isntgreat

Ten reasons why writing isn't a great job. (Because nothing's ever that clear-cut, is it?)

1. Every man-jack and his dog think they're writers because they can use a keyboard, and will tell you all about their brilliant novel-in-progress, even if they're no closer to finishing it than they were five years ago. Given my collection of sharp objects, then, I'm a brain surgeon, and I have this great lobotomy technique in me waiting to get out.....

2. Publishing is just as full of whackos, manipulators, prima donnas, fragile egos, and pains in the arse as the television industry (or any other branch of the media and entertainment industries, come to that) - the only difference is the pace the thing proceeds at. In TV, the pain is over faster.

3. At parties, you can never tell people what you do for a living. They either don't believe you, or worse - they DO believe you and then proceed to try to shake you down for an intro to your editor/ agent/ whatever, or offer you their great idea for a novel, earnings split fifty-fifty, because they've got the idea, and all you have to do is write it.

4. Publishing doesn't operate by the logical rules of any other retail or entertainment business, and it seems to be a stranger to real market research. This is massively frustrating if you've come from ay other business background.

5. The more successful you are, the more you become a commodity - an object with a monetary value, nothing more. It's the low, quiet end of showbiz, but it's still showbiz, remember. To de-objectify yourself, you either have to be low-value so that nobody thinks you're worth exploiting, or pass the tipping point by selling 40 million copies each time so that you own them.

6. One for SF writers only: it's full of navel-gazing cliques constantly bemoaning the decline of the genre and attacking each other for killing SF. No other genre I can think of indulges in this self-destructive crap. The only thing killing SF is that fewer readers than ever want to buy it, and maybe they don't want to read it because it's lost its way, isn't enjoyable, isn't about the human condition, and has been overtaken by reality. (And by cult TV, which fills the niche that "real" SF once did in the good old days.)

7. The vast majority of readers are terrific, but some think they own you because they bought your book. They range from the entitlement brigade to borderline stalkers to complete psychos. Few successful writers manage to go through life without acquiring a small collection of them. Stephen King's MISERY could pass for a documentary, believe me.

8. Some readers don't read. I mean they skip pages, even whole chapters, as a matter of routine, then bitch that they didn't understand the book. Here's the deal: we write words on every page, so readers should read what's on every page. Alternatively, they can tell us which pages they won't be reading, and we'll leave those blank. Deal?

9. Writing is an isolating job by its very nature. Think of it as a long spell in solitary with no time off for good behaviour.

10. The readers who make or break your career are always unseen, unheard, and unknown. They're the huge majority, the hundreds of thousands of customers who buy your books in their local store and never say a word in public. They just buy books and read them, then come back for more. You can only meet a tiny fraction of them, like when you do a signing.