Obama, progress is not a straight line, right? There are times when you are in the dumps and your publisher is sold and your contract is cancelled and you think you’re never write again. And there are other times where it’s like, Holy crap, I just want to Hugo. And you’re not going to know what the next thing is, because every single book that you write is a lottery ticket, right? In fact, that lottery ticket is actually much better than the odds than lottery ticket that you’ll get from the Five and Dime down the street. So there’s that to think about. But yeah, I think that that was always really important to me is when I would have those conversations like we’ve talked about before in the bar and stuff afterwards, I’d learn all these things that when they said, I’m full-time, I was not associating with I’m a full-time writer.

Sunyi
Do you think many people do break out? Because I feel like I know more people who bomb out through no fault their own for midless than who break out, but you have been around a lot longer than me.

Kameron
Most people quit. I have an entire cohort of people. I mean, my clarion mates, the people I came up with in my early 20s, I remember them starting to peel off either because they were getting academic jobs or they got jobs in game writing, which was really cool. It was really, really interesting to watch that happen because again, you always would ask yourself, Why does that happen? And it’s because of life. It’s because of disappointment. It’s because you can’t make it work financially. It’s because, again, you have kids or someone dies or your spouse loses health care, something horrible happens and you have to change the way you’re doing it. I know Jim Heinz, his wife passed away. He had to go back to doing a full-time job in addition to his work. So I think that there’s an accumulation of life that can really get to you and money can help protect you from some of that. So if you are already making a lot, I think you’re much more easily protected from some of life’s ups and downs than if you’re still struggling in that really mid-list. So yeah, I’m not going to mince words there.

Kameron
I know most people will quit. Most people will burn out. Most people just get tired of doing it. There are very, very few who keep getting up every day and will keep going like a Martha Wells until… George Martin is another, frankly, example. He went to Hollywood. His first book, Tanks. He went to Hollywood, built a whole career over there, came back. The first three books of the Game of Thrones did not do super well. They actually came out and really did a huge marketing push for, I think, that third book, actually, I think it was the third book because they realized, well, crap, we bought five books. We really need this to actually be a success. They put a lot of money behind it. And that helped that book reach more of a successful level. And that was what? It was in his 60s at the time. So I think, no, most people will not break out. But I will tell you that the first way to ensure that you never break out is to quit.

Scott
That’s really interesting. I didn’t know that… I was a kid at the time, but I didn’t know that Martin’s first few books in that series didn’t do all that well. And that’s really interesting and reminds me of an interview I heard the other day with Tom Doherty talking about the wheel of Time, and it was almost the exact same scenario. They had signed Robert Jordan for five or six books. And I don’t know how well the first two books did, but I want to say, God, I need to go look, listen to that interview again. But I think he said that they printed a million copies of that, of the first, I don’t know if it’s the first quarter or first third of The Eye of the World, they printed a million copies of that first bit of the first book of The Wheel of Time, and they distributed a million of them when the third book came out. But it was when the third book came out. And so it really does seem to be a matter of your publisher who has a shit ton of money and all the right channels to pour that money into, are they going to make you into what they want?

Scott
One other thing I’ll ask rather than slash mention is I’m curious, Kameron, whether the people you’ve seen quit actually quit, which I don’t blame them at all because at some point you have to weigh the benefit versus the damage done in the industry. But everybody I know that has quit or is in the process of quitting was actually drummed out first. It’s not that they had a deal on the table and turned it down. It’s they took a midlist deal for their debut. Most of the ones I know of actually did fairly well for the deal they signed, and then they just weren’t supported at all, and now their career is dead.

Sunyi
No offers, no agent support.

Scott
Yeah, they’re dead. They can’t get another deal. They’re having to submit just like they were a debut again, and they can’t get attention from anybody because they’re not new and shiny. That’s what I’m seeing.

