Why This Era is Good For Pulp Fiction Economics
Yesterday I wrote about a history of pulp magazines, and why working out how pulp writers used to go about business is an interesting thing today. I’m going to continue along the same theme today, but this time I’m going to talk about how the information from the last article is relevant to writers today.
For years, publishing – and therefore writing as a career – has been largely set by big companies, be they publishers, news companies or other content mills of various descriptions. Now, writers have a lot more freedom to pursue different strategies for making money.
This means that the pulp way – prolific, market-focused and quickly produced writing – has more power than ever. Here are some reasons why.
Ease Of Publishing
Until a few years ago, writers were stuck with traditional publishers if they wanted to make a decent living as authors of books. Journalists similarly had to work for major media outlets. There were very few ways to earn a living that weren’t determined by someone else.
Now, it’s easy to publish. If you want to be an author, you can write a manuscript and pretty much have it on sale the next day. There are probably better ways to go about publishing than that, but the point is this: there is nothing stopping you from publishing whatever you want, whenever you want.
This not only means you have control of your product; it also means you can experiment more with different formats. For instance, ten years ago selling poetry would never have happened because no publisher would touch it. The same was true of short stories as well unless you were a mega-star author already.
Now, you can experiment and release your poetry collection or your short story collections. You can even release individual poems and short stories as their own works if you so wish. It doesn’t mean that they’ll sell, but those are things you can find out yourself.
The Disposable Media Era
Pulp magazines worked in an era where suddenly there was an explosion of media available to the everyman. Magazines and the short stories within them were designed to be consumed quickly and then the next issue would come along and readers would move along.
The stories and their wrappings were designed to compete with all new forms of entertainment: Newspapers, cinema, television and radio. Many producers piled in and the readers piled in after them.
This is essentially what is happening now.
You might think this is a terrible thing. You might want your books to be permanent, or your words to be timeless. The good news is that this will still happen: there are still Conan The Barbarian movies being produced, and Oscar-winning movies are based on pulp magazine stories. If your work is good, then it’ll stand the test of time.
However, there’s the added bonus in that, like the pulp era, your career will not be made or lost based on a single set of sample chapters you send off to an agent. If you write something that’s unpopular, you can act like a pulp writer and just move on to the next thing.
Freedom From The Publishing Titans
The two above points add up to something pretty important. The reason for this is that publishing mega-companies no longer have control of your career.
At least, they don’t if you don’t want them to.
One reason I’ll probably never seek a traditional contract is the time schedule. A lot of publishers want to limit you to a book a year or maybe – if you’re a proven seller – two books a year at most. I don’t like that schedule. Sometimes I’ll write ten thousand words or more in a day.
I’ve written a book in a week before. What would I do with the other fifty-one weeks in a year?
You might have a completely different goal or schedule. That’s fine. The fact is that the modern day publishing landscape allows you the freedom to keep your own schedule and terms.
Your Own Business Skills / Final Thoughts
Yesterday, I stated that to survive in the cut-throat world of pulp writing, you needed to develop a good business sense. Today you need to develop a good business sense to make it as a writer.
If you do develop this business sense, there are more options available to you as a modern writer than there have been to any generation of writers before you. I think it’s good to embrace that.
On Sunday, I’ll write an article about writing at pulp speed. Until then, just have a think about how much – and what – projects you could accomplish as a writer by taking the above approach and going for a high quantity of publishable work.