Now that I'm rich and famous, I get asked stuff.

Well, now that I'm rich...

Well...

Now that I'm published, I get asked stuff.

One of the things I get asked is "Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?"

I have two stock answers. One is "Yes, I do. Stop reading mysteries. Have you read a dozen mysteries? Good, then you get it. Go read something else."

The other is "Yes, I do. Don't take advice."

Here are some good pieces of solid advice I've been given:

Do not go to industry trade shows to try to sell your book.

This is excellent advice. Industry trade shows (such as the American Booksellers Assocation) are for distributors and booksellers. They are not for writers. These shows are about moving product at a markup, not about art. When I was the one asking The Published for their advice, this was one of the things I learned.

Research the market

This is excellent advice. Publishing is, after all, a business, and the wise writer accepts it as such and seeks to educate herself with an eye toward increased marketplace viability and attendant enhanced remuneration. The goal, after all, is to sell what you write, and how better to do that than to write what sells?

Take careful notes about industry trends. Do protagonists wear fedoras or dresses this year? Both? Do they have pets? Do they cook? Do they have genitals? Do they have lethal sidekicks? How many mystery protagonists this year have alternate lifestyles? How many have bothersome family members? How old are they?

Who is the target readership? If it is women in their forties and fifties, do not write books about male characters who are in their twenties or thirties. If the target readership is casual readers who prefer "entertainment only" from their reading, disallow any passage which is non-breezy, contains words of more than two syllables, has thoughtful content, or garners a rating of higher than eighth-grade difficulty from your grammar checker. Purge your prose of allegory, alliteration, and analogy. A book should be judged, after all, as something bought by a customer, not as something written by a writer.

Do your own promotion

This is excellent advice. In a world now overrun by mystery authors organizing and financing their own book tours, nothing will make you stand out like organizing and financing your own book tour.

Give away doodads. Pens are popular, as are sweets. You will stand out of the crowd if you give away pens or sweets -- that's why so many people do it.

Rewrite your book immediately as requested by any agent

This is excellent advice. All agents have solid grounding in literature. The International Association of Mystery Agents requirements for membership call for, in addition to an MBA, an advanced degree in literary critique with an emphasis on objective, dispassionate judgment. The rigorous IAMA examination includes essay questions on such subjects as Subtle Integration of Character and Plot, Valid Uses of Nonlinearity (this question is usually labeled "Nonlinearity Uses Valid of"), and Post-Expatriot Linguistic Choices: Is Writing Like Melville Still Valid After Hemingway?

All agents see more clearly than you do the artistic value of your manuscript, and all agents are utterly objective about it. The way you can verify this is to ask a random sampling of a dozen agents for comments on your manuscript. You will receive twelve absolutely identical responses.

Demand a large advance

This is excellent advice. After all, a hundred thousand dollars is better than five hundred dollars, and the more copies there are out there, the more copies we can sell.

If all fifty thousand copies do not sell, and you do not "earn out" your advance, this is clearly the fault of the publisher, who did not promote the book heavily enough.

I hope this advice has been useful to you.

It is all excellent, and its validity is borne out by throngs of happy writers who never complain about the results of their having followed this advice.

Being less intelligent than most, though, I have not been good about following it.

My first book was bought by a publisher I met at the American Booksellers Association trade show. (My second was bought by an editor I met online.)

My main characters are men in their twenties and thirties.

Although I have done quite a bit of self-promotion, I am now doing less, because the money one spends on self-promotion is less than one is likely to earn as a result, and my opinion is that the best way to "make a name for yourself" is to write a good book that people talk about, not to give out free jellybeans. If you write a good book, booksellers will sell it. If you write a good book and give out jellybeans, the booksellers would have sold the book anyway and you'll be out-of-pocket on the jellybeans. If you write a bad book, booksellers will not sell it, even if the jellybeans are really, really tasty.

I do not have an agent, because no agent would give me a civil "hello" at the ABA trade show, and I do get cranky. So, okay, no agent, so I'm only somewhat qualified to talk about the agent-writer relationship. But as far as rewriting your book because an agent thinks he can sell mysteries about physically challenged Norwegian hermaphrodite ex-military pasta chefs this year, I think there's a larger issue at hand, namely whether perverting your own intention is really what you want to do with your limited time on the planet. If you tailor your product to conform to what your agent thinks will sell, you will probably stand a greater chance of selling. But you are defined by what you do. You become what you do. Do you want to spend your subsequent time doing more of that? Is that why you wanted to be a writer?

If you wanted to be a writer because you thought you'd be good at it, then go forth and be good at it. If you were right, and you really are good, it might go somewhere. If, in addition to being good, you have a story to tell that illuminates the era we live in and won't let the reader sleep, then it'll almost certainly go somewhere.

Go where? I don't know. Not to the bestseller list, probably. Sorry. But why, again, did you want to be a writer?

A good agent is, like any good business partner, a blessing. An agent who isn't so great is, like any not-so-great business partner, of no use.

Finally, the large advance. Large advances are nice. They're bigger than small advances.

Had I been offered a hundred thousand dollars for my first book, I'd have taken it. Bang. You want to give me dough? I'm there.

If offered a hundred thousand now for my fourth, I'd want to see projected figures and promotional plans before deciding. I don't want a business partner who throws money around foolishly and then blames me for the resulting loss, and frankly, I think a hundred thousand would be a foolish expenditure for my fourth book, at this point in my career. If my second and third take off, or if someone comes up with an interesting positioning plan that looks good, then that'll be different.

My hesitance has nothing to do with artistic integrity; it has to do with whether I'll remain a good risk to a publisher.

I don't have any control over the blame part of the equation (after all, who do we blame if our product doesn't sell? ourselves?), but I do have some control of the initial money expenditure. Back to the first part of my example: I would have taken a hundred thousand for my first book. My first book sold fewer than 1500 copies. It would have sold more had it not been from a very small press. But would it have sold 50,000 copies more? That's what it would have taken to earn out a hundred-thousand-dollar advance. And if it didn't earn out, what would my track record look like? It would have only one thing on it: a failure.

So I guess I have one more answer to the question, "Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?" Yes, I do. Know what you want, and act accordingly. If you want merely to sell product, then take the conventional wisdom and use it. Your chances are good.

If you want to be a good writer, then write well. Don't ignore the business aspect of being a writer, but know which way you'll lean when there's a business vs. art dilemma. Be flexible on the business stuff, and be somewhat flexible on the art stuff (sometimes other people's ideas are very good). Just be clear about what you want, because if you're not, you won't get it.

-- Keith Snyder