Kameron
Oh, you just have a pen name. Daniel, Abraham did that three times. He’s James S. A. Corry. Yeah, his first two names failed. Usually what you do is you make a new name. So the best story I have, I think it’s public, so I can share it. Darryl Gregory, Midlist writer for a very long time, signed up with Seth Fishman, new agent. Agent said, Listen, I’m going to send you this book. I think this book is Fire, but of course, you’re Midlist. So I’m going to tell them this book, when I send it out, this book is from a well-known established writer. And I will tell you the name of the writer if you make a bid on the book. And we can change our name if you want. I believe in this concept so much that I think you’re going to believe in it, too. So whatever his pitch letter was, it was genius. Sent it out, ended up in a, I don’t even know how many book auction or a house auction. And when they called in the name who it was, they were like, hey, do you want him to change the name or not?

Kameron
We ended up saying no. But he was able to sell it by keeping the name quiet about who it was. And I actually remember saying him at one point, too, because again, I was five, six, maybe eight books deep at that point. I went to Seth and I said to him, I said, Thank you for Darryl. Darryl gives us all hope. Thank you, Seth. He’s like, Oh, my God. But it was a brilliant strategy, right? Because again, this is a business. And it is true. You get boxed in as you are a certain type of writer who appeals to a certain type of audience, and that’s all that you can appeal to. And you only write certain types of books. Most of the people that I know just use another name because it is true. Yeah, I have one, in fact, I have two friends right now really struggling who, again, these are best sellers, people you’ve heard of wonderful people who made tons of money doing it and have just found that that audience is less and less and less each time where they’re now just going, Okay, I’m just going to have to have a new name.

Kameron
And that might be that you just have Kameron M. Hurley or K. M. Hurley. It doesn’t matter. You’re just stupid. It’s the dumbest thing in the whole world. What I had to do… It has to do with the way bookstores buy books. And again, the attention that debuts get. And I’ve even seen people… You’re like, Okay, someone has only written science fiction. So they’re like, Here’s their debut fantasy novel. Yeah, you know them from other science fiction, but this is their debut fantasy. Like little things like that. Again, my day job is marketing and advertising. So I understand a lot of that BS as well. Is that it’s all about making something look brand new and shiny lesbians in space, something that people get really excited about or that they latch onto, that’s easy to disseminate and debut fresh, shiny new is always going to be something that sells. Or that again, like you have a Darryl or Chuck Wendy is a good example of this too, where sometimes you just have a concept that is so high concept that it just nails it right away. Chuck Wendy is a great example. Someone just writes as tons of different stuff in a ton of different genres and hopes something hits and occasionally something is hit.

Kameron
And also my agent has absolutely said she’s like, the only thing I know that 100 % sells books is printing and giving away a shit ton of books. Shit ton of books.

Scott
That’s it.

Sunyi
It’s funny. I think that one of the big differences between me and Scott in our debut year is between my two publishers. They gave away probably about 1,000 print arcs were Scott. They wouldn’t send any.

Scott
Yeah, they made zero.

Sunyi
You can come back in two years. Instead of Scott Drakeford.

Scott
You’ll be Drake Scottford. I’m Drake Scottford.

Kameron
You’d be Daniel Abraham going through the names, let me tell you.

Scott
I am suddenly glad that Scott Drakeford is not my real name. Maybe I can give my real name a shot and be extra white guy vanilla. My real name is Scott Smith, by the way. I’m Yeah.

Kameron
Very Googleable.

Scott
Yeah, I am not super afraid of doxing myself. Good luck finding the right one, motherfuckers. There’s a lot of us. I have to ask then, being that you’ve seen this before where people have gotten what they deserve maybe based on the quality or concept of the book by hiding their name or going with a different name. Sunyi fangirled and sent me a whole bunch of your past articles that you’ve written in various places, your blog and elsewhere, and they were all fantastic, by the way. But one of them, you said that based on just your sales, you merit a six figure deal, but you still haven’t gotten one. Have you considered submitting under a new name, even if it’s just a slight variation? Or why do you think that has been such a challenge? And what’s your next move trying to get there?

