Take a long walk off a short career

by Giselle Renarde

I listen to podcasts while I clean the kitchen. Self-publishing podcasts, mostly. That's why the notebook on my fridge is covered in titles of books I want to write.

Books like: The Lazy Writer's Guide to a Sustainable Long-term Writing Career.

If I actually wrote that book I don't think anyone would buy it, so I probably won't write it. Mind you, I've written a lot of books nobody buys, so maybe I will. We'll just have to wait and see.

What brought this idea to mind in the first place? Most of the marketing advice geared toward authors (in the self-publishing sphere in particular) is stuff that I'm either way to lazy or way to cheap to put into play. Maybe I should call my book The Cheap-Ass Writer's Guide to a Sustainable Long-term Writing Career. Because, lazy as I am, I'm ten times cheaper.

There are a number of authors who make a mint self-publishing. They exist. They do. But the vast majority of those uber-earners work waaaaaaay harder than I'm willing to work. That, or they spend way more money than I'm willing to spend.

If I funneled hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollar into Facebook advertising maybe I'd make more money. Or maybe I'd be out hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars. Maybe if I purchased pricey advertising slots on bookish newsletters I'd sell more copies of my books. Or maybe I wouldn't.  I'm not the kind of person who likes to take risks. Just ask my sister how it works out every time she tricks me into going to the casino with her. I am not a gambler. In my mind, expensive advertising is always a gamble.

My book would be incredibly controversial. It would go against all the advice you'd typically get from those in the know. But what it really comes down to is how you want to live your life. I think a lot of advice is aimed at people whose idea of success is vast financial gain. If you want to earn a lot of money, you should be prepared to work hard and make sacrifices.

My advice would be geared toward people like myself: writers who are in it for the long haul, but who want a pretty peaceful life, who aren't expecting to make millions in their first year, or probably ever; people who are laying the groundwork for a slow and steady career as a writer.

You can work really hard if you want to. You can wake up at 5 in the morning to write until your brain melts. But the thing about writing 40 novels per year is that it's really fucking tiring. Maybe you can do it for a couple years, but most people aren't going to find that type of production schedule sustainable across the decades. And instead of backing off and just writing... oh, say, 30 novels per year... a lot of authors burn out and stop writing completely.

I don't want anyone to think I'm tearing down authors who make a quick buck and then ride off into the sunset. Earning a shit ton of money is a huge accomplishment--and it's certainly an accomplishment I have yet to accomplish.

My goal was to earn enough money from writing to pay my bills. I'm not a shifting goalposts type of person. I don't feel the need to earn more money this month than I earned last. I just need to keep afloat, and I can do that because I've being doing this work for more than 10 years. Every book is an investment. I couldn't pay the rent with my earnings in year one. Not sure I could have done it in year five. I've had a variety of part-time jobs over the course of my writing career, but the writing was never my part-time gig. The minimum-wage jobs were the part-time gigs. Writing came first.

Like I said: I don't think anyone would buy my guide to a sustainable writing career. Most people who are prepared to take ten years to reach their ultimate goal can probably figure out on their own how to get there. But maybe it would be encouraging for people like me to know that you can be a writer without being a go-getter. That's okay. You don't have to feel bad if you don't earn much or you don't release a book a week. It's still possible to make a living from your writing. It just takes a while.

But if you're lazy (like me), you'll wait.

Giselle Renarde is an award-winning queer Canadian writer. Nominated Toronto’s Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Readers’ Choice Awards, her fiction has appeared in well over 100 short story anthologies, including prestigious collections like Best Lesbian Romance, Best Women’s Erotica, and the Lambda Award-winning collection Take Me There, edited by Tristan Taormino. Giselle's juicy novels include Anonymous, Cherry, Seven Kisses, In Shadow, and The Other Side of Ruth.