Kameron
I think it’s going to depend on a few things. First of all, one of the reasons I’m not giving up the name yet is that each book that I publish for a major publisher has done a little better than the one before. Stars or Legion did better than the Mere Empire. And then Light Brigade did better than Stars or Legion. This text one, if I ever have to finish it, hopefully we’ll do better than that. So you want a little bit of a stair-stepper in your career. And I am still seeing stair-stepping. And again, I’ve done some small part stuff because I’m just trying to sell short-stray questions very hard. But all the major ones that have come out got lots of really great reviews. They sold incredibly well. Light Brigade, I’ve gone back. My Advanced and almost twice my Advanced, I think, in the next two years. So it did really well. But when I have to have either an amazing concept and a finished product to show an editor to pitch or to have that stair-stepper that I can show someone this is why you should do this. So this last book, it ends up being it’s a one book deal and this is a saga.

Kameron
And they also have an option for the next book. So I need to finish this book before I can even think of what I’m going to be doing next. But what I would like to do, and this is the reason I like to do it, is I actually want to finish something. I sold this current book on a one line, I don’t know. It was basically like, I want Kameron Hurley’s next book. And I’m like, Okay, and the ex, he’s like, Okay, cool. So in a one line. So what I would like to do is actually finish a book, which I have not done on finish the actual full book and then send it. I’m going to make more money. And that is always the case. You’re going to make more money on a book that is finished than on three chapters in the synopsis. You just are. So that is what I would like to do. It’s going to take longer, but I think at this point, I’ve had a huge break. I was so happy to have a book a year out and then got burnt with the pandemic and everything. But I think there’s been enough of a breakdown.

Kameron
In fact, I was talking to Anne, lucky. She’s like, I even told them I’m not doing a book a year. I’m doing every two years because it’s just not sustainable. And that’s with her doing that full-time, right? And I have a day job full-time that I’m doing on top of writing and the short story and all that. I have to take that into account is, okay, I want to get a really solid, really good, can’t put it down book that someone can go, okay, Kameron Hurley has an existing audience, and I can see how this will cross over. So you have to do that. And you have to show them that, right? You have to show them that work for them. The biggest thing, number one thing I always heard when I was trying to break in was I don’t know how to market this. I don’t know how to market it. So my agent’s job and my job as well tangentially is to have just to create those synopsies, to create those one line pitches that get everybody excited. It’s kill and Yee, meets diehardt in the spring. And they will get really excited.

Kameron
So that’s my goal as well as to remember on the marketing side is to get them very excited and to finish book. So yeah, I think I’m still in the process of building that career. I think I will eventually get there. We’ll probably be 70 when that happens, possibly.

Kameron
Let’s be real. Let’s be real. So it’s just a matter of having a lot of lottery tickets and showing that you can build an audience. And so far, I’m showing that I can build an audience, I need more lottery tickets.

Scott
Yeah, I mean, that does seem to be the way of it. And what I hope… That’s my quickly growing realization, I guess. And you can correct me or other people can correct me. But it seems like there are three paths people take in publishing. One is you get big real quick, and if you’re lucky, you stay big. Two the middle path is you take a shit deal and you do better than that shit deal, and you stay in the shit deal world until you’ve written enough books that are making a small little amount that that adds up, and that becomes your own little personal portfolio of passive income. Or the much more common one is you take a shit deal and you just get kicked in the ass and you’re out on the curb after your first deal. I don’t see a lot that fit in the cracks. There are cracks, but that seems to be the three major paths. I hope people understand that and I hope people can come to accept that before they learn it for themselves, which I didn’t. I was very stubborn with respect to that and wanting to beat the odds.

Scott
But if people would realise that before they get their asses kicked, then maybe that will help the supply demand issue that’s killing incomes.

Sunyi
I know a lot of people find it bleak, but I think I always feel like you’re better off knowing what you need to know to make informed decisions. If you want to know less about publishing, you can always just… It’s so easy to not know anything that’s going on that I’m not sure it’s going to help you. But this does actually lead me to another question, if that’s okay, which is I’m wondering, as we’re having this discussion about all the paths and how difficult it can be and how difficult it is, how often in your career have you heard someone say the words, Why don’t you just self-publish? Why?