I Was My Biggest Detractor

I’m sure most writers have stories of having to overcome detractors, of having to hold true to their belief in themselves and their craft, despite what others have to say about the matter. I’m not one of them. I’ve always had the support of those closest to me, including when I decided to venture into the world of erotic fiction.

My biggest detractor was myself. This isn’t that unusual for writers — there are many who will feel that they’re never quite good enough.

I spent most of my high school years writing sci-fi in my spare time, only to print out the stories and put them on a shelf, not having shown them to anyone. It was something I enjoyed doing, even if I was the only one that knew the stories. I had told my English teacher every year that I wrote sci-fi as a hobby and I got lots of enthusiastic responses... until they found out that I’m a fan of Star Trek and my short stories were similar to the show. (One teacher looked down his nose and said, “Oh, you’re one of those people.” Another teacher made a disgusted look, scoffed, and said, “How can you like that stuff?”) They weren’t all bad teachers, though. I had one teacher who wholeheartedly supported my love of writing sci-fi and my love of Star Trek. (I later found out that this teacher’s son was a sci-fi novelist and his wife was an internationally bestselling romance novelist. So that would be why he supported my interest in genre fiction and Star Trek.)

After high school, I toiled away at writing more sci-fi. However, I had no plans to make it a career.  I tried submitting a few stories and novels here and there, but never put any real energy into it. In my mind, not only was I not good enough to be a career writer, I felt that even if I were to have a career as a writer, the career itself would not be well-paying enough to live off of. So I relegated writing to a hobby.

I tried to put my life in a different direction — I went to university and got a couple degrees, one of which was my Bachelor of Education. My “back up plan” if I couldn’t write was to be a math teacher. (But in my mind, it was “the plan” not “the back up plan” since writing was never seriously a plan.) I never took a job as a teacher, for various reasons, and did a number of different jobs. I went back to university again to get a masters (because I wanted to work in the non-profit field and for a lot of higher-up jobs, you need a masters) and ended up putting my sci-fi writing on indefinite hold.  I had no more time for it and it was really nothing more than a passing hobby.

Then enter the man who would change my life forever, the man who would become my husband.

Not only did he support my writing — after all, he is a writer, too — but he was driven to have us both have careers as writers. He pushed me to better my writing, pushed me to submit to agents and editors, and pushed me to be more passionate about it.

However, by that time, I had more or less burned out on writing sci-fi and taking masters courses at the same time. For a refreshing break, I tried erotic writing. Since then, I’ve never looked back.

My first novel got snapped up by a small publisher, as well as my second. From there, I discovered the self-publishing path and have charted my own journey through the publishing landscape. While I’m not super successful, as I still have a day job, I can at least now see that being a writer can be an actual profession. I now have three pen names and approximately fifty erotic titles currently released.

I do plan to return to sci-fi at some point in the future. For now, though, I need to see where this erotic writing path will lead.

And it’s led to some interesting places.

Over the past few months, I’ve mentioned how I’m in the process of helping set up an erotica and erotic romance publishing company.  Well, it launched a week ago and is open to submissions. Many people have asked why I bothered starting up a publishing company when erotica and erotic romance thrive on self-publishing — these are my new detractors — and my answer has always been that self-publishing is not everyone’s ideal. Some authors want a publisher — the detractors may not understand that, but many others do. I love the process of publishing as much as I love the process of writing, so if I can help an author get their book on Amazon and Kobo and all the other places, then I would love to do so.

In the past five years, I’ve gone from giving up on sci-fi, and thus giving up on writing completely, to becoming a multiple bestselling author and soon-to-be publisher.  To do that, I had to overcome my biggest detractor — myself.



Cameron D. James is a writer of gay erotica and M/M erotic romance; his latest release is Seduced by My Best Friend’s Dad (co-written with Sandra Claire). He is also the publisher and co-founder of Deep Desires Press, a publisher of erotica and high-heat-level erotic romance. He lives in Canada, is always crushing on Starbucks baristas, and has two rescue cats. To learn more about Cameron, visit http://www.camerondjames.com.