Kameron
So I do self-publish. I write a short story every month for patron. I also have a couple of short stories on, I make like five dollars a month or something on Amazon for short stories. Why wouldn’t I still publish a novel? I know a lot of people who self-publish are very good at it. Also burn them the fuck out because you think publishing is hard. Let me tell you about the Amazon algorithm. One year you might make $86,000, the next year, and I know, Guy, you did it, you’ll make $900. So the Amazon, as you get to quit your job thinking, Oh, this is great. I know another one who had a bunch of health issues made, I will not even save a number of money, but then had health issues and could not keep up with that pace, which was you have to write something like… And even if they’re short, even if they’re a hundred pages, you’re writing six, eight, 10 sometimes. I’m trying to think of the number of times of those a year. And as soon as that production stops, that algorithm goes and shifts things around and changes things out.

Kameron
And suddenly you’re not making $100,000 anymore, right? You’re making a few thousand dollars. You’re making five or six or seven. And you don’t know when that’s going to happen. And I have found that one of the things I started very early in my career was this knowledge that it’s that idea of 1,000 true fans. Whereas if I can build an audience of a real core Kameron Hurley aficionado go to war for me audience, that that is my base. And then I always will have someone to come back to, and that’s patron, right? Which does pay me enough to pay my back taxes, which is great. And I think that that was really important to me. I think Catherine Valente actually was where I got a bad idea from because she started that very L. J. Days, live journal days where she was actually putting out this chatbook and she would do it by hand and all that. But she was making this really dedicated group of fans. So yeah, so I’ve done that. So yeah, I could do it. It’s just you become… You become encumbered to another corporation. Straight to your audience, that’s easier, right?

Kameron
Through patron, through direct donations, things like that. It’s much easier and much more profitable for you to have an email list and do a newsletter and keep that up than it is to say, I’m just going to throw a bunch of stuff on Amazon. So I think there’s a strategic way, just like any business, just like publishing, there’s a strategic way to just self-publish. But that’s the thing, too, is people forget just self-published means I need to find an editor. I need to get a cover artist. I need to, again, I need to market this. I need to build an email list. There’s a lot of other things that go into that just self-publishing to make it successful. And then you don’t know what the algorithm is going to do to you day to day. So I think it’s better to be hybrid. I really love the idea that, again, I have this great regular income that I get from patron. And then twice a year I get paid my royalties. And then whenever I actually turn in a book, I get paid another payment. I like having those different income streams. As soon as you start relying on one, what if Tor is sold and then leads authors?

Kameron
What if Harper Collins decides that the editor leaves? I mean, the editor leaving is like a huge thing, because then you’re an orphan and then there you’re like, Oh, I’m not into your books. Go find someone else. So the more varied you are in those income streams, I think the more successful that you’ll I appreciate.

Sunyi
That answer a lot. And also, I feel a bit bad for springing it on you, but I thought that you would answer it well. But also, because last week, Scott and I did a live session for Jerica Writers. And while we’re talking about trad publishing, there were a lot of people in the comments saying, Oh, why don’t you self-publish? And I always really struggle with this question, because to me, it’s like, it’s the assumption, just self-publish. It’s really easy. That always winds me up. It’s like, the people I know who self-publish works so goddamn hard. So the idea that it’s like you can just switch gears and suddenly it’s a lot easier is wild to me. I don’t think that’s accurate.

Scott
Yeah, it’s a very different game.

Sunyi
But also because to me, it’s not a solution. It’s a career change. It’s like saying, if someone says, I want to be a teacher, but the industry sucks right now. And someone saying, Well, just go be a librarian. It’s like, Well, no.

Kameron
I think they need to understand this too is a lot of people treat just self-published as a slot machine. I’ve got an ATM. I’m going to go and they’ll just money come out. The average self published book makes $250 a year. The average traditionally published book makes about $3,500 a year. And that’s just the first year, whatever happens after that, God only knows. And I think people think that, well, if you just put it up online to build it, they will come. That’s not how it works. And so, yeah, just self published is always, well, just grab the money. The money is just sitting right there. If it was that easy, literally all of us would be doing it, and we’d be rich millionaires on yachts right now. And none of us are. So just self-publish is definitely not…

Sunyi
It’s not an ATN. I think people mean well, but it is honestly the reason why I left most writer groups online, like in Facebook and forums and stuff like that, because in a number sense, we are the smaller population. And just seeing every time if I post asking for trowad advice, basically someone else posting for tried advice, it always devolves into people just telling you to self publish. And it’s like you’re just telling me to quit. It’s not helpful. And if this conversation reversed and I was saying this in the 20 books to 50k group, I’d get kicked out. I was just telling people, Go query every time they have an advertising issue with Amazon. Sorry, I was a rant.

Kameron
Don’t get an agent. Just get an agent. I mean, Oh, we’ll just get an agent. It’ll be fine. Just fine.

Scott
Yeah. That’d go over well.

Sunyi
Okay. So my, I guess, big question of the episode is we do talk on the podcast a lot about the realities of pub and trad pub, and it’s not supposed to be all bad, but a lot of it is not what people want to hear and not what they imagine the industry would be like. And I guess particularly what we’re discussing today and the frank realities of how careers pan out. What would you say to people listening who want to know why do we keep doing it? Why should we persevere if there’s anything to say to them at all?

Kameron
Well, here’s the thing. The greatest joy you’re ever going to get in this industry is doing the work itself. You do not enjoy what you are doing. You should not be a writer. I know a bunch of people, I want to be a writer, and they don’t read books or they don’t make time to write, then you don’t want to be a writer. Because let me tell you, the greatest joys you will have are actually in the work. I remember rereading The Light Brigade, which has this intricate time travel plot, like the fourth or fifth time, and watching it. All the beats were in place correctly and the plot, watching the mechanics of it work and it all seemed to full circle then. And the realization that I had written the book I wanted to write was the coolest feeling in the world and that it worked. I couldn’t believe it fucking worked. I was like, Oh, shit. I told my agent, Anna, we pulled this out. She’s like, I know this is amazing. That moment of joy and of creation, right? We’re making something out of literally nothing. There are thoughts in our heads, and we are putting them together into patterns so that other people can see those same things.

Kameron
It’s magical. It is fucking magical. If you are trying to get, and I run into people all the time, who are trying to get some validation from the publishing industry or some feeling of self-worth from the publishing industry, you’re in trouble because you need to define what success looks like for you. For me, there are too many things I can’t control. I can’t control whether I’m a best seller. I can’t control whether I win awards. I can’t control whether how many comments or reviews that I get. All I can control are the words on the page. All I can control are the people I surround myself with and interact with. All I can control are people, again, that I choose to do business with. So it’s like, focus on the things that you can control and you have to let the rest go. And that’s absolutely easier said than done. I’ve lost years. That first publishing that I did and the ramifications of that sale, and it was just a disaster and it weighed on me for years. But you have to let those things go because you literally have no control over them. And so that is why I really like to tell people to focus on the work, focus on getting better at the work.

Kameron
For me, success is about I want every book I do to be better than the book before I want to continue to complete books. I would love to continue to get contracts, but let me tell you, I can’t necessarily control that either. But as long as I’m still sitting down, I am still writing stories, I still am a success to myself. I have to define that for myself, because if you’re waiting for publishing to do it, you are always going to feel like a failure. I will tell you, there are people making a million dollars to still feel like failure. There’s always something that people are going to say, Well, I wish I had… Well, no one takes me seriously. The critics never… I get so many people on Reddit are so mean to me. I’m like, Who cares? You’re on a yacht right now. But there will always be something that you find if you are not defining success for yourself.

Scott
People always ask me when my third book’s coming. Oh, no.

Kameron
There’s some genuinely good people in publishing. Sanderson is actually a genuinely good person. Scalzi is a genuinely good person. Martha Wells. There are a lot of genuinely good people. Then there are other people. So just find your people and surround yourself with those people.

Scott
Amen. Probably the only good thing you’re going to take out of this industry is very small checks and very good friends.

Kameron
Very good friends.

Sunyi
Yeah, the friends are awesome. The friends are awesome.

Kameron
Your friends are amazing. When you start to look back, again, I look at people I’m bitching to every day on our Slack channel and just like, I don’t know these people. And it is. It’s extremely gratifying. The people that you meet, fan interactions can be absolutely wonderful. They can be weird, but they can also be really wonderful. And again, I think you do need to focus on those little joys because sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Most of the times that it does, it’s that success bias, right? So survivorship bias. Either you hit it or you don’t. So all we think of, oh, Scalzy and Sanderson. And it’s like that is an anomaly. That is the exception to the rule, which is the Tor Dungeon. It is true. Yeah, once you’re in the Tor Dungeon, you’re in the Tor Dungeon.

Scott
And the problem is you’ve never… Normies, especially before you get plugged into the Whisper Network, you’ve never heard of the thousand people who got drummed out of the business in the last three years.

Kameron
Right.

Scott
Where do you go, though? That’s my thing.

Kameron
Where do you go? And that’s where I went to is I published with the smaller publishers and that’s supposed to be really good. And that was all terrible. Apex is good. Apex and Takedon. Takedon was a lovely experience. They arewonderful people, can’t pay you too much. But if you also sell audio rights, you keep audio and sell audio, it’s not too bad. Lovely to work with, but you’re not going to sell billions of billions of copies. But yeah, it’s like you hope to get a good editor. You think of a five of editors. And a lot of people are explaining to me like that. So if you get an editor with a good five to them and you’re on their good list, then you’re in and you’re good and you’re solid, always in the tour of them. So it really depends on which time zone, which is why your agent is so key in getting you to the right five of them. And I think it’s that way at some other publishers, too, is just like you have to get in with the right… And that’s why I would never lose it so devastating, is because you lose your champion in a publisher.

Scott
And they probably stuck, too. You just haven’t heard about it.

Kameron
But they also do. Yeah. And everyone’s had a shitty experience somewhere. So it’s just trying to make the best of the least shitty experience and hopping around.

Scott
I mean, that really seems to be the key is you just got to talk your way into getting so much money upfront that they can’t afford to fuck you over.

Sunyi
For anyone listening, we had to cut about half an hour of this podcast episode because we just branched off into discussing things that were off the record about publishing and our personal publishing experiences. That’s why there’s a little bit of a disconnect in this conversation. My apologies for that, but hopefully you can pick up the thread towards the end of it again. Do you want to do a wrap up, Scott?

Scott
No. Hahaha. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what you’re talking about at this point. We’ve evolved into like half an hour of just talk shit.

Sunyi
Was it worth it? Was it worth it? That’s my final question.

Kameron
Was it worth it? Publishing, writing?

Sunyi
Yeah, the whole journey.

Kameron
The whole journey.

Kameron
What else was I going to do with my life?

Sunyi
That’s a fantastic answer.

Kameron
That’s the thing is, was it worth it? Well, what else the F are you going to be doing all the time, right? I think all the time it’s like, yeah, I can keep binge watching Midsummer Murders for the 657,000,000 times, and I do. But also at the end of the day, I get to say, I might get to look across my room right now and go, Oh, look, I have all these books that I published. I think that you got to look at we have this finite amount of time on Earth. How do you want to spend your time? Do you just want to spend it writing marketing copy all day? Or do you want to spend it making something that connects with people? And you brought up The Chemistry Revolution. I have never seen people so emotional at conventions when they see me as when they read that book. They’ll come up to you and they will cry. And you’ll say, Oh, my God, this is exactly how I felt you captured this. And that is a crazy feeling.

Sunyi
Thank you. That’s an absolutely brilliant answer. And just as we’re wrapping up, where can people find you if they are looking for you? Feel free to plug yourself in your books really quick.

Kameron
My latest book to come out was a short story collection to tell Future Artifacts. And then also The Light Brigade, I think was my last novel. You can find me online Kameron Hurley, and it’s Kameron with a K dot Com. That is my website for all things that are going on. I think I am not super social and social media except for Instagram. I think that’s the only one I have kept. So you can find me there @ Kameron. Hurley. The rest are probably just placeholders.

Sunyi
You’ve been listening to the publishing radio podcast with Sonny Dean and Scott Drakeford. Tune in next time for more in-depth discussion on everything publishing industry. See you later.